 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on a Just Transition Towards Circular Cities, Why People Matter. My name is Fedra and I will be the moderator for today's session. We have about 55 minutes for the session today and so I'm very happy to be joined today by a number of people on our panel but also by my colleague Marina Henri-Soon from KTH, who will be presenting on the social impacts of circular cities. In our panel we have Liv Oberg from Umiol City, Jan-Mertens from the city of Leuven, Ander Ezagire from OECD and Anna Wall from Vinova. Overall, in our 55 minutes we will be giving you a little background on the Urban Circularity Assessment Framework Project and we will explain the research that we did on social impacts in circular cities. After about 10 minutes we will then go into a panel discussion with our four members of panel, Liv, Jan, Ander and Anna. But there's also an opportunity for our members of the audience to provide questions. As you will find out your video has been shut off and your microphone as well but there's a chat and so if you have any questions for our panelists or for Marina or myself, do feel free to put them in the chat. We are keeping an eye out and if we have time left we will definitely ask our panel members to answer the questions. Alternatively, we will provide you after the session with an email where we provide answers to your questions. We foresee to end around 155, so a short seminar today. First of all, so about the projects. We were awarded funding by Vinova in late 2019 for a three-year project. Vinova is a Swedish Innovation Agency and under the projects we aim to support cities in becoming more circular by developing an open source assessment framework. With this framework, cities would be able to measure the level of circular economy in the city and assess the potential for improving circularity. It would allow them to identify specific opportunities for resource and energy recovery but also aside from the very technical calculations of material and resource and energy recovery, we also were going to map the impact of the circular economy transition on society aimed at uncovering any adverse effects. In the partnership with six organizations, I am from SCI, Stockholm Environment Institute, Marina is from KTH, and then we also had four other partners, LIEV, representing IMIU-Commune, Stockholm Wattenog Afval, the Stockholm Water and Waste Company, Raden Sales, our private sector partner, and WSB. This figure presents our framework and the cycle that we follow in the project. The plan is to develop or adjust a framework, then we apply it to the city, we assess the impacts, and in collaboration with our partners, we uncover where there are opportunities for improving circularity. Our framework is co-created by different types of stakeholders, so Marina and me, we represent researchers but we have private sector and local governments. We are about a year and 10 months in the project and so far we have done a lot of background work and are starting with field work as well, but we have so far reviewed frameworks and indicators for circular cities. There's a link provided to a paper and we also reviewed how social impacts have been considered in literature on circular cities and also a link there. I now hand over to Marina who will briefly present the findings of that second paper on social impacts. Thank you, Fedra. Yes, as Fedra indicated, there is a paper where we investigated how the societal consequences and the impact, social impact, is addressed in literature and also what does it mean for practice as well. As we know, cities are already implementing and embarking on circular economy pathways, transitioning towards more circular cities and it is crucial as in any transitions for including circular economy transitions to include the social impact. What we found in the literature are results so that the current resource academic discourse as well on circular cities is quite limited and out of the potential social impact that could have been addressed only the social impact areas such as people's way of life which is largely the employment opportunities, the community cohesion and political systems have been discussed in literature and quite largely is also limited to the informal waste management sector. In this case, we clearly observe a gap in the research where research is needed to understand how circular economy transitions impact society more holistically and more broadly and that will in turn allow the practitioners will guide the cities and municipalities to implement circular economy initiatives, to take circular economy measures that do take into account the people that do take into account the broader societal impact aside from understanding the transition from the industrial point of view or closing the biophysical loops and yeah I'd like to hand over to the next speaker and Petra I guess. Great thank you Marina so we in the academic research that Marina just presented we found that social impacts are rarely considered and they only look at employment and for in developing countries that is going from an informal sector to a formal sector mostly for waste and then we found that there's also a lot of discussion around governance and that is mostly in the developing world. To our members or the people that participants in our webinar today we prepared a little mentee question for all of you asking you how do you think people will be affected when cities become circular? What social consequences could emerge? We've prepared this on mentee if you have a smartphone you can scan the QR code and that should open automatically the question if not please go to the website mentee.com and use the code 73654078 and you will get the question and you can type as many characters I think as you want and so in Europe the question is in your opinion what is who will be affected and how will they be affected when cities become circular? Maybe Venny our colleague can put this information also in the chat and so if that's okay I will now like to go over to some questions which we prepared already for our panel for today's presentation. I will stop presenting and I would like to invite the four members of the panel to join me on the stage. Great here we go we have as I said Anna Waal from Vinova social innovation experts. We have Jan Mertens from the city of Leuven working leading the circular city platform. We have Lieve Oberg project manager for circular economy in Umeå commune and then we have André Zagire who works for OECD on the circular cities project. Lieve you work with us in the project but you also work for the municipal government of Umeå so in your experience with Umeå commune do these findings resonate with you? Do you also feel that in the work in becoming more circular that social impacts have been overlooked? I would say no actually I mean I did read the article and I thought it was really interesting. Umeå has wants to grow but wants to grow with several perspectives. We think of culture growth and sustainability and social sustainability and we also have a great focus on gender equality and for instance when we build and plan for our neighborhoods we always plan with mixed types of houses and that method including you know rental sector townhouses apartment houses and the fact that we grew late has led to the fact that we have no vulnerable neighborhoods according to the Swedish police measuring. We also have quite a low child poverty rate for 0.9% but we have a goal of halving that percentage so I would say that we even though we want to become leader in circular economy to grow we also have a strong you know focus on social sustainability and children's rights. Thanks Lieve Young would you say that also resonates with your experience that it could be that it's just in academic literature that social impacts are not considered but in reality they are very much the forefront of what you do. Actually I think so I have two general remarks on what I read. I was not completely happy with the article. First of all I think what is important we should look at social aspects of for instance in employment of our circular economy strategies. What is important is that initiatives like repair cafes etc which are very useful that they not remain in the margin of our economy. So we need to have policies to have a more structural change and what we hope to achieve in the longer run that with our circular policy we will have more employment opportunities for vulnerable people who might lose their jobs due to digitalization and robotization. So it is important and I think at least in what we are trying to do in Lervon this is at the forefront of what we are doing. Secondly what do we understand with the social aspects. I think it's a bit too simple just to look at the distributional effects of circular economy policies and not look at the distributional effects of the absence of a circular policy. What do I mean when you look at people living in poverty or in vulnerable positions. Actually they have lots of let's say circular competence since they have a very low ecological footprint. I'm not making them an example in the sense that we do need to have a good policy to diminish inequality and to give them more better income but actually the social problem is that the footprint of let's say middle class and higher class is too big and it is the vulnerable people poor people that suffer the consequences of the too high footprint of other people. So the social dimension is try to lower the footprint of the other people and at the same time diminish inequality and this should be a target of circular policy as well. Thanks a lot for that Jan. Anders you co-authored a study at the OECD with over 50 cities on their circular economy trajectories. Was there any discussion around social impacts across those cities and like what were the key findings? Thank you, thank you Fedra for the question and thank you to the Stockholm Environmental Institute for the invitation. Well as you mentioned last year at the OECD we launched a report on the circular economy in cities and regions where we analyzed the results of more than 50 cities and regions around the world. There were cities of different sizes of different levels of advancement and we had a broad view of the state of the art of the transition at the local and the regional level. We analyzed some obstacles expectations and we also concluded with a series of recommendations. So regarding the social considerations we found that there are three main opportunities or three main benefits that the circular economy can bring in terms of in terms of the social considerations. The first one is that we saw that almost half of the cities of the several cities had the job creation as a driver for the transition. So in fact this happens because many activities linked to the circular economies such as the repair, reuse, upgrading, remanufacturing they are more labor intensive than other typical activities more linked to the linear economy such as the current manufacturing industry. So we saw and as an example of this we saw that for example it is estimated that in the Île-de-France the region where Paris is located there are expected 50 000 jobs linked to the circular economy. Also we found that for example in London it is estimated that 40 000 new jobs linked to the circular economy will be created by 2036 and also we saw that another city working on or well advanced in in terms of the circularity the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands we saw that 10 percent of the current jobs there are circular. So job creation would be one of the main motivations and one of the drivers for this transition but we also saw that the transition can also improve the access to services and when we talk about this improvement it means that it also it's possible for for people from high income groups but also from low income groups so and this can be done for example through the sharing economy which implies different services like mobility services bike rents and so on. So we saw that there is a potential to benefit from low cost and more affordable services like leasing, renting and so on that can favor this vulnerable or low low low income people and this can be for example in terms of transport and finally and let's conclude with this we saw that the circular economy can also improve the well-being of cities because if cities are starting to advance towards becoming more resource efficient using more renewable energies it can have a positive impact on the quality of life of citizens. So for example in Amsterdam there was there was a neighborhood which was an industrial area which name is Wilkenham sorry for my Dutch and what they did was to transform this old industrial site to a circular to a circular neighborhood and for example in Glasgow one of the cities we are currently working with it's full of derelict lands as a result of the industrial past industrial legacy of the city and we found that the city can by transforming these areas it can help improve the and it can have a positive impact on the quality of life of people in terms of life expectancy and also health. So we see that there are many opportunities for the circular economy to improve the social consideration of people. Thanks Anders and I will actually follow up on your question so you say three benefits job creation access to services and the well-being quality of life of your citizens. Now in your experience the city of Leuven consists of a lot of students young families commuters to Brussels given the relative short distance are those also the benefits that you're seeing that circular economy is creating in your city? Yes I think so but what is important to really grapple what is happening is that you have to start with let's say a broad focus on on the diverse and very multi-layered circular urban ecosystem because it's at the same time lots of more informal or formal citizens initiatives and at the other end let's say a high-tech research in universities and at all levels people are participating and lots of things are already happening they don't have to be stimulated that's what we see in Leuven there there's let's say a broad yes kind of an ecosystem of for instance repair cafes and networks around that around new initiatives for instance some weeks ago there was a specific student repair hub opened to try to reach students and and help them with repairing things or lending equipment so I think it is happening but what is important and and this will be of course the the target can we find a way to to bring these things together and and scale them up in a way that that they will lead to to let's say a systemic impact because if all of these things remain more or less in them in the margins or do not touch what we call the classical economy then it's not good enough and and we do need ways to to actually in real terms diminish our material footprint and to go from the one to the next stage next next stage that that's a bit difficult but I see the advantages as as I was scheduled as I was said in our city yes I can confirm that. Thanks Jan and so I like that you said that we need to touch upon changing the classical economy and before you mentioned also distributional effects of the circular economy that it will be important to address Anna you work for Vinova as a social innovation experts so how is social innovation being perceived within the circular economy and how is your organization working with that specifically to in transitions? Well I think that at Vinova we worked more and more during the last couple of years with social innovation and I think in Sweden as it is a welfare state a lot of what we call social sustainability is controlled by law and policy and I think that maybe as a factor we've gotten far but also we've overlooked it as an innovation area and I think we're catching up now and really seeing that we need to look at them together we have to look at all aspects of sustainability in order to reach our goals. I think because I work with the built environment we can also see that we have an opportunity now we're building a lot of new cities or part of cities and we have to include that aspect from the beginning. I work with accessibility issues as well and it's much easier to do it right from the beginning than to change it later on we usually say but I think what you describe also is that it is a question of equality but it's also a question of democracy and we have to have all citizens on board to be able to do this otherwise we will just not you know we will be a power shift so I think it's important to look at it as an issue for democracies that we have to be addressed. We work in two ways both integrated into our calls which are in other areas and also specifically addressing social innovation and sustainability in their own calls so we had one call this year regarding social sustainability in the built environment so actually how can you add on that aspect when you are already building or planning. We also have one concerning changed travel habits because we see behaviour as a big issue and an important part so how can we give the possibility to make a different choice and we also have calls aimed specifically at NGOs because we need them to be a larger actor and a bigger player in the system change but we do see I think a few challenges that we try to address. I think the first one is that projects are often short-sighted and I think we're all to blame there on a national level and municipalities and I think it makes it very hard to scale and spread the solution so we don't get the leverage that we want from our projects and we start over in a new municipality on a national level. I think also the way the public sector municipalities plan and budget which is also constrained by law means that it's on a yearly basis and I think with social sustainability and working with prevention you need early investments but the benefits come much later in time or affects another area so for example you know making your way through school early on means that you're not yeah that's a state issue later on but it's a municipality issue early on so I think issues like that needs to be addressed and how we can work differently. Also like you pointed out we don't measure it as we do financial issues we don't have a standardized way of measuring it. We do have several projects now looking at that and I think we will in the few next couple of years see a lot of standardized way of being able to measure social sustainability. I think also conflict of interest is something that's often overlooked I'm not sure we can meet all different groups' interests at the same time but I think that the fact that we're not addressing it means that we don't even know that we might be affecting some groups in a negative way and also how can we find how can we move from projects to long-term collaboration how can we work with NGOs municipalities so that they together can experiment meet the users and so on. Thanks Anna. So picking up also on what you said there and like I think in very importantly for a city like Emile, Emile has grown to 120,000 inhabitants double this population the last 50 years you're one of the largest or the fastest growing regions or cities and you're the surrounding neighborhood is quite densely or sparsely populated I should say so how is it going for the community how do you effectively incorporate like I was saying it's important for democracy to maintain as you're growing so quickly how do you ensure that there's good inclusion of different groups in society do you work with NGOs in your circular economy plans and like how are they incorporated? Well it's a very good question and I must say like with regards to the job creation that we have as some of you might know we have huge investments in the northern sweden so we have rather lack of people so if you want to work with you know with industry work or you know high technology just move to north of sweden there are lots of jobs but we lack the people up north I must say that it's really important that we don't like as I said we don't have any like vulnerable you know societies we want to keep them safe we also we are ranked highest region of the social progress index of all readers in the EU we are the region where we have the most trust within you know among each other it's super important to keep that and I've talked to one of our you know important persons who works with the social commission and an important thing for us that we have our own you know statistics department with 10 people employed meaning that we are doing a lot of surveys for instance we conduct a survey to all 13 to 19 year olds every second year we have conducted a large survey on social sustainability targeting you know all the whole city in all neighborhoods we also have done a local consumption based study and we do travel surveys and we do all this because we want to know and we want to understand the living conditions of everybody we want to know how people live their lives is your life do you have a cultural institutional library close by is it a safe neighborhood do you talk to your neighbors those kind of questions we ask we it's super important for us to have this kind of knowledge for us when we develop our policies and there I would say that circular economy is a is a mean or a method for us to create you know and become a climate neutral city for 2030 and it's it's we work I would say integrated so even though circular economy is my table it's socially sustainability is always you know it's always there you know in the back of my head and I collaborate with my colleagues who works with those issues so that would be my answer so leave them so given that is doing so well on the on the old social indicators so what are your key success factors and what can other cities learn from email like why is it that you have so little poverty and such good connections with your citizens and what are you doing differently than other compared to other municipalities one thing we do we spend the most per inhabitant on culture and civil society the the commune that's like a big difference from other cities in sweden that's one thing we also actually have two persons employed to work with gender equality and we have we've had a specific committee for 30 years that's also the longest in sweden so we have we have a tradition of including social sustainability building and planning from like mixed neighborhoods of types of housing so it's a combination of things but I do think I would say that the statistics department the gender equality and the high spending on culture is I do know that the the reason behind the high score is we have a lot of NGOs and a strong civil society and has had for a long time it's been part of our you know educational system I would say thank you thanks leave so if I can then bring it a little bit back to like the distributional effects and like what Jan said before on bringing down the footprint so we at the CI we did a study on the Umeals consumption based emissions back in 2018 where we found that the emissions in Umeal are about 10 tons per citizen and quite high yeah if you look at a study from oxoamn sci also around the the material footprints and consumption emissions you find that the rich people are the ones with the highest footprints so how do you bring it to then distributional effects if you become circular how can you design policy that makes sure that the wealthy reduce their footprints effectively I don't know whether anyone has any thoughts on that maybe under what would work from a policy perspective how could you effectively tackle this material footprint question sure thank you Fedra for for your question so so it's true that it's important to to design when transitioning towards circular economy it's important to design policies that can ensure that no one is left behind in this transition and for example it's true that there is a risk of job loss when this transition takes place and and and the differences between these risks can be even bigger when you compare different regions or different cities so so so this is an issue to to take into account because of course there are when we transition towards circular economy there are winners and and there are there are also losers so so that so that so that's why because the circular economy implies changes in in the in the current in the current economic system so even if it's true that the number of jobs is expected to to increase in some sectors there are others where things may be a bit more challenging and the challenge is how to make sure that these people are are not left behind so cities considering that there might be some benefits and some costs here here cities can for example it's important for cities to focus for example on the capacity building because they have the instruments to identify those economic activities with a potential based on established local resources to they have the potential to to have a maybe another comparative advantage they see this can also reflect on on strategic skills that can can be useful for for the future transformation and need to think about the the existing or or or need to think about the skills that should be improved and therefore cities can start designing different training in green skills that come help in this job creation and also they come support they can design and and they can analyze the the existing capacities and skills and review the capacities more that are mainly associated with with activities such as design and setting and implementation and strategy so so that will be the first one on capacity building and the second one and this is linked to what Anna said before or on the importance of having all the citizens onboarding in this transition because as we always mention the the circular transition is a sure responsibility it's not something that it's only responsibility of the of the local government it's responsibility of everybody so it's important to communicate and to tell the people which are the benefits of the of the circular transition the benefits also for them and to try to to explain them which can be their role in this transition so here here is it it's important to engage through this information it's important to engage with everybody and also with other key actors like universities private sector and so on so they can collect academic and business proposals to to put in place for example in place activities that can have a social impact in the implementation so to to conclude just to say yeah yeah that this transition must be inclusive taking into consideration all the all the all the different actors leaving no one no one behind thanks for that so I think so one of the things that keeps on coming up for circular circular cities is oh it will circular economy will create so many jobs but I have read comments that well the quality of the jobs that will be created is not that high at times it's oftentimes lower-skilled very manual labor is that something that you have also found maybe young or leave in your cities and if you look at the jobs that have been created since you started the circular economy trajectory are we talking lower-skilled jobs or is it all types of jobs and is it to the potential that we are talking about I mean Anders was talking about 50 000 jobs in in Paris and so on do you see the job creation of that size well it may sound a bit negative to to call them lower-skilled jobs I think it is important that we make sure that when we give for instance public support to to the economy that it does not only go to the high tech classical technology research things where that we really create an environment where people that that may not have been able to to study long and that they have working with their hands is not necessarily bad on the contrary it might be a very useful job and to to work on to for instance to repair things and it might be more fulfilling than just only have to collect all the things that people throw away that you can work in a society where things are repaired and and keep their value and you when you are let's say respected for the work you do so I think that that should be the focus that that that that might be very very useful jobs and and and very fulfilling and and giving people again a purpose of belonging to something and creating value with the skills they had already because for instance the skill the knowledge and the skills people had in in in past times to to be able to repair things and to keep them there that they could keep their value in the in the minds of some people that that that seems to be outdated but it it's the thing we need actually lots of things that that we call modern circle thinking is a kind of let's say competence and way of life we have lost along the way so I think we should try to see it as a as a positive sign of another kind of prosperity within our planetary limits that might be more fulfilling and less alienating us from from what we could mean in our societies under you raise your hand you wanted to come in here or yes I very briefly on your comment on on the maybe low profile on the new jobs I mean the these new jobs and the the circular the the positions created link to the circular economy it's not for example just about the link to the waste collection or separate separate waste it can be for example also in the in the design of of different products or or in the design of buildings so so so that it takes into account for example the the material choice the the consumption of of of water and energy and and and the design that takes into account the future life of the products and the reparability of the product so so so just to to mention an example of work that that that needs to that that can be linked to the circular economy and which is not just linked to to for example the waste collection so I don't agree that it's it's only low profile jobs thanks under leave yeah I was going to say about the same thing almost that I mean we are just in the beginning of our transition if anybody could call the transition but where where I see things are happening is as you mentioned under you know at the sort of design phase where you when you talk to architecture companies or the building companies or the incubator or the at the business school and their collaboration and in innovation places that that's where sorry the lights I didn't move that's where I see that people are you know like new positions are popping up and it's about the it's in the first phase and then I also see some some new positions regarding residual residual streams from industries and so on in companies but yeah but I think if I can add I think that this would be very local so I'm not sure what type of jobs we lose in Sweden I mean I'm not sure it's high level jobs that would be replaced with if you want to call it then low low level jobs so I think so I think and I think that's that's the bigger issue if we look at policy or law I'm I think that's the million dollar question I think that we see more and more attention in the EU trying to address that question I think fit for 55 comes with a lot of social funds and I think that we have to look more at investments rather than policy to address this but I think for us or for for Umeå it will be high level jobs so the most of the jobs that we're looking at with the new industry moving up north so I'm not sure it's I think it's it will vary a lot depending on country we have a question in the chat from Shagofa so it's how are new skills created for a circular economy transition in your city so what kind of capacity building programs could be established for new skill developments I don't know if you want to or Jan you want to take that question one of the projects that still is a bit in the pilot phase and learn is a material bank so it's it's tried to be it's a sort of hub you try to collect possible building materials that that can find a second life I hope that in the future we can try to elevate it to a higher higher level but this means that the some totally new kind of job will will be there trying to look for let's say new clients new possibilities for these materials that were regarded as waste that's a new kind of interesting kind of job that that can work on the on an urban scale I think that that's one example the second example is we have a pilot project in Lervon for circular renovation of all the apartments and this is new because we are trying to find architects who are willing to to step into the pilot project we are trying to find construction firms who will be willing but if if it works and if he then can can introduce these elements in our public procurement from the city or now building regulations then we will are enforcing a new sector of architects and construction firms that will be working in a new logic and I think this will be interesting for for lots of people to find the job and I hope so because maybe that's what we hope if we have a more circular building system it will be more localized it will we will not lose as much value that always is is going away from the city and we hope that that by looking at city as kind of a library of materials that we can keep the jobs and keep the value there and and give them all let's say durable prospect for for the jobs of lots of people we have another question in the chat around and this is so we've talked a lot about mitigation and material footprints and so circular economy comes in there but the question is from Arno and it's about how much is climate change adaptation a driver for introducing improved circular economy solutions so leave I see you put down your microphone let's say a lot that's that's our that's ours that's one of our important we have five goals five five fingers and one of them is the half the child poverty but another one is to become a climate neutral city so that's the biggest big umbrella I'm working within so that's that's absolutely main driver at least for us thank you under yeah on climate change just to add also based on on the on the work I presented before that a climate change is is the main driver to the circular economy for more than 70 percent of the the cities and regions we surveyed and this is and if this happens because cities are both vulnerable to to to climate change impacts but also they they can importantly contribute to to to climate risk as they they for example and the circular economy can can can also help mitigate this as as we found that the adoption of a circular economy framework in five key areas for for cities which were the steel plastic aluminium cement and food could achieve a reduction of 9.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 so so the circular economy can of course help in this in this objective thank you under so linking that to some of the work that we're doing on the urban circularity assessment framework project where we are trying to see opportunities for reducing resource and materials so Marina maybe you want to comment upon what have you found so we're looking at some material recovery energy recovery social impacts now too have of you found this integration of all these different domains into a framework well we are looking at all possible indicators like monitoring and valuation becomes really important when we're trying to track and measure progress towards more circular cities and as everybody mentioned pretty much today that's social aspects jobs social economic aspects are pretty important so we would also like to to evaluate and measure the contribution of the circular economy model to these aspects of sustainability and sustainable development the challenges we came across so far well even establishing biophysical boundaries and also to response to the question in chat it is quite tricky on a city level so how do you define system boundaries because well the city is not really a closed system but when it comes to the social aspects so far the existing frameworks the existing ways of measuring pretty much a limited to jobs creation but then the the challenge here would be how do we measure job creation in terms of specific sectors that are relevant for circularity and if the cities don't collect data specifically on that level it becomes a bit problematic you can there are ways of using proxies but we still think that they might not give us a clear picture but then other social aspects such as equality for example or education for circular economy or as Anna mentioned investment in which is really important both for the municipalities and public sector but also important for the private sector so it does I would like to disagree slightly with Anna on policies are not that important the investment is more important but we do have to create policies to support the investments so then it comes to how do we measure governance for promoting circular economy but also the governments of circular transition itself which has also been touched upon so this is our struggle for now we're trying to come up with solutions and we are looking for support from the municipalities because they do know better hopefully thanks Marina and in the interest of time I will share my screen and show you the results of the mentee meter so in the beginning of the this webinar we asked a question around what do you which who would be affected and how would they be affected and what social consequences can you foresee I am hoping I am sharing my screen here I think we had 16 people so far answer the question and so uh answers are around uh cohesion improved well-being problem displacement so shifting the environmental burden to other cities and regions um higher costs less waste emission reduction so quite a few environmental uh consequences um also some uh more uh social governance ones like empowerment uh maybe people feel more satisfied or happy kind of a positive on achieve impact on achieving the sdgs and the gap between the rich and the poor might still be prevalent I don't know whether any of my the panelists want to comment upon these uh categories and I would say personally I think the one the gap between the rich and the poor might still be prevalent because it is quite unclear in my personal opinion how we could design policies that could work to tackle the material footprint effectively um because I don't think there is a an answer to that yet but I don't know whether anyone wants to comment upon I don't think we should be that pessimistic but it's important to see what is the aim the general aim of our circle economy is it just a new strategy to once again try to enhance competitiveness of our industry and just keep our growth paradigm going if that's the aim of circle economy it will not work it will just be a new disguise for the same thing if we have the courage and this should be done it's difficult to do it on the on an herbal level but on a higher level for instance to introduce really targets on the use of the amount of materials we use can we install product norms that that oblige producers to make products repairable that oblige them to make sure that that they are sustainable can we introduce a physical system that makes a system of as a service more interesting than just throwing away all things uh are we uh prepared to introduce an income system uh that get that makes inequality something of the past are we prepared to install measures to bring down uh for instance the amount of of how we use airplanes to transport are we willing to to take structural uh things or not because for instance it's mentioned rebound effects are very important we should not be hypocritical um we have lots of let's say uh leftist or green like i am a middle class people going with a cargo bike to the repair shop and then going home and take the airplane to fly to to africa this they have the largest footprint and they consider themselves as being very green and ecological but the actual footprint of them is too high so we need structural things as well otherwise it will not work and do we have the courage or not that's the question i think what you're touching upon is on the behavioral change the same with a little bit climate neutral cities reducing your emissions that fit within the planetary boundaries i think it's a challenge for yeah circular economy i see it as a part of uh climate neutrality overall and that requires people to change behavior i'm not you spoke about that uh in your uh when we asked you asked you a question as well the importance of behavioral change yes um well i think i agree with with jan and i also think that we have to look at who makes the largest footprint and how can we change the behavior i think like marina said i think policy is also important but i think we have to look at what type of policy i think policy regarding building in a new way building with wood building with the reused material in a larger scale those type of policies but i think um policies aim that changing behavior is is necessary more difficult and i think there we have to look more at maybe incentives rather than than policies but i think it will be a large a large issue for for a country like sweden where you have to i think it could feel like you are losing your your freedom or your or and yeah possibility possibility to travel or buy and things like that leave any final comments on social impacts and circular cities no i i can i i i just agree with a lot of what the about jan and ana said i think it's a it's sort of a paradigm shift so it's it's everything we need to it's it's not something that would it's not easy but we have to do it so i i i say no more thank you final words from under sorry i've stopped sharing my screen so now i see your hand under yeah i just to follow up on what anna said i totally agree that we need our incentives but i will say that the cities for example they have tools to to create these incentives they they can work with different taxes they can also include circular criteria in the public procurement processes so there is also room for for cities to to advance towards that and and well also we regarding for example the the involvement or the involvement of the private sector in the end the the circular economies and economic agenda so if they understand and if they see the benefits of of this transition of course they will embrace this new path so i think there is room for everybody even those with higher or or with the smallest footprint to to move towards a circular transition thanks a lot under and panelists for your time today we've come to the end of our 55 minute time slot so thanks everyone for joining in the discussion we have a couple more questions in the chat which we will do our best to answer it's very nice to have a conversation around social impacts and circular cities what's next for us at scikth and umio is that we will do an assessment of social impacts with umio city and so we will be hoping to share some results in 2022 so do keep an eye out on our website and we might be in touch with more news thanks a lot for today bye everybody