 Hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Karina Barquette. I am a senior research fellow at the headquarters of the Stockholm Environment Institute. I will be talking to you today about islands of innovation. So a few words about myself before we move on. I am leading a team of multidisciplinary researchers working on water, coast and ocean issues, including islands. Our work covered aspects related to, for example, systems and infrastructures, disaster risk reduction and adaptation, blue economy and marine spatial planning issues, both in Europe but also globally. Perhaps something a bit more personal about myself is that while growing up in Mexico, I was constantly in contact with disaster relief work through my dad. I would say that this experience has probably got me interested in what I do today. These experiences made me appreciate water in all its forms, but they also made me a little bit scared of it. So I actually hate swimming, and though I love the sea, I'm always terrified when jumping in, especially when you live in the cold waters on the Baltic Sea. They're never warm. Anyways, today I will be talking a little bit about islands, climate and innovation. But before that, I would really like to know who's behind these screens. I can't see you, but hopefully I can find out a few things about you. My colleague Brenda is going to help me paste the link to a mentee on the chat. If you don't see it or if you cannot access it, just go to mentee and provide the code and tell us a bit about who are you. Where do you come from? What do you do? It would be great to know who's behind these screens. And I'm going to change my screen just to see how the answers start floating in and I'll give you a few minutes. That's super nice. Creative, kind, somebody from Slovenia. Maybe you hear my pain with the cold weather. That's great. That's super nice to see how you all define yourselves. I should also say that I found out a few minutes ago we're registering for this webinar that two years ago, since two years ago I stopped being young. So today I'll be the granny reading you the bedtime story, I guess. Nice to see. Welcome everybody. It's super nice to have you on board today. I hope we can have a conversation despite the limitations. So now I'm going to continue with my presentation. So island systems are among the most vulnerable to climate change. And we know that climate change is predicted to reduce shifts in temperature rainfall and sea levels. And while these changes are exacerbating challenges and putting people infrastructure and biodiversity at risk in unprecedented ways. I would say that these challenges are also leading to innovation. This session is proposing seeing islands, not just the spaces of vulnerability, but also spaces for innovation. That can offer an opportunity to think beyond what we are usually used to thinking beyond the established paradigms and beyond the ways we usually organize society and build our cities. And I will be sharing with you some examples of innovation, but I also want to hear from you your experiences and thoughts about ways in which islands could innovate. But before we dig into the core of this presentation, maybe we should take a step back and sort of think about what is an island. But we all know that an island is a piece of land surrounded by water, and essentially every landmass, no matter how big is surrounded by ocean waters. So how many islands do you think there are in the world? And this is our second mentee. Again, my colleague will paste the link on the chat, please click on it. Alternatively, log into mentee and type in the code. And I will again share a new screen just to see your answers. You have three choices. I hope you can access the link. Right. There's some competition here between options going on. Any more answers before I change screen. Great. One more for 169,000. Let's settle for that. Let's see what the right answer is. So many of you actually were much wiser than I was when I first found out what the right answer was. There are over 340,000 islands globally. I was personally shocked to see that there were so many islands. I think most of us know about the bigger islands, which is roughly about over 21,000. Big islands are considered islands that cover over one square kilometer. But there are many, many more smaller islands that are below one square kilometer. And actually we didn't know the exact number of islands until 2018 when a group from the US Geological Survey was tasked to map a global map of islands, which is quite interesting. It took us so long time to actually know how many islands we have in the world. Some of these islands have been intensively developed and become the local or even the regional center of economic activities. But there are many islands that are not even populated or not developed at all. I want to tell you a little bit about my island story. I mentioned I grew up in Mexico, but I've lived in Sweden for about 14 years. And the last years I have lived in Stockholm. You can see Stockholm in red square way up north. Maybe some of you know that Stockholm is an archipelago and archipelago is a cluster of islands. And Stockholm archipelago is in fact the world's largest archipelago, consisting of 30,000 islands and cobs extending over 1,680 square kilometers in the Baltic Sea. And these islands are huge tourist attraction. It is also the everyday life for many people. But they're also increasingly hosting second homes that could be summer houses, summer cottages or even all year round kind of weekend houses. And if you look at the image on the right, you can see that this is one of the places in Sweden with the highest concentration of second homes. Now why is this interesting? So Cliffhanger, I'll get back to that. What I can say for now is that all of these islands are very, very different. Some are larger and very urbanized. As you can see in the far left, one of the biggest islands, Sandham. Some others are much smaller. Some of them are even, you know, one island, one house. Most of them have lots of boats activity, increasingly so as well. If you ever come to Stockholm, I highly recommend the boat ride to any of these islands. It is a rather inexpensive ride, partly because it is subsidized by the government. It is also for many, especially the islands that are closest to the city, it's the everyday commuting. Yeah, it's an everyday commute. And so because they are relatively accessible and relatively cheap to get to, they're also quite popular, particularly during the spring and summer months. And so this creates a lot of opportunities, especially for the local economy, which largely relies on tourism. But it also creates many challenges. Archipelago, like many other parts of the world, is risking to run out of clean freshwater. And this is partly due to the risk of saline intrusion, but also partly due to that groundwater is extracted at a faster pace and it is replenished. And this extraction has increased in recent years due to demographic changes. In the Swedish Archipelago demographic changes, or to be more precise, demographic fluctuations are extremely challenging to manage. Places and landscapes are usually planned in relation to projections of activities where people go, where people buy, where people live and work and so on. But in a setting with constant fluctuations, planning and financing investments, for example, from large infrastructures like water, energy, wastewater becomes very, very difficult. These types of infrastructures usually go hand in hand with the taxpayer base, which means that the larger the population, the more needs, but also the more taxes available for covering large and expensive infrastructures. But in the case of the Swedish Archipelago, the taxpayer base doesn't correspond to the needs on a yearly basis. So there are around 10,000 local inhabitants and about 50,000 temporary homes. Together, they pay for services that are used by themselves, as well as the two million visitors per year. So obviously the systems are not sufficient, but the taxpayer base is not large enough to cover for an expansion. And this creates obviously other types of challenges, which leads to insufficient services, but also not the best environmental services or most environmentally designed types of services. The overly polluted Baltic Sea suffers from severe eutrophication and hypoxia. And this means that insufficient structures, for example, for cleaning water before it flushes before it's being flushed out in the sea is not enough. I will come back to this in the coming slides, but before I do that, I want to hear from you once again. Do you have an island story? Do you live in an island? Do you come from an island? Or do you have any experience or memories from an island? Or simply you're just interested in having something to share with us when it comes to an island. Once again, please follow the link, I think, on the chat. Otherwise, login to Menti with code that you see on the screen. I will switch screens so that I can see your responses coming in. And I will give you a few minutes. We have somebody from Sri Lanka. Is there anyone else from elsewhere? Great. This is great. A lot of you have visited islands or would like to live in one. Some of you have actually grown up in an island. A compliment island. We have somebody from Comoros, from Thailand, seashells. This is great. And for those of you who live or work or have experience islands, you're probably a lot more knowledgeable than even I am. So, I hope you can share your insights towards the end of this presentation. I will go back to my screen again. Thank you for sharing your island story. We come from different islands and I shared my island story, which is it's got its challenges, perhaps not the immediate thought like if I would mention Sweden you wouldn't immediately think about vulnerability or even islands necessarily. But I think all islands have commonalities and the challenges that I described in the Stockholm area are probably faced by many other islands. But there are differences. There are islands that are way more vulnerable than others. If we were to look into the whole equation, then studies point out at smaller island development states or developing island nations so-called seeds as being the most vulnerable islands globally. Especially in the Pacific, you can find some of the world's lowest islands. If one would take into consideration two things, one, exposure factors, which means the people, the landscape and the infrastructures that are exposed to risks. Plus a second factor, which is vulnerability and vulnerability is considered a lack of capacity to manage effects in the short term and to adapt to change climate in the long term. Then we can see that not all island nations are equally vulnerable or prepared to deal with the effects of climate change. And amongst the islands in the Pacific Ocean, Papua New Guinea is considered the most vulnerable. On the other hand, Fiji is less vulnerable and more ready to invest in adaptation measures. So even amongst the Pacific Islands, there is differences between them. What we see is that many island nations are taking measures to reduce risks instead of trying to prevent the effects of sea level rise. You can't prevent the effects to sea level rise. And this action is already increasing their capacity to adapt and to reduce risks. For example, Fiji and Tonga are already working to expand their economy by investing in public infrastructure. They are adjusting taxes and they are reorienting the economy away from agriculture to our services and tourism. Now, of course, everything is vulnerable, but we know that agriculture is extremely climate vulnerable. And you probably wouldn't want to have your crops close to a potential risk area for saline intrusion. Now it's expanding its network of marine protected areas to reduce the strain on its reefs and fisheries. The Kiribati government has bought land in Fiji to grow crops and perhaps even evacuate the entire population of the country if worse comes to terms. And parallel to this, there's a lot of international pressure, for example, the World Bank pushing neighboring countries to help out. So for example, Australia and New Zealand are being pushed to allow for migration of people displaced by climate change from some of the most vulnerable islands like Kiribati and the other Pacific islands. Until now, New Zealand has allowed 70 people to migrate from New Zealand to New Zealand per year. So we'll see what happens in the coming years, but I think it's important also to recognize that pressure on islands is also pressure on the neighboring countries to take action. And how and how that will happen and how that will be financed is still a question that's not really solved. When it comes to finance, we do see an increased stream of finance globally and this is what this figure is showing. Between 2010 and 2014, a total of 748 million in finance, $748 million in finance, was principally targeting climate change, was committed to the Pacific Island countries. And this was, this corresponds to about 6% of the total flows for the Pacific that were reported for those years. The largest recipients of climate finance are Timor-Leste, Samoa, Tonga, Banuatu, Papua New Guinea and Fiji. If you want to read more about finance, you can find it in this publication that my colleagues Aaron and Nella published a few years ago. Really interesting to see and really desegregate finance, what goes where, who gives who and what finance is useful. Within the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean is also facing real threats and within the Caribbean we also see differences. And it sort of highlights, these differences highlight a fundamental difference between hazards and disasters. They are natural, they are a result of climate and weather events, but their aftermaths are human made. So disasters are human made. And nowhere, this is clearer than in the contrasting reality between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Both of them are located in the same island. Both of them are exposed in various ways to storms, to storms, hurricanes and climate change. But there are fundamental differences in both their landscape and societal organization that defines when a hazard turns into a disaster and whether a hazard turns into a disaster. On the left side, you see probably a line, a dividing line, which is a border between Haiti on the left side and Dominican Republic on the right side. And you can see the degree of deforestation on the Haitian side versus the green coverage on the Dominican Republic. And a lot of research has pointed out, while there are many variables involved in creating a disaster, deforestation being a very key thing for enlarging the impacts from storms and hurricanes. Partly, it basically, there's no hinder for the storm or there's no hinder for the waves or there's no hinder for the wind to destroy everything in its path. But they've actually found that deforestation can trigger earthquakes through the rapid erosion, which is in turn made worse through hurricane activity. So that was an interesting finding and Haiti and Dominican Republic are both exposed to storms and earthquakes. If we look at what's causing deforestation, we go back to the issue of systems and infrastructure because the main reason for deforestation in Haiti is the demand for charcoal, which causes then people to chop down trees essentially to be able to get fuel for cooking. And so we are back to having the systems and infrastructure for world living but also for adapting. And that we see everywhere, but in islands, there's basically no escape so this is so clear in an island setting that it has brought to light for researchers and even policy of the importance of resilient disaster resilient infrastructure and how this is going to define whether the communities are able to reduce vulnerability and adapt. This is an image of a house in Puerto Rico, nine months after Hurricane Maria. That caused the largest blackout in the US history because Puerto Rico is part of the US as you know, it's the second largest power outage in the world on record. It filled a housing shortage, suicide crisis, the spike in the murder rates, and about 4,600 deaths at least was recorded. Nine months after the hurricane, which is when this picture was taken, the power grid was weaker than ever. And so, once again, this brings light to the importance of systems and infrastructure, because very often we see that the systems that are worse heat are also those that are most critical. Very often, these are provided through centralized weights, centralized wires and pipes. This way of building of designing cities is very much following one way of thinking one way of development. But what we can learn from islands is that there is a need to think differently about the way we build cities and about the way we organize societies. I will give you some examples but before I give examples, I want to hear from you. How do you think islands can innovate? How do you think islands can think differently? And what can islands teach the world when it comes to adaptation and building resilience? Once again, please follow the link that my colleague is posting on the chat. If you have any problems, just log into mentee and this is a code that you need to access the question. I will give you a few minutes to think and I will switch my screen to see your incoming responses. I will give you a few more minutes. Your answers are looking great. I'll give you half a minute more in case there's anything incoming in before I switch back. So we have suggestions for off grid technology, ecotourism, there's a need for more funding, awareness campaigns and capacity building, electric resources from natural resources, I guess renewable sources of energy, mariculture, floating structures, shipping industry. And I think there's a couple of answers that perhaps belong to the previous question, sustainability conservation. Thank you so much for your answers. I'm going to go back to presentation. So I want to give you some examples and in fact some of my examples are really well aligned with some of your comments. It would be great if we could discuss this, of course, this webinar doesn't allow for discussion, but perhaps towards the end of this presentation, you can tell me a bit more about what you know, which relates to some of the examples that I have or perhaps even completely new things. And what we see in our research, but also in the work we have with the private sector is that islands are coming up not just as places of vulnerability, they're also triggering innovation. So, one example is solar panels, we all know and have witnessed the extreme pace at which solar panels have developed, the prices have become much more accessible. It basically has taken over in a much faster rate than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. However, panels have also been designed for stable conditions. Solar panels have been installed in conditions of extreme hazard events like the Caribbean or many of the islands could not withstand extreme weather. So based on these conditions, we have private companies and researchers developing a new type of solar panels that can withstand wind intensities at the level of hurricanes. And many of these have now also been able to be adjusted to extreme weather conditions, extreme cold conditions, for example, ice and snow that usually breaks the panels have now been also inspired in the development of solar panels in islands being adapted to other contexts beyond islands. So this is a very interesting and important development when it comes to solar panels. Another, let's say less techie development, but super important is how the limit of space availability in an island forces us to think multifunctional. And once again, I'm going to use the example of Sweden, even if even if it's, if it doesn't present so extreme and extreme case as many of the other islands. As I said, the threat or the risk of running out of water is real and in fact we've had extreme droughts for several years in a row. And this has led to building nature based solutions that can be used for multiple purposes. What you see in this picture is a water retention pond that can be used for irrigating agriculture. It can also be used by cattle, while it can also capture nutrients running from agricultural fields. A third type of innovation which was actually mentioned by one or a couple of you in your comments is the use of offshore platforms. And essentially we know that the level of the sea is rising. Islands know that they are going to lose land. So we need to use the ocean space more actively. And one way of using it is through these types of platforms. We've seen offshore platforms normally through oil platforms and gas platforms, but platforms have potential beyond these dirty types of energy. And what we're exploring and what we're seeing is the use of this space for many different purposes, whether energy in the same space where you have aquaculture activities or energy to power for example, wastewater treatment plants offshore, or even desalination plants. And another example which also one or a couple of you mentioned was a floating solutions. So why not convert ships into mobile, multi-purpose mobile modular marine solutions, what we call in our gridless initiative as for solutions, as M4 solutions, mobile multifunctional modular and marine. And these are essentially solutions that can travel wherever there is need, and it wouldn't take space in land, and it would be a much more demand based type of solution. Now, I've given you lots of or let's say for examples, all of them are interesting, all of them require more exploration, especially because the marine space is an unregulated space in contrast to land based activities. So how will all of these different types of activities be managed and governed in the marine space is not really clear. This is some of the stuff that we are engaging with and hopefully we'll try to figure out in the coming years. But for now I think that the main message of this presentation is that there are exciting opportunities. Islands can provide, can provide, can be spaces for innovation, and we can learn a lot from them on the types of solutions that can be applicable beyond the spaces of islands. An island in the Pacific Island shares, in the Pacific area shares a lot in common with the Caribbean but also with islands in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. And this is sort of the main message of my presentation today. Before we wrap up and I hand the word back to Hannah, I am wondering whether there are any questions or comments in the chat or in the Q&A function. My colleague Brenda will help me keep an eye on the chat on the Q&A. Feel free to just pop out anything you want to comment or question. Not sure I can respond to everything, but I will do my best. Brenda, I will ask you to open your mic if there is anything that is coming through the chat with the Q&A. Absolutely, I'm keeping an eye on the chat. Thank you. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for joining us today and invite you to get in touch if you want to learn more about our work. And visit the SAI website, we've got lots of resources there for you. And of course the presentation will be made available. It's being recorded as well I think. I will, I think hand over to Hannah. I have a comment saying it's very informative. Thank you very much from Sri Lanka. Thank you so much from Sri Lanka for joining us today. Hi everyone. I can turn on my video but maybe, maybe Mario if you can help me. It says that I need permission from the host. There we go. Hi everyone. My name is Hannah Begweit. I am the project manager of this summit and it's really, really great to have you all here. Karina, thank you so much for a brilliant webinar. It was really interesting. The material, the slides that she used today are available in the chat in the Google Drive link that my colleague, Mario just sent. And I thank you very much for joining us for these last, for these pre-summit webinars. This was our last one, but I do encourage you to have a look at the recordings that are available on our website. You can see dash youth.org slash y40. That is also in the, in the chat box. We're uploading, we will be uploading Karina's webinar today or tomorrow the latest. And, but we have two out of four uploaded already that we encourage you to have a look at. For those who have signed up for the summit. In two days. And for everyone just explore the recordings, explore the material. And I wish you a wonderful rest of the day or afternoon or evening wherever you are. Thank you so much.