 Well, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining us here today for this first press conference of today, Saturday 25th of January. Thank you also to our audience who are watching us live on our webcasting platform. Now it's a great delight to have to say that it's been a real stand out year for environmental initiatives here at the annual meeting. We started our environmental agenda on Thursday with UN Secretary General, Banky Moon and Dr Kim from World Bank and President Barroso of the European Union, making some very, very determined announcements and pledges to tackle climate change and work with the forum amongst others, other stakeholders to really drive momentum going forward to the UN climate talks in 2016. Following that, we've had our own World Economic Forum report which was launched yesterday on the circular economy with some analysis that suggests that we could unlock a trillion dollars of extra value for the global economy every year by 2025. Now it's a turn of a very long running initiative and a very long running collaboration with the forum. I'm very delighted to be here with my colleagues to announce the launch of the Environmental Performance Index. I'm going to keep my talking to a minimum so the experts can do their bit. I will just first introduce them and invite them to make some remarks. First of all, I have Kim Samuel Johnson, director of the Samuel Group of Companies in Canada to my left and we have Angel Sue, PhD director and lead author of the 2014 Environmental Performance Index at the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and we have Mark Levy, deputy director of the Centre for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University in the USA and also a member of the Global Agenda Council on Measuring Sustainability. Kim. Thank you very much. The 2014 Environmental Performance Index is designed to help governments gauge their success in addressing a range of environmental challenges that every government faces including environmental public health, air and water pollution and the vibrancy of ecosystems upon which all life depends. We have produced this index for 15 years and the 2014 EPI marks the 10th iteration. I worked with Dan Estee starting 15 years ago to launch the original index in Davos. So it is especially exciting to be here again with the 2014 EPI. We know you are all anxious to hear about the 2014 EPI rankings. So before I go any further, let me tell you that Switzerland is again in the top spot followed by Luxembourg, Australia, Singapore and the Czech Republic. Somalia performed worst in 2014 preceded by Mali, Haiti, Risotto and Afghanistan. Other than Haiti, we did not have enough data to rank any of the bottom five performers in our last EPI release. We know that a country cannot manage what is not measured. So although Somalia, Mali, Risotto and Afghanistan are not performing well, there is a silver lining in simply having the data to include them in the 2014 EPI. One of the most important innovations of the 2014 EPI is that it ranks many more countries than past iterations. When we began this project, we only ranked 23 countries. In 2012, we ranked 132. This year, we ranked 178 countries. This broad coverage allows us to draw more conclusions about global environmental trends because the 2014 EPI ranks countries representing 99% of the world's population, 98% of the globe's total land area and 97% of global GDP. Angel and Mark will mention more about this global scorecard in a few moments. Thank you all for joining us today. In addition to this briefing, please do not forget to visit the 2014 EPI website at epi.yale.edu for more information and a full 2014 EPI report. I am pleased now to turn it over to Angel Chu, the director of the environmental measurement program at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Lead Investigator on the 2014 EPI. Thank you so much, Kim. I just want to first thank everyone for being here today. We are so excited to be presenting to you the results of our 2014 EPI index. So, I'm just really excited on behalf of all of the researchers and the collaborators at Yale and Columbia universities and around the world who helped us in this effort. As Kim mentioned, our 2014 EPI results show that leading countries have relatively strong performance across the spectrum of environmental issues, which include air quality, water quality, climate change and energy, et cetera, and also measures of environmental health. And as a major theme of this forum has been economic development, employment, growth, what this result shows is that countries don't have to necessarily sacrifice the environment for economic growth and development. But at the same time, even these performers aren't best in everything and there are some areas, most notably fisheries and forests, where countries could also improve. So, among the world's largest and established economies, Germany performs very well at number six, the United Kingdom is at number 12, Japan is at number 26, France 27th and the United States is 33rd. In terms of some of the fastest growing economies, so these are the so-called BRIC economies, Brazil comes in at 77th, Russia is 73rd, India is 155th, China is 118th, and South Africa is 72nd. This entire group performs relatively worse than average on air quality, biodiversity and habitat protection, but India and China in particular stand out as overall laggards. But despite this gloom and doom for these emerging economies, some of these BRIC countries actually are performing better on issues than they have in the past. So China, for example, even with dismal declines on air quality over the past 10 years, has received continuous media attention over the last year for air quality. And so they've taken a number of measures to implement policies to improve the quality of their air. And they've also realized the value of better measurement and indicators towards this progress. Our website, as Kim mentioned, epi.yale.edu features a profile for every single country so you can dig deeper into the data indicators to understand how each country performs. Kim also mentioned some of the innovations that we've made for this year. We're constantly striving to refine how environmental data are used to shape policymaking, and as a result we have some important methodological advances for this year. For example, we're featuring for the first time a global indicator that assesses fine particulate matter or air pollution. These are harmful particulates that have human health consequences. We also feature a satellite derived indicator to assess deforestation and how countries are performing on improving the rates of forest loss. And finally, we have in our policymaker summary a global scorecard to show how the world is doing on these critical environmental issues. So for example, we now know that the world has made significant advances in terms of waste and sanitation, child mortality, and also the protection of both terrestrial and marine habitats. Epi indicators demonstrate both high scores and solid trends in these issues. But then at the same time, we see again a notable decline on the state of the world's fisheries and also air quality, which Mark will dive further into. So we'll hope that you'll take a copy of the summary if you're here in Davos or download the report or materials from our website. Mark. Thank you, Angel. I want to take a look at the bigger context and the implications for how we're going to promote more effective management of environmental problems globally that we can derive from our experience with the EPI. I think it's fair to say that internationally we're living through a period of dramatically rising interest in trying to tackle the big environmental problems that we face. We see this in anxiety over climate change and water scarcity and other issues. We see it in the rapid proliferation of sustainability strategies among corporations. And we see it in the dramatic rise in the seriousness of the environmental issues in the debate over the sustainable development goals. These will not be easy problems to solve. I think I can make our main point by contrasting two indicators. I can give you a tale of two indicators. If you look at the issue of access to clean water, you find an experience of great success. In the last 20 years you've had 2 billion people elevate from a position of not having access to clean water to having that access. Today there's only about 750 million people that are forced to live in conditions where they lack such access. This is within our indicator set, the indicator that has shown the greatest performance. If you are grading indicators instead of countries, this one would get the highest grade. But if you look at the air quality indicator, which is just as important substantively, it's a major source of premature death and illness. And the air quality indicator, things are getting worse at a faster rate than the water quality indicator is getting better. Instead of having fewer people exposed to bad air, we're having much more. In the last 10 years, 660 million additional people are forced to live under conditions of unsafe air. 1.8 billion people totally at present worldwide live under such conditions. Why the big difference? Well, I think what the water indicator has, the air quality indicator lacks. And there's three critical things that we think are elements of success. The first is a clear policy target which is measurable. The water indicator has that. It was embedded in the Millennium Development Goals. In the case of international air quality, the world community has not set a target for improving air quality. The second is a system of measuring objectively and regularly the rates of improvement on the indicator. The water system has that, the air system does not. And then the third is a set of policy and management mechanisms which are closely tied to the target and the measurements. So if you set policies so you're evaluating performance against these indicators, you can make great progress. If you don't, you're going to languish. So these lessons are important because, as I said, the world is trying much harder to solve these problems. But I've been part of many international environmental assessments where the conclusions are depressingly similar. The problems are getting worse at a faster rate than our solutions are getting better. So in general, you tend to see situations that are much more like the air quality story than the water quality story. And fundamental to all of this is the quality of the data. So one of our conclusions from the very beginning of this experience 15 years ago is that the data quality and availability are distressingly weak in a number of very high importance areas. So it's not just air, it's also in water quality, it's also in waste, toxins, across many, many very important indicators. This is very, very bad news for the international community that's trying to frame ambitious sustainable development goals. For example, there's a lot of creative work that's gone into framing watershed management goals, sustainable agriculture goals. These processes will fail if we don't live up to the challenge of figuring out a way to measure progress on those goals. So I want to conclude by pointing out that our experience has shown that when you get these things right, targets, measurements and management, you can make dramatic progress. So it is possible, but we have a lot of room to make up. I'll take questions. Oh, I can just have one more. Please. Thank you. Thank you. Just before we turn back to Oliver for questions, I would also like to mention my own country of Canada. It is notable that Canada, which has a reputation for being an environmental leader, is not in the top 20 performers this year, coming in at number 24. There are already discussions in Canada about the role of tar sands, pipelines and fossil fuels. Canada's ranking in the 2014 EPI should add more substance to this ongoing debate. I'll turn it back to you Oliver. Thank you. Thank you. Well, being a former journalist, maybe I could start with asking a question myself. I can't resist myself sometimes. The problems are getting worse faster than the solutions are getting better, which is a bleak picture you paint, Mark. But we're also talking about almost defining period in terms of momentum being generated at this meeting. How do you reconcile these two forces? Do you think we now have enough momentum to turn us around and actually start building solutions quicker and faster than problems are getting worse? I think we clearly have that potential. I think the optimism is born of experience in small scale experiences and in corporate level innovation where you've had corporations make decisions to reduce pollution, reduce environmental footprints and make dramatic improvements. So in individual firms, specific projects, we've shown the possibility of great progress. What we have not yet done is scale those things up at a fast enough pace. So the challenge before us is to take what we know from these individual experiences and scale them up at speed. Any further questions? Sir, there's a microphone just coming. How would the index help investors look at investment and make judgment? Thank you very much for the question. We've seen over now the past 15 years a very strong link between the investment climate within a country and the environmental performance. They tend to rise together. They tend to stagnate together and they tend to fall together. It's especially true when we look at emerging economies where especially you can see long, what I'm calling long haul implications for countries that are addressing their environmental problems. An example of this would be Brazil, which came in at 77 this year. And an example at the other end would be India that came in at 155 using the index as a tool we would state and show that Brazil long term is going to augment its investment climate to foreign investors because of sound environmental performance. I would also add that business can be a very powerful change agent for reform in terms of promoting transparency, insisting on very good data and making sure that nobody is allowed to be complacent. And looking very closely and making investment decisions at the environmental performance and policies within that country and we see that again and again. Thank you for the question. Lady at the front. I'm interested to find out where China ranks in the index and also if other any sort of over the period there are countries where they have improved the ranking through maybe alternative renewable energy or other sources. Thank you. I'd like to take that question. So China is a very interesting country because they've rapidly developed over the last two decades and have suffered severe consequences as a result. But at the same time, I think that top leadership in particular the last five year plan, which was called the greenest five year plan to date, they've made an enormous investment and commitment to try to reverse its pattern of developing very quickly and polluting at the same time. So the unfortunate part is that they're not quite there yet. So in terms of air pollution, China performs the worst out of all countries in terms of outdoor air pollution. And so they have more people living in cities with worse air than any other country in the world. But then there are some notes of optimism, for example in terms of climate change and energy. The way that we've structured the indicators this year, we rate how well countries are performing on their ability to reduce emissions over time and also the rate at which carbon intensity grows. So compared to other BRIC countries, India, Brazil, Russia, for example, China is the only one that has been able to reverse that trend of growing the economy and also growing emissions. So they've actually been able to reduce emissions. So I think there's a lot of optimism and you're absolutely right that the renewables piece has a lot to do with it. They've made huge investments to try to increase the share of renewable electricity within their energy mix. They have a thriving R&D industry for improving these technologies and for exporting them. So I think they're really doing a lot, despite their lower performance, I should add. Any further questions? Perhaps one for me just to close things off. One of the top trends we identify in our global agenda councils here at the Forum of 2014 is rapid urbanisation. In fact, we talked about it here with China. And this is a potential positive movement in terms of air quality. It's obviously the concentration is a great challenge, but could this be a more efficient way of improving air quality? What impact does this huge mega trend have for future air quality? Just quickly. I would say that I think urbanisation presents opportunities and then challenges at the same time. So with the air quality issue, if you have a mega city and you have urbanisation increasing the amount of infrastructure development, etc., then you will have potentially higher air pollution. But the emergence of Singapore, for example, as number four in our index shows that also you can be more efficient with delivering better infrastructure for clean water and also for treating wastewater. And so I don't know, Mark, if you have anything to add. Well, I would just say that historically cities go through an inverted U curve where they start out relatively clean. They get very, very dirty and then they get better. And so what Beijing is going through now, other global cities have gone through in the past. London experienced the same thing about 100 years ago. The challenge today is as new cities, the Beijing of the future comes online that they shrink the amount of time it takes to clean up. And they lower the cap so that they don't force their citizens to suffer in that way. Thank you. Well, there are no further questions, so I'd like to close this conference. I'd like to thank my panel for joining me here today. Thank you all for joining us here and also thank you to our audience watching on our live webcast platform. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.