 All right, so we are live. Good morning or good afternoon or maybe good night, their colleagues and friends across the world connected to our webinar here in our symposium. And I must say that I really am very sorry, I'm apologizing for our friends in Asia because we are having this live webinar at a time that is not very convenient for them. So I know that there are some friends in Asia who despite the late hour for them do connect and that's fantastic. So we very much appreciate that. But also the reason why we have this late appointment is because now we have the opportunity to make sure that our colleagues in Latin America and in North America also can do can join. Right, so I would like to briefly introduce our cast here, our speakers. So we have Dr. Yassir Mohammed, who is currently a member of the transitional government of Sudan, and he's the minister of irrigation and water resources. So very welcome and thank you for spending the time with us, Dr. Yassir. Before he was minister, that's about a year ago, he was professor and director general of the hydraulics research center in Sudan. And for several years, he was also a professor at the IHG Delft for water resources management. Secondly, we have Dr. Charles Verus-Marty, and he joins from the other side of the world. He is a professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York and also director of its environmental sciences initiative. He has published extensively. We know that in nature and science and really the big journals on global environmental systems is a member of numerous scientific and research councils, and he served as advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations as well as the UN on global change and sustainability. So he has a really a track record. And we are very, very grateful that you two are with us here. And we have also Jasper Honolink, our tech host. Jasper will help us navigate through this webinar here and navigate the IT issues. So Jasper, may I ask first that you give us a brief technical introduction? Yes, thank you, Gui. So on your right hand side, you will see our chat feed where you can post your comments and questions. On the top, you see a document read before webinar, where you can find details on how to engage with speakers. Please use the format if you want to ask a question. Q, name of the speaker you direct your question to and your question. And there is a scroll function to go up and down. Also, afterwards, this webinar will be recorded and posted to the platform where you will be able to continue the discussion asynchronously. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jasper. Maybe also good to mention if one of the speakers has a problem with his system or if on the side of the audience, there is an issue that is important to be reported on the IT side. Use a chat function to alert Jasper if something needs to be done. We have two presentations. The first one is on Strengthening Institutional Capacity for Climate Resilience in the New Sudan with a focus on Darfur, a very famous place. And so Dr. Yasser will present that and we will ask him now to give a brief recapitulation of his keynote speech. He gave already, he recorded his presentation, the full representation, which, as you know, is on the website, sorry, on the platform and we are sure that you have already clicked on it and already have watched it, but perhaps good to have now a quick recap. Dr. Yasser. OK. Hello, everyone. And I'm really happy to participate in this webinar as the original plans that I should travel to Darfur and that would cost me a couple of days. So I was a bit worried and hesitant and but I don't know how to say fortunately or unfortunately now that the symposium is on and it's online and interesting to see people from all over the world. I see here on the right part of the screen, so it's really a new experience for me, but it also looks interesting. I hope we can have a kind of fruitful discussion and I also learn from you and also maybe you hear some stories from my side. Shall we start with the presentation you have? Yes, Dr. Yasser, so the presentation is on the screen. So please go. OK, I also put it on my side. I worked since last September last year. I work as a minister of irrigation and water resources of Sudan. And this is part of the transitional government of Sudan after our great revolution started December 2018. So I'm now like eight months in office. Before that, I used to work at IHE. So I also enjoyed the research and capacity building and maybe very different kind of work mainly on policymaking. But I'm trying to make use of my experience and connections in the last 30, 35 years to try to solve problems, water problems in Sudan in the coming three years. Next, let me start the context with a kind of a kind of extreme case. If we start, it is in therefore semi-arid climate that is the Sahel part of Sudan and Africa. Climate variability is a very important issue. And with climate variability, I mean rainfall variability. Because the rainfall is not big. It's mainly like 200 to 400 millimetre per year. And it falls in a very short season of two to three months. But it's very important for the lives of the people and the ecosystem. And mostly people here are farmers and livestock herders. So rainfall is really is life for them. Climate variability. But also superimpose on climate change, because sometimes it's not easy to signal out climate variability signal from the climate change signal. But what is more serious if this is superimposed by poor water governance? Like poor institutions, very big policies, very big regulations, very limited capacity of human resources. If these three factors superimpose together, it is very likely, at least in our case, we had this, therefore, atrocities. We had huge conflict in therefore, which has really big humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people has been killed. Also originally, many people believe that the conflict started around water between the herders who moves from north to south and the farmers, the residential, competing around water resources. And that has been exaggerated by climate variability, climate change, but more importantly, by poor water governance. Because we had, during that time, we had the military regime, and which is, I mean, the whole effort is to be important not to solve the problem of the people on the ground. When these three factors together, they were the key reasons for this human crisis we had in therefore. Starting from this context, my talk, in fact, you already have it in the platform, how we can address, at least during the transitional period coming three years, and years after, how we can address this issue focusing on capacity development. So we had, as I call you, from December 2018 to September 2000 to April 2019, we had this great revolution, peaceful revolution led by young women and men of Sudan, including young men and women from Darfur. And we were able to overthrow the military regime so people now starting this new regime with a lot of hopes to make change on the ground. And the slogan of this revolution was freedom, peace, and justice. And it can be directly reflected to what we are doing in the transition in government and specifically in the water sector. That is the main mandate of my ministry. So coming back to the theme of this webinar, building the capacity of the water sector in Sudan, giving that context, we believe that it should start with what are the capacity needs. And by that, we mean it should be part of the overall need assessment that considers the whole system, means the water governance, including institutions, human resources, policies, finance. It should not be part of this setup. It should be comprehensive or inclusive because if you build the human resources and you have the wrong policies on the ground, then the impact would not be optimal. The same thing if you have very strong institutions and you don't define the relation between what is the mandate of the institution at the state level or at the community level or at the municipality level and what are the mandate at the central level, the federal level, because this is exactly one of our key problems in the water sector in Sudan. You find very big disconnection between the federal, the capital and Khartoum and what is happening at the states. 18 states or at the regions. So it should be inclusive, it should be comprehensive to include all components of the water governance. That is specifically defining the capacity needs. Then, how best it can be built? We think it should respond to the actual needs. And in many cases, I have an experience that sometimes the capacity building respond only to who is providing the training. No, we think it should respond to the actual needs on the ground. What are the specific needs? Do we need to build the institutions? Do we need to provide more facilities? Do we need to do training? Do we need to change the policies? So it should respond to the actual needs on the ground. That's the best way to respond to capacity building needs. Sustainability is crucial, but it's not easy. I remember 30 years ago or maybe more than that, early 90s, we built very sophisticated flood forecasting system of the night to tell the people. We did it with DALF hydraulics, by the way, DALTARIS. At that time, it's called DALF hydraulics. It was the state-of-the-art technology recording the rainfall from satellites over Egyptian highlands. And then using models, we can predict how high the floods will come to Khartoum or how many days. It was very state-of-the-art kind of techniques. We trained, or at that time, the government trained like 10 engineers to come to the Netherlands to know the modeling and to run the system. But one year later, the 10 engineers moved out from the ministry because they found better position in the private sector in Sudan or outside Sudan. So sustainability of the capacity building efforts is important. That requires time. But it's also important to link the capacity building needs as I started my first point with overall needs assessment. And we should... What could be the role of all stakeholders? That's government, community, private sector in this water business. And we believe that each one role is crucial and should be respected. And the roles from all these partners should be complementary. In that way, we can try to solve the problem at least in the context of my country or the context of many parts in Africa and create impacts on the ground. And this is my last slide. I'm sure there were longer slides in the platform. Sudan is in doubt with huge land and water resources but face by natural climate variability, climate change, technical, institutional and financial challenges. We admit that. We know that. But we believe that revitalization of the water sector gives huge opportunity for socio-economic development for the Sudanese people. It can be the driver for the socio-economic development. And we believe it is well possible. Thank you very much. This was my quick introduction to my speech or a kind of general overview of my speech during this webinar. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Yasir. And let's now move to Charles who will talk about training a next generation of water scientists, engineers and policy makers. And also focusing on Africa but still relevant for all countries in the world. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Yasir. And thank you to the conference organizers once again for inviting me, at least virtually to participate. I very much have been looking forward to meeting everyone in person but that simply was not not to be. So this is, I think, a fairly good facsimile of being together. I did want to amplify a couple of points that Yasir has just made. And I wanted to, I guess, address this from the standpoint that I am speaking here to a community of hydrologists and water resource experts. And climate change question is indeed a climate question. It's globally distributed as a change to the planetary heat balance and all. But it's really manifested through the water cycle. And I think it's quite important and particularly important in places like Sudan and sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the Sahel and Belt, that climate variability and climate change is a little bit different or in many cases a lot different than hydrologic change. And what I'm talking about is that variability that we see in the atmosphere, the amount of rainfall that's hitting the ground, the amount of solar radiation that would evaporate water back into the atmosphere. Those are certainly variable in the region of the globe that our colleague has just described. But what happens is that through this transformation through the hydrologic system, all of a sudden we have issues of recharging groundwater. We have issues of horizontally transporting water that's accumulated as excess precipitation into riverways that in these very marginal areas are extremely variable. And in fact, to my measures, are much more variable in terms of sustainable and reliable water supplies than we see coming out of the atmosphere. So I just wanted to maybe just warn us that when we're talking about the climate change question, we're talking about water questions in many cases. And we're talking about hydrological regimes that are no longer vertical in their dimensionality but have these horizontal components and extreme variability in those dimensions. And I think that Sudan and its political instability and its the atrocities and all, it can be drawn to the water question. I believe it was drawn to the hydrology question as well. So I just wanted to make that point. So let me turn now to what would be a summary of my discussion points. And I'd like to start with this diagram here. It comes from a paper that we recently, a group of my colleagues and I were solicited by the UN World Bank high level panel on water. I think there are 11 at its peak. There were 11 heads of state who were very concerned about water security issues. And they worked through both the UN and World Bank auspices to come up with a game plan on water security. And one of the issues that had come to light during the deliberations was how might green infrastructure, that is natural capital, that is ecosystem services, be allied together with green infrastructure to bring about improved advancements in water security. We published that solicitation which was essentially delivered as a white paper to the group. We actually published that in the peer reviewed literature back in 2018. It's this paper from pages shown here. It's an eco hydrology and hydro biology. If those of you want to get a little bit more background, I would definitely turn your attention to looking over that paper where it really does lay out some of the main principles here that I would like to talk about. And one of the things that we did is we produced, I guess what you would term a heuristic model, and these are aspirational. Let's just say they're not always realized in nature in the real world, but they're aspirations. And what we've done here, and Jasper, do I have any control of a cursor or a pointer at all? No, unfortunately not, so you need to describe it. Okay, let me describe it as best I can. So on the horizontal axis where you see these balloons, these different colored balloons, the horizontal axis is the level of utilization, capitalizing on green infrastructure and ecosystem services from low levels on the left to high levels on the right. Gray infrastructure would be levels of insufficient service moving up towards basic and advanced services. And we looked at these little heuristic models between the period 2015 and 2030, so the start and the end of the SDGs. And the whole idea here is that because of investments in the SDG agenda and the infrastructure that would be required in particular for SDG-6, which is on water, all countries should be moving up towards advanced level, okay? But they're doing so in very, very different contexts. And if I could just point your attention to this little balloon that's listed as A1. A1, we had presented as the experience that you would see, for example, in Afghanistan in 2015. Insufficient gray infrastructure, very low utilization of any green infrastructure that was available. And with some luck and some good hard work and some appropriate investments, hopefully by the year 2030 the people in Afghanistan will have at least basic services in terms of drinking water and sanitation and using whatever green infrastructure that they can muster, okay? On the right is B1. B1 is the conclusion for Uganda, Kampala, Uganda, starting out with relatively insufficient levels of gray infrastructure, but high levels of potential green infrastructure that could be used to bring about this water security. And hopefully the utilization of that green infrastructure and their large wetlands that are used for cleaning the effluence that are flowing out of the city. With dutiful keeping to the game plan here for the SDGs, we would see hopefully that the green systems would be preserved and the gray infrastructure, the basic traditional engineered systems were bringing about clean drinking water and sanitation would move up in this phase plane. The idea here is that the ideal setting as we have reason is to combine green infrastructure and gray infrastructure. And the whole idea here is that from what has been reported in the literature you would see great cost savings if you are drawing your water resources from ecosystems that are not damaged or repaired. And because you have vibrant vital ecosystems you reduce substantially the amount of gray infrastructure that you would need to install and also to operate and maintain. And this could be substantial cost savings in a place like Sudan or many other parts of Africa if not other parts of the world. And so again, we don't have time to go over this whole diagram but if you can please check out this reference and we show several examples from around the world including the developed part of the world in fact New York City in one case. May I have the next slide please? Okay, this looks like a very complicated diagram and perhaps it is but it is really trying to make a very simple point. And what we're doing here is we're trying to articulate the fact that you have assets that you can deploy towards bringing about water security and so we could take a look at SDG 1 and 2. SDG sorry, 6, Target 1 and Target 2. 6.1 the drinking water target, 6.2 the sanitation target. But please understand there are other targets within the domain of SDG 6 and for water we have to worry about pollution and we also have to worry about the state of ecosystems. And so what we did is again a thought experiment here in which we took the concept of a landscape and that box that you see that's enclosed in black the black box that occupies the left part of the screen and that's an element of the landscape. And that element of the landscape generates local runoff it also receives water from upstream and we can categorize the state of affairs with respect to that water and we can apply a little risk factor low risk is light blue, purple color is high risk very impaired water systems. What we can do is we could follow the water that's generated from local runoff on the top left we add to it upstream inflows and we mix those together and we have a subsidy from the landscape and from the upstream river of total available water that we then present to the ecosystem that are within that domain and if the ecosystems are in a relatively intact state they can begin to clean that water and they can reduce the risk to the supply. Why is this important? It's important because the next step as we move towards the bottom half of that box is that the water is either going to be passed through to downstream users or it's going to be withdrawn and used by humans and for 6.1 the drinking water target likely if it's a city that's sitting upstream it's going to be withdrawing the water from the environment it's going to be treating that water to some degree and making it available for human populations and the scenario we're playing with here is using sewer piped water into households with sewer systems disposing of the water fantastic public health benefit for the people living in the city benefiting from the clean drinking water benefiting from the sanitation services but they create raw effluents that are highly risky if that risk is attenuated by purposeful wastewater treatment SDG 6.2 the finishing step of 6.2 you can return the water in potentially even better condition than when it was withdrawn and used by the city and then you can move that water to downstream users and the point here is that depending on what levers that you pull and the two levers we're pulling are green infrastructure and traditional engineering depending on how you balance those and depending on the state of affairs with respect to populations and water degraded by upstream land use etc etc you get very very different outcomes and you can actually create cross-circuits or unintended non-positive consequences within any SDG and this matrix on the top right captures that so we have this matrix of high levels of green infrastructure and so low to high and on the two columns there the traditionally engineered systems with sewage treatment at very low to very high levels we have four scenarios basically and as you might imagine the worst situation you could find yourself in is having to deal with the water supply flowing through degraded green infrastructure and not being treated in terms of the effluent that flows back to the rivers delivered to users downstream so that would be scenario C and in point of fact scenario C in terms of these bar charts shows that about 80% of that water being flowing actually out of this landscape and out of this urban complex to downstream users is highly risky the flip side of course is to have lots of intact green infrastructure and use it sensibly with high levels of support by the traditionally engineered grey systems that's scenario B and scenario B of course shows the lowest levels of risk and there are of course intermediate conditions for A and D the point here being is if you don't pay attention to all of the targets at a particular SDG in this case SDG6 you might find that you have made big investments in the wrong kinds of things and you could produce beneficiaries downstream but not downstream next slide please which is my final slide so one of the nice features about this green grey mentality is that grey infrastructure can often be quite expensive can quite often be over designed it might indent nations to invest in these systems but yet again it's the tried and true way we've gone about business so there's a real propensity to invest in these systems but if we can realize that there is this additional resource of natural capital of green infrastructure linked together with the grey systems blended together we may be able to leapfrog over a unitary dependency on the grey systems where we do a better job of maintaining the natural capital maintaining the grey infrastructure co-designing them and scaling them appropriately to the places where we need them the most and as a capacity development and training set of requirements here in my talk I wrote up a job description for the 21st century water expert who would be really hopefully thinking in this combined state and we would be asking of that newly trained person to first of all execute baseline inventories and execute appropriate monitoring of how the green infrastructure is faring what its state and functionality is as well as the grey infrastructure we discovered as I explained in my talk that it's been very difficult to gain a clear handle on the grey infrastructure the simple mapping is very difficult let alone understanding its functionality so I think the 21st century water expert will be attuned to monitoring the state of affairs with respect to the traditional engineering as well as the natural capital we also need to have along the lines of the last slide here we also need to have experts who can do both biogeophysical and engineering systems models how does the engineered system interact with the natural system in the most positive way possible and that gets us into the world of trade-offs we have to have frameworks the most optimal combinations of systems for different unique settings and Sudan is going to be very different than what you would find in Uganda it's going to be very different than Sao Paulo, Brazil Europe is going to be different than the United States all of these systems could benefit we believe from this thinking and then finally what's absolutely critical Yasir's talk very much stressed the human dimensionality of this including institutional capacity and kind of the social setting in which climate and climate stresses and I would say water stresses are occurring and involving regional stakeholders very early on to first of all assess what are the resources of the system looking like in terms of the natural ecosystems as well as the traditionally engineered systems co-designing improvements to that system have to be done literally at the sub-regional and sub-national scales and so all of what I might have been talking about as a macro scale set of principles really comes into play as we look at applying these concepts in creative ways at the very local scale and with that I would like to turn ourselves over to the question and answer Thank you very much Charles that was a very very challenging presentation and the point you make is I think very well taken that is that we need to be much smarter and much more energetic at understanding and making use of the natural capital of the green the green engineering that nature offers us to manage our water systems I think that's a very important point I want to do now two things three things one thing is I would like to put the question to Dr. Yasir so the green infrastructure is that from your perspective as a minister as a policymaker is that something you can work with on the short notice in principle I would say Sudan is a Nile it has a bafu which is fairly dry so what kind of green infrastructure could potentially be applied there is there a scope secondly we can launch the first poll so we are going to ask the audience so what do they think about the opportunity here do we already understand enough about nature-based solutions about green infrastructure are we ready to apply it and thirdly I invite the audience to send in the questions so we have already a couple of questions that have rolled in addressed to Yasir and thank you Jacqueline for apologizing it's not so terrible that you clicked just a little bit too early but that's fine so if the audience has further questions please come in and in the meantime I ask Yasir and Charles to look at the questions and prepare for the answers you may first like to address the question that I posed so what do you think Sudan and indeed Africa and the opportunities to do more with green infrastructure okay thank you for the questions and I do agree with Charles is that you cannot split green infrastructure green infrastructure but I would expect always they go together and as I said in my talk it should start with the needs with the actual needs and the local context also put rightly by Charles for example in this therefore area they use Baobab tree to store water to harvest water that is you can say green infrastructure absolutely and in some places you need to to dig groundwater wells to provide water in this arid lands or to do water harvesting to make some water ponds and maybe you say okay around the water ponds I should grow trees to reduce evaporation so the philosophy is fine it's good but it should be very much it depends on the needs the actual needs and the context right thank you very much Jasper do you have the poll can show poll number one okay thank you so it's already circulating I'm wondering if Charles has also comment on what Jasir just mentioned yes certainly we need to look at these as tandem systems and there actually is a question that I think I can answer at the same time I combine it with the answer so Jacqueline Mathura asks Charles looking at the ABC scenarios what does it say do do we have case studies of countries or utilities that have successfully combined the grey and green infrastructure or link the natural capital with traditional engineering so yes there are several examples and that's the good news the there was a paper written in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences I think it was back in 2017 by a fellow named Robert McDonald and he led a group that analyzed I think it was a 325 or 330 perhaps more drinking water systems urban drinking water systems and surely enough whether we know it or not we actually do rely on green infrastructure as the water resource provision areas that flow into the engineered infrastructure of cities that are then used by urban populations and there are 300 examples of this that he showed and the good news is that yes we are in fact capitalizing on green infrastructure we're using it routinely to get water into our cities that's the good news the bad news is that in a very many of these systems they discovered that over a 100 year time period even though these were especially they were supposed to be especially well protected because they are in fact urban water supplies they found that there was an incursion of population they found that there was an incursion of grazing land they found that there was an incursion of crop production they found that one of these landscapes was polluted with nitrogen runoff and phosphorus and sediments and what these debilitations to the green infrastructure had done is it made it more and more and more difficult for the gray infrastructure to operate and as a consequence of that the price tag of the operations and maintenance of the gray infrastructure up so yes in answer to this question we have to think about these systems together but just like you would be thinking of maintaining your infrastructure in the first place your gray infrastructure you have to have the same kind of mentality that you have to upgrade and protect and keep well functioning the gray infrastructure or else your price tag goes up in terms of operations and maintenance just like you would see traditionally engineered systems but putting them together and creating a package we think that we can do a better job first of all of reducing the cost of delivering the services but also at the same time protecting nature protecting all of the benefits that you would the co-benefits you would get from those ecosystems in many parts of the world food supply a more reasonable possibility of flood control with these intact systems etc etc so I would just like to maybe kind of combine those two answers and hopefully that did the trick absolutely thank you very much I would like to pick a few of the questions that have been rolling in and they are relevant both for Yasser and for Charles and it is about how to move forward so we definitely have to change a paradigm here right so it is from so far we tend to educate our engineers and our decision makers for the grey infrastructure so how to make better use of this combination so how to move forward on this side and so there is on one hand the question to Dr. Yasser so he has said in his speech that capacity development has to be embedded in the bigger program so it has to also about institution building about the regulations strategy of the country but also getting the right knowledge in place on the other hand the question is how to keep the smart people in the organization so that they do not escape to other countries in search of fortune and that also links up with the question to Charles from Thea Bohnertmann and it is how can we get from the current education system to one that delivers the expert the water expert of the 21st century so that's a combination of questions so perhaps let's first listen to Dr. Yasser okay thank you I will try to answer in a quick way so that to cover all questions if most of them most question if not all of them there was a question about capacity development and it takes time what actions we are thinking in Sudan I mean during this this new regime this is a very relevant question in fact it should start as I still emphasize that capacity development approach should be comprehensive should be inclusive including all components but it's a kind of dynamic issue I mean all this should go in parallel like policy reforms like building in the institutions like building the capacity of the personnel all this should go in parallel and of course at the same time you have the crossing while at the end of the day you aim at strong institutions including everything for example what of the immediate needs we found is that we need it to hire engineers of high quality because we found out that most of the engineers during the last 30 years there was limited training limited rules of law so what we did we hired like four advisors those are Sudanese they used to work in international organizations overseas universities so now these are four of them in fact the plan is to hire 10 of them and they work on the they are in their daily work they work with the youngest staff of the ministry in fact in a very effective way of on the job training there's a second question on by Arno what is the role of universities of course it's crucial fortunately we have started a capacity building program a fast track capacity building program with IHE for the ministry of water in Sudan and we wanted to do it differently so to start what should be the impact on the ground so we are making this training coming from IHE addressing the needs we did a very comprehensive program to set the needs and joining efforts or joining forces with local universities to implement this training even with local staff there is a question from Hossam on how I mean you built the capacity of the people and when they go back from IHE or from Europe when they go back to Africa they don't stay on this government low paying government jobs so they move to better or to green patches in fact this is true but it is also life and we have to work to address these problems so what we did what we did is that for example the last winter season in Jazeera has the highest weed productivity in history per acre we have like 15 sacks maybe on average 1.5 per hectare per acre it seems that we have a temporary break on the connection with Jazeera we are going to try to reconnect with him perhaps you can send him an email to ask him to refresh his browser in the meantime let's shift to Charles the same questions of course are equally relevant for you so how do you see the trajectory moving forward I think you probably have gathered at this point the fact that I come from a much more biogyophysical perspective than my Jazeera which I think makes for a perfect complement to this discussion that's an observation that's positive in terms of trajectories I'd like to then start with what I have seen and I soon hopefully publishing a paper on this very issue of trajectories and the trajectories that we see with respect to gray and green infrastructure are quite striking from the standpoint that if you map out the relative change in infrastructure invested currently today versus 30, 40, 50 years from now if we adopt a business as usual mentality and I don't see any reason we wouldn't unless we struggle against it there's going to be enormous increases in the deployments of gray infrastructure globally, in terms of dams and reservoirs, in terms of sewerage systems treatment plants of one type or another, inter-basin transfers irrigation works etc etc and if the past is any key to the future looking at the future we're going to see especially in places like Africa many fold increases in the level of infrastructure water security that we see today so it's an upward trend I have the same token and it should come as no surprise based on what I shared about supply systems if there's a business as usual modality the trajectory we see for the future of green infrastructure is that it will continue to be destroyed and again as you begin to destroy and degrade these ecosystems it becomes more and more expensive to invest in the gray infrastructure because it's having to overcome the degradation that you might not have seen if you were sensible and tried to protect those green infrastructures so what I see as the macro scale trajectory is the growth of the engineering and the decline of the green infrastructure which of course makes life very much more difficult so I would say that if we're trying to look at the trajectory of expertise needed just for the water sector alone we need to be uniting the engineers that we're producing we produce all of these engineering cohorts and we have those engineers talking with the ecosystem experts and understand that there's a new kind of ego engineering that we need to develop as a paradigm for thinking through these issues we cannot have people who design dams and reservoirs and switch treatment plants not understanding that there's a broader set of ecosystem perspectives that we have to take into account the trajectory I would like to see in order to change the actual trajectory that I see in nature is for us to increasingly unite the perspectives of traditional engineering and biology and I would an ecosystem service expertise I would also go one step further I've had a very interesting dialogue with someone who's in the higher echelons of something called the world federation of engineering organizations his name is William Kelly former engineer in the United States and he's really taken on this notion of sustainable infrastructure when I talked to him I was always thinking initially we'd just be talking about gray engineering traditional engineering but he's very much into this green gray blending of systems and he's taken it upon himself in his retirement to semi retirement to promote this concept of these blended systems and he's gone one step further saying that he believes that the 21st century engineers we are producing today are not sufficiently broad in their understanding of all sorts of other things like public policy like history like natural system studies like economics like legal systems and he has argued very strongly in the US system we're trying to broaden the perspective of our own engineers in the United States I can see no better place to apply this broad thinking than in many other parts of the world like in Africa Thank you Charles maybe now that we have Dr. Yasir back with us we still have six minutes Yasir And as we were also talking about you know how to educate the next generation do you think that in Sudan there is already enough capability in the universities and in vocational training institutes in research centers to be prepared to work with green infrastructure to combine it with green infrastructure for optimum benefit you think that's already present or you think there should be some enhancement to be done I think as a new idea or new approach you don't see it like department in university or section at the research center you don't see this kind of even for myself I had to look into Google in the morning to understand green infrastructure and green infrastructure but the philosophy itself is there of course even in practice it is there so the idea to me is not very new but how to articulate it in a more structured way Yes right Yeah so but again I should say it should not be kind of top down kind of approach it should be bottom up what are the needs how to do the best combination between this gray and green infrastructure that should be that to me should be the key driver on this but I'm sorry that the line went off if you allow me just few minutes to respond quickly to some of the questions Sure go ahead Is that okay because some of the relevant question is that addressing my worries is that for example one question is that how can you how can you keep good stuff after they get trained in these ministries and we say it's possible I mean it's possible to keep some of the good stuff by giving them opportunities to grow to move the system up I mean this promotion like now the key modeler doing this renaissance done modeling the impact of the Gerdon Sudan is he came from Aichi like one or two years ago so now he's a key member of the negotiation team with Egypt and its shipyard when the young people see that the opportunities is in front of them they stay in this poor government jobs there is also relevant questions how we from somewhere is Yes perhaps we have again lost connection with Sorry You can come again Yes A similar question Yes from Aichi when they go back they don't stay but I would say this doesn't seem to work very well Jasper we still have a few minutes can I ask you to post a second poll to ask our audience we do have Jasper back Jasper can you post the second poll the second poll ask the audience how can we best build this capacity for nature based solution for green infrastructure so this is also a quick poll to pull together some wisdom of our audience and so it's a very instrumental one very related to capacity development so I see that now we have already 30 seconds of Dr. Gasir back with us so perhaps sir can you try to to come back to your one last question one last question about how the capacity of local communities as I think it is a relevant we should it is two way learning mechanism we learn from them from local communities how best we do it but we also can share experience from other communities too sorry my apology my apology for this interruptions in fact I'm using internet from my mobile and someone is trying to call so my apology go ahead so how to build the capacity how to build the capacity of local communities I see it is two way in fact this is about renaissance so it's really hot issue nowadays in our region Dr. Baham and maybe I would suggest you answer questions in the chat panel because I I think we have strong internet I will write is the chat perfect sorry I will write thank you so much for let's see if Charles has a final comment or advice for us sorry I was on mute I guess an observation so I've been looking over the questions here and it's interesting so the some of the people of course are from IHG but some of course outside of IHG but it seems as though the audience members understand the inherent value of combining these systems and these are the kinds of challenges in different parts of the world but I think that there's an inherent acceptance at least among the participants that it's important to preserve the environmental underpinnings that really ultimately allow us to even consider the sustainable development goals and that word sustainable that's within those three word phrases there are 17 different domains and the word sustainable means that you have to think in a long period of time you have to think multi-generationally and you need to have this paradigm change and one of the one of the key concepts here is that if you're looking over time horizons putting a piece of well designed let's just say very well designed infrastructure in place virtually instantly once it's constructed can bring the design benefit the benefits that you try to bring about and there's no time delay basically you start to use it and it's working the gray infrastructure makes us think about a multi-decade if not multi-generational time horizon that if you really want to design these blended systems you have both the gray mentality that you build it you get the benefit quickly the green mentality requires you to be thinking about environmental stewardship perhaps rehabilitating landscapes perhaps replanting forests I'm sure that many people who are on the zoom meeting here know about the trillion city project that's been promoted by the world economic forum you know in order to do that you don't simply snap your fingers you don't pour some concrete don't connect the pipes that's going to take a very very long time to try to bring about those changes which have very enormous potential positive elements in terms of the water system but also some negative ones because they'll be using a valuable water slide the only point I'm trying to make here is that the time infrastructure and green infrastructure are very very different so as we begin to educate the next generation of our engineers our scientists our practitioners as one person in the chat box said you know gray infrastructures is a ribbon being cut and the politicians love that well the politicians also should have to realize that these investments are in the long term they're not to be made within any one or two or three-year period they're in there for the decades so I'd like to just simply end on that note if there are not any other questions that we wish to address. Thank you very much Charles and Yasser we have to come to a closure now we have some friends in Indonesia and other places in Asia for whom it has already passed midnight so let's come to closure here Jasper two things first maybe can show the poll results and then secondly you can tell us here our speakers and the audience what next so how the chat questions will be collected and be further addressed. Thank you Guy so firstly the poll results over here and I will move on now so and thank you everyone for any questions that were not answered during the webinar. We will post them on the platform along with the recording of this webinar and we will strive to answer all of them shortly. Do not forget to keep track of the discussions in the post in which the recording will be placed online and finally please comment, like or post content on the platform to keep the discussion going and to exchange your ideas. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you Dr. Yasir Charles and our friends in the audience across the world. Thank you so much and we are going to continue this debate and this struggle so wash your hands in the meantime and to see you very well. Thank you.