 This is a session for building resilience in their societies after COVID-19. We are very pleased to introduce our respective speakers, Dr. Dieter Sebesbuck, the Deputy Director of the UNU AEHS, and Dr. Maikunishi, is a research fellow at UNUIS. I'm myself, Ken Tukushi. I'm also from UNUIS, their academic director as a program, academic program officer. I'm very delighted to give a chance to organize a session in their respectable wider annual conference here. This modality of the session is a little bit not really familiar. However, this new platform really enables us to bring everybody together in the same place. With that delay, I'd like to explain the organization of this session. We will have three talks from each speaker started by me on their resilience, sustainability, and monitoring urban health metabolism by me. Dr. Nishi Maiko is talked about by Dr. Sebesbuck. Dr. Dieter will talk about disaster prevention all related to COVID-19. Let me start my presentation first. We're going to welcome their question and answer after a talk of three people. You can put your question in Q1 chat box, or you can lively ask questions to us. Let me start. Okay. It starts with a very classical definition, not really classical. It is defined by Kaupoke 2010 in sustainability and resilience relationship. The sustainability is basically managing the resources in a way that guarantee welfare and promotes equity in the current and future generations. It's important to see the resilience. Important things is retain essentiality, the same function, structure, and feedbacks. We have something to retain. What do we want to retain? Let's say the society, actually society at large, not only human, but also including the planet. In order to have society, the society is supported by various things. Economy is a very typical one. Economy, good economy supports society. And economy is also supported with various issues. And I listed here three things here, landscape, biodiversity, disaster risk reduction. And these things are also supported with their natural and human resources, as well as their technology and social systems. And these economy, natural human resources, or the other system is subject to receive external forces, climate change, natural disaster, migration of people, other things, but we won't focus on COVID-19 here. And these kind of external forces is going to disturb their system. However, it is very important to retain their function of the society. We call resilience. Our prosperity, current prosperity, is based on the stable climate for the last 20 or 15,000 years. This stability created agriculture. And current prosperity of the people is really based on their assumption that the climate is stable. However, in also pro-theme, we observe our activity, human activity is really changing the earth system, or earth itself, our environment. The carbon dioxide concentration, population cell, GDP, water use consumption, what these things is really putting pressure to their earth system. Then now we are really seeing the boundary of the planet. COVID-19 is one of the greatest pressure external forces that we experienced in the last 100 years. And still we don't know when this pressure is going to finish. This is one of the issues that I'm proposing here, is to utilize wastewater to monitor urban metabolism for health risks. Wastewater includes various things, but the very important things is wastewater has feces. Feces is a very good indicator in order to reflect the condition of the health, as well as how people are getting infected with their pathogenic microorganisms or non-pathogenic microorganisms. This is an indicator of health on urban residents, or even animal as well. And our recent rapid development of molecular biological technique has really tremendously improved the detection and enumeration of pathogenic microorganisms. And we know that wastewater flows very quickly and it takes less than one day from the very upper stream of their city to the downstream. Usually the wastewater treatment plant is located in the very most downstream of their entire sewer network system. So it takes only one day or less. In the case of Tokyo, it takes almost half a day. And since the wastewater is mixed and combined, and finally it detects sampling in their wastewater treatment plant, and then privacy is secured. As we also know, privacy is very important for under this COVID-19. We have observed a lot of discrimination based on these infectious stages. Because of these things, the real infection may happen, you can see in the bottom figure. However, the reports from the hospital usually delay like two weeks, because it takes some time people visit the hospital. It takes some time. The hospital reports to the authority. And it takes some time. Authorities organize and gather and report to the public. It is getting better, it's getting better, but it takes several days to several weeks. However, in the detection of the wastewater, the detection of pathogenic wastewater, we really don't need to collect the data from hospital. We just need to take samples from water and then just send to lab. And in a few hours, we have answers from the machine. The technique that we use the PCL polymerized chain reaction that we are using for detecting our infection status of the people. Preparation for the preventing outbreak. As I explained, like wastewater detection, we need to have real-time data for the infectious risk. But at the same time, we need a very basic data for social information, economic information, in order to assess the vulnerability. By knowing this, we know the intonation, how to precaution behavior, or masks, or vaccination, etc. Then having this action, then we can prepare a hospital for Dr. Ness's vaccination. We can prepare the society for lockdown and lifestyle changes. And finally, the result will bring the rest number of patients, or zero number of patients, or no outbreak. So, I would like to propose that the monitoring people is or urban environment for health risk is very important. Okay, I'll stop my presentation here. Thank you. And I'd like to invite Dr. Maiko Nishi. She has a video presentation prerecorded, so I'd like to request organizers to play the video. Hello, everyone. My name is Maiko Nishi, a research fellow of UNU Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, IAS. Within UNU IAS, our program, Biodiversity and Society, has been engaged in policy-oriented research and capacity development on the issues of sustainable human-nature interactions. We have been also hosting the Secretariat of International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative called EPC. This is a global platform to facilitate collaboration on the management of production landscape and seascapes, helping to meet the twin goals of conservation and development. Today, I'd like to share some thoughts about local communities and biodiversity in the COVID-19 societies based on our studies and experiences, particularly working with the BPC partners. The ongoing pandemic has demonstrated the cascading effects of complex human-nature interactions on human health and well-being. COVID-19 is said to be a zoonotic disease, or an emerging infectious disease of probable animal origin. So currently more than 70% of emerging diseases like Ebola, Zika, and almost all known pandemics have animal origin. So in this regard, Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPES, convened a workshop last year on the links between biodiversity and pandemics. The report from this workshop says pandemics originate in diverse microbes carried by animal reservoirs, but the emergence is caused by human activities like long-distance change, agriculture expansion, and intensification, and also wildlife trade and consumption. So these drivers bring wildlife, livestock, and people into closer contact and allow animal microbes to move into people, resulting in infections and sometimes outbreaks. Global pandemics are rare relative to small-scale outbreaks, but have been increasing under the exponential rise in consumption and trade, demographic pressure, and climate change. So human impacts on nature drive the emergence of diseases, but nature essentially support our life and well-being. So ecosystem services or nature's contributions to people support human well-being in many ways, like food, water, timber, regulating climate, and also providing cultural values, and all of them are underpinned by biodiversity. And millennium ecosystem assessment identify five major aspects of human well-being, including security, material needs, health, good social relations, and also freedom of choice and action. And among them, our human health, inclusive of physical, mental, and social well-being, is a central component of all these well-being constituents, because health is affected by not only ecosystem change, but also the changes to the other aspects of well-being, like security and good social relations. And importantly, as Constanza and others pointed out, ecosystem services can be provided by nature alone without human involvement, because people, community, and built empowerment help nature to have meaning and values to humans. So in this context, to ensure and enhance sustainable human nature interactions, we have been promoting the Stadium Initiative, and this is a global effort to realize societies in harmony with nature. And this initiative is developed based on the concept of sociological production landscape and seascapes called sepals. Sepals are defined as areas where production activities like agriculture and forestry contribute not only well-being of local communities, but also biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. And in order to implement the concept in practice, the International Partnership for the Stadium Initiative, IFC, was launched during the 10th conference of the party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD Cup 10, held in Japan in 2010. So this is a platform to globally promote networking and also collaboration in managing sepals, particularly for sustainable use of biodiversity. And having started with 51 founding member organizations, this partnership now consists of about 280 organizations, including national and local governments, NGOs, private sector, academia, and ingenious peoples and local communities who are dedicated to work together to foster synergies in the implementation of their activities. So in order to facilitate the sepals management, we have been promoting the landscape approaches which are multi-stakeholder collaborative processes to balance diverse needs in a given area. This approach provides a useful framework of space-based strategies attending to specific local conditions and also the knowledge of local actors. In particular, it takes a realistic view to reconcile competing demands and needs among different stakeholders. So this allows for minimizing trade-offs and maximizing synergies for more ethical and equitable decision-making. And this approach also entails iterative learning processes involving diverse stakeholders. So it also facilitates resource mobilization and capacity development and also helps to adapt to changes and deal with uncertainties. So serving as the secretariat of IPC, we have been collecting the case studies of sepals management from the member organizations. So far we have collected 245 case studies and among them agriculture and forest ecosystems are dominant, but we also have cases on inland water, grassland and coastal ecosystems. And to share an argument practical knowledge on the sepals management, we have been archiving these case studies in our website. And since 2015 we have been publishing an annual series of case study compilation on certain topics like transformative change and multiple values. And synthesize experiences lessons learned from the on-the-brand management activities and provide policy recommendation relevant to the international processes and also global goals. So we are still trying to learn more from the IPC case studies about how the local communities are coping with the pandemic impacts. But one case from the Philippines for instance suggests the community's capacity which has been strengthened through the sepals management has also helped to deal with the pandemic challenges. So here in the rural coastal community, Mangrove Restoration Project has developed since 2009. It is a multi-stakeholder effort by a locally-based farmers association, a local government unit and also the national department of environment and natural resources. And this effort has been building climate change resilience by supporting livelihoods through the provision of food and fibers from mangroves creating buffer zones minimizing the risk of flooding and also empowering the community. And after the COVID-19 outbreak it was reported that the pandemic impacts were felt minimum by local people. So here the health in mangroves continuously provided food and livelihood resources. And Oatsavings Program developed through this initiative allowed people to manage their financial resources within the community even with their travel. Also the high degree of cooperation has helped to adhere to the protocols and orders by the government to prevent disease spread. So the local community with high capacity of landscape and seascape management may better address new environmental and socio-economic challenges. But we can't really guarantee that these communities can continuously sustain such a capacity and also overcome emerging challenges because the climate change impacts may be amplified and also pandemic will occur more frequently if the current trends continue. So it should be important to keep monitoring and evaluating the community's capacity to reduce vulnerability and also strengthen the resilience. In this regard the indicators of resilience in sepals would be a useful tool to have local communities better prepared for the future challenges. And this is a set of 20 indicators developed in cooperation with some of the EPC members to capture multiple dimensions of landscape and seascapes and also help communities to assess the resilience capacity on their own and develop community-based strategies in a participatory manner. And one of the 20 indicators also capture our health dimension and this would help to build the resilience of society after Covid-19 particularly from the local level. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Michael. I'm very happy now to invite Dr. Zeter Sibisbury for the third and final talk for this session. Now Flova, if you're with Zeter. Thank you very much. So welcome to everyone. I have a pleasure to talk today about Covid-19 and impacts and solutions in the context of disaster risk. And in fact we just today launched a new report which is called disaster risk in an interconnected world. This was launched today in the morning hours and reaching now a lot of media attention. We are very proud to have the opportunity to be here also today at the wider conference and share with you our thinking around compounding disaster risks. So what we did we looked back at 2020-2021 and selected 10 events including Covid-19 which are emblematic so to say for a certain type of disasters in that year. So as you see we selected different ones like the Amazon wildfires. 2021 has really large wildfire years a lot of wildfires going on. There was a heat wave in the Arctic. You might remember the byroad explosion the blast happened in August 2020. The flooding in Central Vietnam where just within seven weeks nine storms and cyclones hit the Vietnamese coast. Then the Chinese powder fish was declared extinct in 2020. That was a beautiful huge fish of seven meter length which is not with us anymore. It was older than the dinosaurs. We also had the Covid-19 pandemic. Cyclone Amphan which hit the border area between Bangladesh and India. There was a desert locust outbreak in which impacted 23 countries mainly in eastern Africa but also in the Arabian peninsula and behind. There was a mass beaching event in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and finally in February 2021 there was a huge cold week which impacted the US state access. So our idea was to look at these events because more and more events are happening. They are coming every day. You hear them, you read them in the media, you watch them on the television and even for people like us who are actually working in the field of disaster risk reduction is getting more and more challenging to keep space with all these changes and the next disaster. So you just catch up on one and the next day the next one is happening like we just had the flash floods in New York and then now there's an earthquake in Mexico and who knows what is happening tomorrow. So the idea was to select 10 events and look at them. How are they interconnected? What are underlying patterns and what we can learn for better solutions? So for this session I would like to highlight specifically the COVID-19 and how the pandemics actually interacted with almost all other disasters which happened in 2020-2021. So some of the disasters led to spiking numbers of COVID-19 incidents such as the Texas Cold Wave, the viral explosion and also Cyclone Amphan in Bangladesh and India. For example, for the Texas Cold Wave, there was a power cut which impacted millions of people and some of the hospitals were already full before the cold wave came because of the pandemics. So those people have been sent home with plug-in breathing instruments and then the power cut came due to the cold wave. So many people actually suffered adverse health impacts or even lost their lives. But there are also impacts other way around. So because of the pandemics, many people suffered increased financial vulnerability and then when the disasters strike, they were harder impacted or there was a reduced effectiveness of disaster response because of the pandemic situation or a disruption of supply chains for necessary goods and I will give you now some examples so that you can better understand. So for example, increased financial vulnerability, I would like to give you the example of Cyclone Amphan which hit in May 2020 this border area between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. So people were already struggling with the impacts of COVID with the lockdown. Many people lost their livelihoods in the cities and then came back to this more rural area and they were actually quarantining in cyclone shelters. So at the time the cyclone hit the shelters were already full altogether around four million people have been evacuated from their homes and there was not enough capacity left in the cyclone shelters to house them. One example for how actually the pandemics contributed to reduced effectiveness of disaster response is the Texas cold wave where basically the hospital capacities were not enough so to say to cope with these two different impacts. More than 200 people died because of the cold waves, mainly because of hypertherma but also because of insufficient air supply due to power cuts. In other cases such as in the desert locust outbreak, basically the COVID pandemics and the lockdown contributed for experts not being able to go to the infected area or they arrived too late but also necessary goods such as pesticides which could not be supplied because due to the lockdowns the supply chains were interrupted. So this shows that actually there was a lot of interaction between COVID and other disasters and the interaction was mutual so some of the disasters led to spiking COVID numbers and on the other hand COVID made some of the disasters more severe and their impacts more lasting. So when we are talking about solutions we are using basically in this report the interconnectivity we are showing between the disasters to our advantage and here there's a lot of similarity actually between this thinking and this presentation and between the presentation you heard before from colleagues from IES. So if we look at the emerging crisis or it's actually more than emerging we do have the climate crisis we do have the biodiversity crisis and we have increasing changes in terms of reducing disaster risk. We do see actions which aim to reduce the adverse impacts in one sphere such as applying for example a large amount of pesticides to combat the desert locust outbreak. However those kind of pesticides really harm biodiversity non-target species but also livestock and also impact human health. So what we are saying is that there are actually opportunities to combat the desert locust in a way that we are not harming biodiversity if we do actions much earlier at the time the local swarms are not that large yet and also using pesticides which is more environmentally friendly. The second example on the right hand side you see we show that also some of the actions we are taking may be beneficial to two out of three of these swares by still impacting negatively the third one. So for example in the case of paddlefish the Chinese paddlefish went extinct mainly because of dam construction on the Yangtze river. So with dam construction we do contribute to tackling the climate crisis because it's renewable energy. Dams also contribute to disaster risk reduction in terms of flood risk reduction but also drought reduction. But of course the fragment rivers separate fishes from their pooling grounds from their habitats and in this case it's even led to the extinction of a species. So what we are showing in the report that there are actually also solutions which are more integrative which pay attention so to say to the other swares and do no harm and one of those are nature-based solutions which with nature-based solutions we mean action which restore or protect nature in order to help people to adapt the adverse impacts of climate change or to reduce disaster risk. For example here I'm using the example of Cyclone Amphan. The Shundurban which is the world's largest mangrove forest in that very area where the Amphan Cyclone hit provides protection kind of a shield for communities behind the forest. While it's breaking the wind speed it's breaking waves and help to minimize the impacts to mean that the impacts of storms and cyclones. However we are losing the Shundurban due to for example coastal erosion but also land conversion. So protecting and also reforesting the Shundurban similar ecosystems worldwide could help us to not only tackle disaster risk but also save biodiversity and address the climate crisis as the forest still sequester carbon. And finally a last example for an integrative solution also called adaptive social protection solutions. Social protection systems are usually designed in a way that they help to reduce individual risk so people who suffer unemployment, sickness or disability or death in the family through risk pooling adaptive social systems can help to increase resilience. However these social protection systems are not designed in a way that they could also address the impacts of disasters or the adverse impacts of climate change. If you imagine an area where a flood flooding is happening and for example there's a factory which is impacted the employees cannot come to work because the factory might have had to stop working due to the flooding. So just imagine a social protection system which is specifically designed to tackle those kind of challenges and to provide temporary help for people who cannot continue working due to flooding. So with that I would like to close and I am looking forward to the discussion. Thank you Dieter. Now we finish this representation then we can have 10 minutes left and we can proceed for the discussion. Just one comment from the director of IAS to the Dieter. Talking about both nature best solution and adaptive social protection is very important. She agreed with that. And we wait for the Q&A from our question. Let's see the solution requires. The question from Dr. Imaguchi is there at the same time that this solution requires intensive awareness raising. Do you have any opinion on this? This is I think question to Dieter. Do you want to have a quick answer for this? Yeah, thank you very much. I very much share that opinion and this is why we set out at UNHS to design a science-based media report to raise awareness for this interconnectivity and to highlight that we actually can make this interconnectivity. It can work with this interconnectivity to our advantage. So seeing the interconnectivity as one means to design better solutions. And the idea is to publish this report every year and the idea is to write it in a very accessible way so that the general public and also media can understand and take up the messages we would like to convey. And it comes with scientific technical backup documentation. So for each and every event we do have also a technical report which can be downloaded. Thank you. I have one question to Michael-san that your presentation having a kind of their biological issue and climate kind of their interaction and of course the disaster, I mean their infection and their biodiversity. And in the previously several upcoming diseases like SARS or Mars or AIDS or their COVID-19 itself, is there having not really scientific proven yet, but it has some interrelationship between human and then natural animals, you know, and they're wild animals. And in a way the Satoyama is a kind of front-trying the interface between their nature and human. And what do you think, I'm changing question in the past, but what do you think in their proper relationship with the human and their biological system in there a little bit more wild? Yeah, thank you very much for the question. I think it's really critical question and I think it hasn't been scientifically actually proved. And of course I think so for the landscape approach and landscape people are looking at them how the positive aspects like benefits are writing from the human nature interaction, but I think particularly the COVID-19 and pandemic show that kind of very critical nexus trade-offs we have in having or suffering from the or kind of our interaction with nature. And so to that extent how and also how we should actually interact with nature is actually a big question. And for example, in order to kind of protect the biodiversity, like a protected area is a mainstay of the kind of a policy tool. And of course there are also arguments like we should really reserve some kind of our area for biodiversity conservation, but at the same time we need to also think about the livelihoods so we can really kind of dedicate as much as lands only for the nature conservation. So I think there should be some balance and also in that way I think we need to kind of consider multiple needs and also demands for the natural resources, but at the same time we need some or scientific evidence or empirical evidence and also scientific reasoning, but also at the same time we need to have some local wisdom. So such kind of an interaction and communication probably will be the key to kind of a device as a strategies to wisely manage the landscape and also the nature. All right. Thank you very much. I want to question to Zita. Actually, this is kind of their echoing their question from the Yumeya Maguchi that you have mentioned about a lot of interrelationship, interconnectivity of the various different sectors from the viewpoint of their disaster, but these each sector having a different language in other words. So how do you have any idea in order to encourage communication of different sectors like financial sector or governmental sector or their vulnerable people in the Bangladesh? I mean, they have to work together in order to have a synergistic effect. You analyze it, but the intervention have to be done at the same time with their all stakeholders. How we can kind of stimulate their discussion with their with different stakeholders? Do you have any, I mean, their experience or idea for this? You can take one example in there. You have four examples, three examples that you have shown. Yes. Well, I think I mean, the report was more an analysis and such as for solutions. But of course, in other type of work, we are also involved in we do have a lot of experience with bringing together different stakeholders. And I think the most important is to try to find joint objectives. So what could be, so to say, joint benefits of those different sectors of those different stakeholders and why they should come together in first place, right? And once we manage to to get the right people to get coming from different angle and really working out together, what is the joint goal they can contribute from their specific angle? It's hard work, I agree with you, but I feel we do not have too much of a choice at this stage, because we are, yeah, the clock is ticking. I think the sixth IPCC assessment report is also a strong reminder. And what is currently ongoing in the CBD process also shows us that there's not much time to lose. And the sense of urgency, I think more and more people actually understand the sense of urgency for our action. True. Actually, I was also thinking the same way that COP26, how are these IPCC assessment reports six in front of their discussion or stimulate in the COP16 at 26? As you said, it's giving us kind of same objective, kind of same kind of view. So it will probably stimulate the discussion in COP26. Let's see what's happening in COP26. Unfortunately, COP15 is the best one. So we can see that discussion in next year. It's time is over. We have only one minute. Do you have any final statement, 30 second statement, Dr. Nishi? Yeah, thank you very much. I think we are still working on the like synthesizing the findings from the local cases. So I hope to kind of also share our kind of finding from the local kind of the case studies, how the local communities are coping with the pandemic. So we are looking forward to sharing more with you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. How about you, Dieter? Yeah, maybe I would like to highlight because there's a new nature publication highlighting the success of the Montreal Protocol for the benefit of our own layers, so to say. And I think it's important to highlight success stories because that was a story where international cooperation and agreements actually made a real difference. And this recent nature paper calculates how much temperature increase we actually would have got if we do not set up the Montreal Protocol. And the outcome of that paper is that we would be now at 2.5 degrees Celsius global warming. So I think highlighting that we really read something there and that it's possible to do it again would be my closing remark. Thank you very much. I think through this session, we really saw having found that in academia is actually easier. We represent sometimes in the different sectors, but in academia we have much easier discussion. So I would like to propose that academic people would be the kind of glue or stimulator or catalyst, you know, in order to stimulate the discussion in the among different sectors. I'm sorry to say we have one minute past, but I confirmed it from the organizers, you know, they don't force to close the session. So we'd like to officially thank, close this session by thanking to all speakers and audiences. Thank you very much.