 Let's get started. It's a pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Gordon McCord, professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, the director of SDG's policy initiative and senior advisor to SDSN. Gordon, thank you for being with us today, the floor is yours. Thanks very much, Mary, and thank you everybody for the invitation. Happy to join you for this event. Just to lay out, I think, the challenge a little bit and the motivation behind SDG's today, when you think about many of the challenges of sustainable development, you realize that they're inherently spatial challenges. Things like understanding the spread of infectious disease, something that's been very relevant in our lives over the last 18 months, understanding who's at risk and where to deploy different public health measures are inherently a spatial question and a spatial challenge. Understanding the spatial distribution of violent conflict around the world and what measures can be taken to reduce the likelihood of conflict in the future. Understanding how to use land sustainably in ways that meet our agricultural livestock, timber and urban needs, while also meeting our collective goals in biodiversity conservation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from land use and land use change. Questions like the land use implications of massive solar and wind energy infrastructure that we'll be building over the coming decades in countries all over the world. What happens to the agriculture that was there? What happens to where the transmission lines go? These are spatial questions. Where should the next school be built? Where should the next obstetric surgeon most urgently be deployed to reduce maternal mortality in a country? All of these kinds of questions require a spatial lens through which to look at the world and timely data to understand in real time or as close to it as possible what's going on across all of these different challenges and sustainable development. So solving these challenges requires understanding problems spatially and designing solutions spatially. We have many new tools over the last 15 years from geographic information systems to remote sensing with satellite data to drones to spatial data analytics and all of these will need to be mobilized and deployed. And yet often we're depending on 20th century data collection methods. We're having to wait five years or 10 years for the next census or the next household survey to understand how poverty or education or migration is evolving in our societies. And we know now that working with national averages for indicators is just not enough. Countries are large. They're diverse in the challenges that they face. And so we need to be able to go down with data district by district to actually diagnose challenges and progress towards the SDGs and tailor solutions to those different challenges. In the 21st century with all the technology we have available, we urgently need more timely data that's geospatially explicit. And that's what SDGs today is all about. The work of SDGs today is vital to inform data driven and evidence based policies to meet the SDGs. My own work at the SDG policy initiative at the University of California, San Diego, is all about this. Together with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, we work at national and subnational scales, deploying systems to monitor as many SDG indicators as possible and at the highest spatial resolution possible to help government and other stakeholders map out what areas are on track and what areas are off track to meet different SDGs. We can then work with policymakers to identify priority areas and communities and work with those communities and stakeholders to plan public and public private investments that can begin closing those gaps. We do this work with national governments, but also with local governments. As an example here in the San Diego region, two kinds of projects that we have are helping to further progress towards the SDGs. We work with our local planning agency that's called Sandag. We're building an SDG dashboard at the highest geographic resolution possible. Measuring things, for example, at census track level and then projecting out to 2030 to figure out how are different communities, by race, by ethnicity, by socioeconomic status across different neighborhoods in our region, how are they progressing and where does the government need to focus efforts? A different project here is a decarbonization trajectory or decarbonization pathway to mid-century. So how is this area of Southern California going to reach zero? That's a spatial problem that needs timely data and understanding where is energy demanded and at what time? Where do we need to put the solar power? Where do we need to put the wind power? Where will the new transmission lines go? How do we do that in a way that we don't offset agriculture or push out biodiversity or ecosystem services? These are hard spatial planning challenges that we need all of us and all of our societies to deal with over the coming decades. And spatial data is critical for monitoring, planning, policymaking, and holding the system accountable. It's in everyone's interests, researchers, analysts, policymakers, civil society to have timely measurement of SDG indicators. We should all work together to do that. Later today you'll hear an example, the My School Today program in which anyone around the world can help crowdsource SDG proxy indicators. Setting up systems where we can crowdsource the location of public infrastructure like schools and combining that data with high resolution population data sets lets us have timely estimates of how many people live prohibitively far from public services. Working with universities and others around the world, we can enrich open source data repositories such as OpenStreetMap to reflect up-to-date state of public infrastructure in every country around the world. And that's just an example. Researchers across fields like environmental science, epidemiology, and economics now routinely work extensively with satellite data, drone data, mobile phone data to measure what's happening in human society and in the natural systems that humanity depends on. As a platform showcasing timely data for the SDGs, SDGs today brings to researchers, policymakers, and civil society from around the globe the very cutting edge in measurement for sustainable development. I have no doubt that this initiative will catalyze improvement in how governments around the world and other stakeholders design data-driven policy and how researchers can help diagnose problems and evaluate solutions. Thanks very much for inviting me to join you today.