So ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome all of you to the first C4 ICRAF Science Week in the era of living with COVID. And we have around 50 people in Bogor, over 100 here in Nairobi, and over 400 over all registered and taking part from offices all over the world. It's a very important time for our science that this Science Week is happening. Yesterday was World Environment Day, and you may have read in the news a senior figure in stepping down because of greenwashing, following on a similar situation in HSPC bank where a senior asset manager was suspended in relation to comments about climate change. So it's a really key moment. And in our strategy to 2030, we have five global challenges that our science is addressing. And throughout this week, the detail of how we're addressing that and the solutions that are coming up will be discussed. These are broken food systems, climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation, and the cross-cutting areas of inequality and unsustainable supply and value change. These are all urgent problems, as we can see, from the way that food prices are spiking now. And people are realizing, countries are realizing that their food security may be as much to do with import of nitrogen fertilizers as they are, how much food is produced in their own countries. So it's a key moment. Urgent problems, they're interrelated, which means that they demand a systemic response.  And the closing remarks on Friday will be given by Maria Lisa Tapio-Bistrom, who is the chair of the research and innovation committee of our board. Without further ado, we're going to hear from five experts about these five challenges. And I want to start with a recording from Jennifer Clapp, who is the research chair in global food security and sustainability and professor in the School of Environment Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Now it's 2.30 in the morning in Canada, so her colleague, the chair of the Committee on World Food Security High-Level Panel of Experts, Bernard Lehmann, is going to be online for the discussion. And without further ado, let's hear from Jennifer on food transformation. Hello, I'm happy to be here today to discuss policy imperatives for food systems transformation. Given the timing, I unfortunately could not be there live today, but my colleague Bernard Lehmann, chair of the steering committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, will be online live for the discussion portion of this panel. This is such an important time to be discussing the necessary policy steps to move us closer to food systems transformation. By all accounts, we are in the midst of a major world food crisis, with a war in Ukraine disrupting food, fertilizer, and energy supplies and pushing food prices ever higher, affecting vulnerable people and countries dependent on food imports most profoundly. This crisis hit while we were already seeing higher food prices and rising hunger due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My comments will draw on the work of the High-Level Panel of Experts, especially its 15th report, Food Security and Nutrition, building a global narrative towards 2030, as well as several other of our recent policy reports, especially work on the impact of COVID-19 on food security and nutrition, and our recent briefing note on the food security implications of the war in Ukraine. Food systems as they are currently organized are clearly broken. Even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine triggered the current crisis, food systems were facing serious challenges. Over 800 million people were chronically under nourished, a number that's been rising in recent years. Nearly 2.4 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, and nearly 2 billion adults were overnourished. 1.5 billion people suffered from one or more forms of micronutrient deficiency, and there's a highly uneven quality of food environments in different contexts around the world. Food system livelihoods have become increasingly precarious, especially for small-scale producers and food system workers, and food systems have crossed several of the proposed planetary boundaries, indicating severe environmental degradation associated with food systems, as well as increased vulnerability to climate change. Food supply chains are highly concentrated, and there's an uneven distribution of power among actors within those supply chains, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these trends, leading to rising hunger in recent years. In short, food systems have not been working for everyone, and the goals to end hunger and improve nutrition and to make food systems more sustainable have not been met. The work of the HLPE calls for a bold transformation of food systems, stressing that policies to support this transformation must be grounded in key conceptual elements highlighted in the scientific literature. To begin, the overarching conceptual framing of the HLPE's work is the centrality of human rights and especially the right to food in the formulation of food policies. Yet progress in upholding the right to food is uneven. Too often, the right to food is not prioritized, or governments may lack the capacity to fulfill this right, or there may be forces out of the control of individual states, such as conflict or other shocks, that hinder progress. Second, policies must also be conceived within a food systems approach. In particular, a sustainable food systems framework is vital for both the analysis of problems, as well as the articulation of policies. Taking a sustainable food systems approach is stressed in the literature and was emphasized in the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. Because a food systems approach enables greater recognition of the complexity of food system processes in relation to other systems, such as ecological systems, health systems, and economic systems. A food systems approach also points to the drivers of food system change and how different components of food systems affect food security and ultimately the right to food. The third key conceptual policy component for food systems transformation is the need to widen our understanding of food security. Food policy has long recognized four dimensions of food security, availability, access, utilization, and stability. These components are typically referred to as a four pillar food security framework, but a focus on the right to food and especially ensuring basic rights and capabilities of individuals and communities to feed themselves highlights the importance of agency as a dimension of food security. Agency refers to improving rights and capabilities of people to feed themselves with dignity and to shape their own food systems. And the focus on sustainable food systems highlights the need to take long-term ecological, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability of food systems into account. Sustainability here refers to strengthening the economic, social, and ecological bases that generate food security and nutrition for future generations. In short, it's important that we move from the four pillar framework to a six-dimensional one and also to recognize the interconnections between these dimensions. The HLPE's work has stressed the importance of both agency and sustainability because they help to unpack why progress has been so uneven to date. Society's most vulnerable and marginalized groups often lack agency and these are the very people who are most at risk with respect to food security. And unless food systems become more sustainable, they will ultimately fail to provide food security for all into the long future. Fourth, there's a need to embrace critical policy shifts to achieve more sustainable food systems. First, there's a need to move away from policies focused solely on increasing agricultural production to recognize the need for a radical transformation of food systems as a whole to make them more equitable and sustainable. The scientific literature emphasizes that ending hunger is not simply a quick technological fix. Second, we need to move away from viewing food security and nutrition as a sectoral issue to instead viewing food security and nutrition as deeply interconnected with other systems in other sectors. The scientific literature highlights connections between food systems and ecological health and economic systems. Third, we need to move away from an exclusive focus on hunger and under nutrition to focus on hunger and malnutrition in all its forms. The scientific literature stresses that problems with food security and nutrition are increasingly complex. There are multiple forms of malnutrition. For example, under nutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and over nutrition that can occur at the same time in the same communities. And finally, we need to move away from a focus on trying to find universal solutions to instead developing context-specific policies. We have to move away from the idea that we can feed the world with a single approach to instead focus on policies that understand the unique circumstances in different locations. The HLPE's Global Narrative Report brings these conceptual points together in its theory of change. Ideas must shift to catalyze changes and policy norms to better achieve the SDGs. The four policy shifts, like just outlined, plus enabling conditions, are necessary to build sustainable food systems that support all dimensions of food security in order to achieve the SDGs, and in particular SDG2 to end hunger. This theory of change has informed other HLPE policy products, including our COVID-19 work and our brief on the impact of the war in Ukraine on food security and nutrition. So what are the main policy takeaways for transformative food systems change? Recommendations coming out of the various HLPE reports for food systems transformation draw on these insights that I just presented and focus on key themes that tie these policy elements together in concrete recommendations. The first theme is social protection and the right to food. While long-term transformation of food systems should strengthen the right to food and reduce vulnerability to food insecurity, during periods of transition and instability, it is important that protective policies be in place. This means taking stronger actions to fulfill the right to adequate food, including international assistance to support populations in need during crises. It also means investing in effective social protection systems, especially systems that can expand rapidly in crisis situations, such as conflict or other shocks to food systems, in order to reach the most vulnerable people. And it also means providing financial support to low-income countries that depend on food imports and whose funds for social protection measures have been depleted. This is the case for many countries right now who depleted their funds for social protection during the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine causing rapidly rising food prices has made it very difficult for these countries to ensure that they reach the most vulnerable and needy among their populations. The second key theme is to enhance agency within food systems. All food system actors, including small-scale producers, women, Indigenous people, and youth, for example, must be able to engage with food systems with dignity and to be respected to have their concerns taken seriously. This means more support for equitable food systems by rectifying power imbalances among food system actors. For example, global agribusiness corporations have enormous power to shape global food supply chain dynamics, while small-scale farmers have far less power to set the terms of their engagement with those supply chains. It also means empowering citizens to have a greater say with their own engagement with food systems as consumers, as producers, and as food system workers. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, for example, that food system workers often lack adequate rights and voice in their terms of work during this crisis. And it also means ensuring representative participation in food security and nutrition governance. The rights of citizens to participate in food system governments from local to the global scale is extremely important. Strengthening food system sustainability is another key theme. Food systems must be regenerative in order to provide food security into the long future. In concrete terms, this means support for agroecology and other sustainable forms of food production that reduce reliance on fossil fuels and synthetic inputs and increase ecological diversity and protection of the natural resource base. It also means incorporating more robust adaptation to climate change to build resilience in the face of the growing global climate emergency. And it means redoubling efforts to minimize food losses and waste. Promoting greater diversity within food systems is also extremely important in order to build flexibility and responsiveness into food systems to improve their resilience. In concrete terms, this means investing in building up the capacity of local and regional markets as well as small scale producers to meet food demand. This includes support for infrastructure for context appropriate territorial markets for a mix of local, regional and global markets rather than reliance on any one scale. It also means investing in increasing and diversifying food production capacities at the national level where it's possible to do so sustainably in order to reduce the concentration of stable crop production and trade that became so apparent when Russia invaded Ukraine and markets became extremely tight. It also means taking measures to encourage diversification of diets by supporting small scale producers to increase production and consumption of culturally and ecologically appropriate crops. And finally, there's a need to strengthen policy development and coordination. Food systems transformation in different parts of the world need to be context specific, yet at the same time they need to be coordinated to ensure coherence across jurisdictions and they also must be grounded in science. This means deepening international policy coordination via the Committee on World Food Security and other international policy bodies. It also means building better systems for policy coordination between sectors, both within and across countries. And it means support for a robust scientific research agenda on food systems transformation. In summary, a bold transformation of food systems is urgently needed. Critical policy shifts are necessary to support sustainable food systems to improve prospects for meeting the SDGs and in particular SDG2. Agency and sustainability are key dimensions of food security and all six dimensions are essential to upholding the right to food. Diversity and coordination and science are needed to support these goals. Thank you very much for your attention and my colleague Bernard Lehman looks forward to engaging with you on these things in the discussion portion of this session. And that discussion is going to be after the second presentation and I hope that Andy Purvis can start sharing his screen. We're really lucky to have with us from the UK Professor Andy Purvis who's a research leader in the Natural History Museum in London. He heads the PREDIX project which is projecting responses of ecological diversity in changing terrestrial systems which aims to model globally how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human pressures and to use these models to project potential biodiversity futures under alternative scenarios of socioeconomic development. He was a coordinating lead author of the first IPBES Global Assessment to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services scientific advisor on Sir David Attenborough's documentary Extinction the Facts and is a contributor to Greta Thunberg's forthcoming climate book. Andy the floor is yours. Thanks very much indeed for that invitation and the opportunity to speak about the work that I and my colleague Adriana De Palma have been doing and also some kind of highlights or lowlights from the IPBES Global Assessment. So biodiversity loss is here. It's there. We estimated in the global assessment that there are currently a million species of animal and plant that are threatened with extinction. Here we have a picture of the last two northern white rhinos both of which are female. Extinction rates are already tens to hundreds of times higher than they would normally be but they're going to get very much worse in future. We've already had 700 vertebrates, 500 plants extinct in the last 500 years but that's nothing compared to what's coming down the track unless we change course. But it isn't only or even mostly about threatened species and species dying out. From a more utilitarian perspective a human well-being perspective we depend on functioning ecosystems and the biodiversity that lets those ecosystems function. So on the left hand side here we have a simplified version of the IPBES conceptual framework and in the bottom right hand corner we have human well-being and it depends largely on ecosystem services which in turn depend on biodiversity and ecosystems functioning and as Jennifer was saying we've seen what happens when supply chains are cut off, things get bad very quickly. The IPBES global assessment recognized these 18 classes of ecosystem service or nature's contribution to people listed on the right hand side and over the last 50 years only the three in green, the material goods have actually increased. Most of the rest, nearly all of the rest have decreased because we have been caning ecosystems harder and harder to produce the material goods and these other things that we tend not to manage ecosystems for but nonetheless depend on have been going down. What are the causes of biodiversity loss? The five direct drivers are these, obviously the indirect drivers are socio-economic and socio-political, population growth, economic growth, consumption but these direct drivers are the links between them and ecosystems and in the global assessment we ran a sort of driver Olympics, a quantitative comparison of a synthesis of studies that compared the impacts of these five direct drivers and perhaps surprisingly climate change isn't even on the podium yet in terms of the magnitudes of impacts it's having at the moment but obviously climate change is quickly becoming more important and it's projected to become as important as the big two by the middle of the century but none of the others is going away. So we've got serious problems what should we try to do about it and how should we try to do it? Well one possible target, one possible goal that's been proposed is to minimize the number of species going extinct and focus on preventing global extinctions. If that's what we choose to do then this map shows where we're going to have to concentrate our efforts because this is where the species that are narrow range endemics found there and nowhere else are concentrated. So that's one option but of course there are huge chunks of the map that if that's our focus nature would basically not get protection. If we're taking the more human well-being perspective actually we need a much broader focus, we need to focus on having healthy resilient functional ecosystems over as much of the planet as possible and this is a map of a measure that we produce within the predicts project biodiversity intactness index which estimates the percentage of natural biodiversity that still remains and all of these yellow and orange areas are heavily degraded compared to natural systems and there they may be productive but they're requiring an awful lot of human input in order to keep being productive. So which are we going to do? Are we going to focus just on extinction prevention in which case it's very narrow focus but we'll lose a lot of ecosystem functionality elsewhere if instead we focus only on functional ecosystems we're going to lose lots of species from those hotspots. There is no single numerical biodiversity target that you can set that looks after both of these things and there's a really major need that the new global biodiversity framework about to be negotiated COP 15 has goals for all the key dimensions of biodiversity because although there's overlap in the distribution of these things there's also a lot of independent variation. So we need goals for ecosystem species, genes and ecosystem services and we need those goals to be ambitious because otherwise we're basically knowingly planning to degrade nature. Because of these overlaps though there are actions that we can take that will help us advance towards multiple goals at once the most obvious one being restoring species-rich high-endomism, high-carbon ecosystems, looking after forests not only forests but clearly including many forests. So this priority is a no-brainer and it's even possible to work out as Strasbourg et al did in a paper a couple of years ago in nature where you get the most bang for the buck in terms of biodiversity and climate. Restoring the areas here that are in red just the top 15% would balance around a quarter of the carbon emissions globally since the industrial revolution. But this will cost money because it involves taking land out of agricultural production and investing in restoration and decision makers tend to prefer to defer actions that cost money. So the key question really is do we have to start now? I'm going to answer that in two ways in two minutes. First, yes, this is a map of how BII changed over just an 11-year period for Borneo which is almost the definition of a species-rich high-endomism high-carbon ecosystem. It's losing biodiversity and tackness. One of the planetary boundaries indicators really, really quickly. Second way of answering what's the economic cost of delaying? So if we take the position that society has to take substantial action sooner or later the question is whether it does it sooner or later. So we can ask for a given biodiversity outcome in 2050 should we act now or would it be cheaper to put action off for a decade? So we did a global simulation looking at reforestation comparing two scenarios that both achieved the same biodiversity endpoint in 2050 but in one of which we delay action by a decade. Delaying the action nearly doubles the amount of area that needs to be reforested to reach that biodiversity endpoint making it biophysically probably unfeasible but also more than doubles the cost even if it were to work and that's a like-for-like cost comparison using the discounting rate that the UK Treasury insists on. So it's equivalent to an 8% annual return from investing in nature. This set of simulations used biodiversity models so does the Biodiversity and TACNAS index and models are the only way to have a joined up holistic view across indicators, targets and policies. Basically we want to set action targets, use biodiversity models that we have at the top there to make indicator forecasts and that will tell us whether our actions are enough to achieve our goals and if not then we have to change our policies and go round again until we are on track but then we also need when we enact the policies to monitor biodiversity and integrate monitoring and modelling in a way that we haven't done yet and that can give us a sat nav for getting to the future safely. So to summarize there is no single target that will safeguard biodiversity. We have to have an ambitious set of targets that are joined up and coherent and that means that the post-2020 global biodiversity framework needs to have multiple goals or sub-goals call them what you like for nature targeting those different dimensions. We literally can't afford another decade of decline as well as what I've shown here we've also done simulation work showing the food systems as Jennifer was talking about also need to be improved both the supply and the demand side and models have a really key role in integrating across the piece and getting us to the future safely. Thanks ever so much for listening. Thank you Andy. Now we have 10 minutes for discussion and we will take questions. I don't know whether we can see Bogor. Hello Bogor. Is there anybody in Bogor who's going to be looking for questions in Bogor? If you do have questions from the Bogor side please let me know. I'm also getting questions that are coming in online and in the room here if anybody wishes to make a comment ask a question please raise your hand and if you are making a comment you need to press the little button on your microphone in order to be heard. I'm looking to see yes Patrick. Thanks Fergus. Thanks to both of the speakers for brilliant and extremely concerning presentations. Both of them recommend an effect that we invest today to improve systems that are increasingly broken. Both of these investments will deliver vast returns over the long term. Both of these investments need to be made by actors whether private sector capital institutions or policymaking bodies that are rewarded or punished, incentivized for very short-term returns, stock market prices, elections. How do we deal with the fact that we have these extraordinary differences in objectives and incentives depending on the timescales with which we look at issues? Okay that's a substantial enough question to get a reaction from both of you if you're up for it. Can I take Andy? So it's a really great question and it's a very very concerning one. I think it does suggest that there's a role for regulation to ensure that organisations that are wanting to be on a level playing field we have a choice or regulators have a choice of whether that playing field is levelled up or levelled down but without regulation then there'll be a tendency for organisations to want to undercut one another. So I think regulation has to be a part of it. I think social pressure has to be a part of it to encourage organisations to act to avoid the social cost of seeing to be acting in bad faith. So we're certainly seeing increasing numbers of organisations starting to pay real economic penalties for acting in bad faith environmentally with protesters, with shareholders, with activists, making it harder for them, forcing them to defend themselves. So that sort of social pressure I think also makes it easier for governments to regulate but I agree it's a huge challenge. Society has not typically shown itself to be magnificent at responding to these problems that take a long time to arrive because there's always something really really pressing and urgent for them to deal with. And Bernard are you with us yet? I hope you can you hear me? Okay thank you. Yes we can, super. That's also the daily life when you are working in HLPE you have the CFS plenary on the other side with all of the interest groups and it is clear that the Global Narrative Report in 2020 presented by Jennifer accelerated the discussion about the necessity of the transformation of the food system. And the CFS is an inclusive body with the civil society, with the private sector of course and the ministers, the governments but the civil society plays a key role, a key role in this acceleration of the discussion in the food systems to have more agency as Jennifer said and also more sustainability. Sustainability is a strong link to what you have said Andy in biodiversity and we have in CFS the report Agroecology. Fragus was the main author of this of this report. During two years, the CFS elaborated policy recommendations for Agroecology. 13 points are adopted by the community but the problem is that the implementation because they remain recommendations and the implementations is in every different state all over the world and the speed of this implementation is a problem. So that we decided in CFS and also in the HLPE to contextualize recommendations stronger than before and to be in dialogue with the local communities for the implementation of recommendations of course in the domain of agency and sustainability. Thank you very much. We've actually come to the end of the time for this segment of the discussion. We're going to look now at climate change and unsustainable value chains and then have another bit of discussion and I can see all of these challenges are interacting extremely strongly. So our next speaker is Professor Sheaq Mbao, the Director General of the Centre des Suivis Ecologiques, the leading regional center in West Africa working on the application of geoinformatics for environmental sustainability. Now it works as a technical arm for the Senegalese government and deploys international programs in West Africa and beyond covering 17 countries in respect of various research and development aspects. He previously served as a senior scientist here at ICRAF coming to the University of Dakar as Professor of Geoinformatics and Forestry and he served subsequently as Director of Start International in Washington DC before joining the University of Pretoria, South Africa as Director of the Future Africa Institute. Sheaq, please take the floor. Thank you so much. I'm Fergus, colleagues of ICRAF, colleagues from Bogor, everywhere from the world. Very pleased to be here today. It's a very early morning in Tunis where we are actually gathering to talk about ecosystem services in Africa and the previous speakers Andy really touch upon aspects which are absolutely necessary to address particularly in Africa and I was quite inspired by the previous speaker. Thank you so much Andy. Very nostalgic indeed when I see the room and all the colleagues, Patricks and and allies sitting in the room reflecting on the salience, you know, cutting edge knowledge that would bring the transformation, the deep and rapid transformation we want. This is the type of questions you raise and you're raising the right question at the right moment because yesterday was the world environment today and this week many organizations are going to reflect on the decade of action. We need action. The window of action is getting smaller and the target of point 230 is just in the corner of the future so we need to act now and my talk would be not to disappoint a few of you, not more on climate change but more on the overarching issues of food security and the title of my presentation is how to pull food security back from the brain and I'll try to give you some fact before I make a kind of recommendation on the level of complexity that we are facing when we're talking about food security in Africa but let's go through the evidence. The first slide you have here is, you know, how the Africa food security context plays out in terms of markets. I think Tony would like it, I had a brief discussion in Abidjan Durinkov and the issue of relating whatever we do with human well-being but also the income for a country which is known to be poor is something which is really absolutely central to the equation. So what you see here is basically Africa is mostly dependent to import for anything related to Syria which is the base of food security in all continent. We import most of the supplementary maize, the rice, the pedi rice, the wheat which has been actually being retained because of the crisis in Ukraine and you have seen the African Union going to a country in crisis to ask them to help Africa which is bigger in terms of land, richer in terms of resources to help out have wheat. I think that was quite pathetic for me to see that image of our leaders to go to a country which is involved to ask for help and that's really, really the thing that we need to raise out here. How can we be so dependent on food security when we are in a continent with the biggest share of land resources, of water resources, of energy resources and of manpower and the import is based on the statistics we are publishing this paper for African Union actually and the statistics shows almost 90 million of import 90,000 million of import of food from Africa as we export only 55 roughly 55,000 million and what we're exporting are not those products which you can put into the general framework of food security it's more what you call commodity crops which are important to get cash but the cash we are getting are not ever never have never been enough to import enough food and to satisfy the continent needs. So if you put in the picture the depletion of biodiversity the acrescent of climate change in many ways you know high-temperature drought and the drought in the horn of Africa and southern African part the limpo down south area to eastern Cape and West Africa Sahel all those areas are being you know affected by severe drought that limits the growth of of many many crops but the potential is there and I will tell you about the potential I'm not trying to be the rhetoric which is only negative but also positive rhetoric a positive perception of what we should do differently is something that that can be waived so here is another picture is how much of the land used for different crops I mean despite the potential the area which is used for maize and and sorghum and all those product which we need for food those areas are very limited and at the same time we use a huge land to to cultivate cocoa to cultivate coffee cotton and granite and those land which are used for cash drop are often the richer land in terms of soil fertility the land which has more biodiversity but the return in terms of income does not allow the very investment that Andy was mentioning to support the ecosystem functions but more particularly to support the food security production in Africa and that is really for for us a fundamental question do we have to sacrifice those rich land for commodity crop which are not bringing enough cash to support food security which is the the important requirement for the development of the continent and as you see the statistic I will let you browse on it you would you would tend to see that there is a big margin for improving food production but we should not do it in a way that biodiversity is lost or in a way that ecosystem is degraded and agroforestry and all the things we have been talking about at ICRA for the last 40 50 years is something that comes into this you know framework of thinking the future of the food in Africa in the basis of preserving ecosystem and and that's what the African Union to inform you in celebration of the 20 years is questioning here you know by trying to to bring back the objective of Maputo and all the cadet initiatives to to question them in the lens of how agriculture can be done differently do we have to mimic the modernism of the imported from western countries which does not really adapt to the context of Africa in food production and in that thinking and I think if Ramney is in the room and all the people working on orphan crops we look we call it neglected plants would like this this this slide the the neglected plant would bring a fundamental question the predecessor my my previous speakers mentioned all of them the climate change food security health rural livelihood and environment he mentioned carbon sequestration and all the like with with neglected plant you're not only dealing with you know herbs and and and and and and plants such as the kopi and and and and Ipogea arachis Ipogea called called peanut but you're dealing with also perennials and we have published with Eryktaans Maya a few years ago in the recent paper also in bullets and doors and nature that the the the neglected plant can be perennials and the big question is how do we use perennials to produce food and to respond to all those climate requirements which is you know improving biomass buffering to high temperature etc it's very important and the progress in domestication I think you know sequencing plants and genetics you know identification gene identification has been really advanced science because of the technicalities behind it and now that innovations that goes into research to quickly know what do we know to do in different plans for accelerating them was to get them was domestication has been a huge area of research that the graph was part of and many other organization that brings you know people to know the the short the shortcuts and to leapfrog how we do domestication and there's acceleration process that is an opportunity here we need to explore to make sure that we domesticate those local plants the reason why I'm mentioning those local plant domestication is that unless we do it unless we know what the agronomic properties of all of them there would be very weak you know argument to the policymakers to include them in the national agricultural policies in the agricultural policies of Senegal of West African country which I know the most there is no specific policy for coffee and all the neglected plants you only have the five major crops and that's it and we need to really bring science to the level of satisfaction in terms of replicating the agronomic properties of those plants to make sure that the policymakers would include them into their policy which is something needed by people by aspiration because it's really traditionally the kind of food they're using and the multiple benefits of those plants are known both in terms of nutrients kacha were there with the with the colleagues working on the content and vitamins and and protein of those plants it's all known by the way and this is just argument I'm waving here for people who know already more about it but the major gap as I mentioned earlier is the agronomic properties how do we go from you know the harvesting spirit of those species to a more productive spirit of them and and we need to know what's their ecological elasticity their distribution and what are the impact in the whole food security realm and I think we need to a coalition of willing here to make sure that those gaps are being fulfilled as we go along and now this picture would show um you know often you see in the literature that 70 percent of the farmers in Africa have less than two hectares if you raise it to five are you drawing to a close shake yes it's the previous last line five hectares of land would be occupied by 93 percent of the farmers and that's the 93 of the farmers occupying those lands are this type of farmers very weakly equipped and and you know the rest so the the use of nitrogen and other fertilizers is absolutely stable not increasing very much but the alternative would be to increase the duplication of agroforest system across Africa and the potential would be something like this building the yield gap in areas where you think it's dry it's dry it's a perception because those areas are full of water and you have groundwater surface water and deep water table in the indoors continent and there's a range of challenge that we need to challenge to channel through this process from policy level to external factors to motivational issues the incentive to the assets preservation and the sectors that we need to address and these are really a brush through um through some of the important issue which I wanted to share with you I I return the floor to you for questions and comment thank you. Thank you Shay and we're going to have another presentation before the discussion session um and that is from Dr. Ranil Sennanyika who's a systems ecologist trained at the University of California Davis he's held many international positions such as being the executive director of the environment liaison center international in Kenya the senior scientists of counterpart international in Washington DC and a senior lecturer at Melbourne and Monash universities in Australia and he's going to be talking to us about a novel development of biocurrency and because there are power interruptions in Sri Lanka at the moment we have a recording of his talk can we play that now please. Hello all I'd like to present a green value chain based on quantifying positive externalities what are positive externalities what is an externality externalities occur in the economy when the production or consumption of a specific good or service impacts a third party that is not directly related to the production or consumption of that good or service you see the examples out here this is very important for all of us who are working in nature who are working with trees because trees provide positive externalities that benefit third parties at no extra cost or no direct cost but there are many many positive externalities that trees provide for us that we absolutely should be aware of one is the function of cleaning groundwater through transpiration this important positive externality is the only thing that takes polluted groundwater brings it up from the roots and releases it as clean pure water from the leaves consider that trees basically can clean or can transpire up to 50 000 liters per large tree and add this water to the atmosphere to come down later as rainfall this is a positive externality that benefits third parties at no cost and to add to this the leaves also produce cloud condensation nuclear which contribute to the making of clouds without which clouds cannot form even though the plants and trees give out the water as water vapor cloud condensation nuclear is yet another positive externality provided by trees and leaves and yet another positive externality is the value of the evaporative cooling given by the leaves of trees one tree provides the cooling of about 10 ac units room-sized running 8 hours a day roughly about 1,200,000 British thermal units a day of cooling this has enormous implications in the coming changing climate and in the heating environment that we have to work in but we'll have to talk about that another time now leaves are also the only production system on land that supplies oxygen the creation and destruction of molecular oxygen in the global commons was in the equilibrium but now as you see from the graph here oxygen concentration has started dropping rapidly in response to increased consumption of fossil fuels and by deforestation now what can we do we should look basically at the leaves in terms of its potential to create primary ecosystem services so biological carbon fixation carbon assimilation oxygen production all of it is a product of photosynthesis as you see from the carbon cycle these are the initial products that are produced when life begins to manifest itself they create through the action of chlorophyll what we call primary ecosystem services the primary ecosystem services are the capture of solar energy the production of oxygen the phytoremediation of groundwater and the capture of carbon over time now this value that we have in ecosystem services is found basically in territorial ecosystems in and within the leaves of plants because it's the leaves of plants that carry the chlorophyll or the for and thereby become the photosynthetic biomass represented on the planet primary ecosystem services PES are verifiable through photosynthetic biomass as a proxy because it provides a measure that is obvious and verifiable by simple testing now since we have seen this we have now to look at recent plans and this photosynthetic biomass in terms of private property private ownership which underpins all of the ecological economic activity at the moment on the left you see a privately owned mango tree in a farm the farmer owns everything trees leaves everything and it belongs only to the farmer on the other side of the farm is a forest where there is another mango tree that is the commonness it belongs to everybody you me anybody has access to that tree now since the farmer has private property and owns the tree that's on his land all the output from the privately owned tree also belongs to the owner whether it be the fruits the flowers or the leaf functions and here are the leaf functions that come from every single tree now these leaf functions are the activity of the leaf issuing its products into the ecosystem this act of primary productivity is what creates the primary ecosystem services but under the current economy only the fruit has value and only after it has plucked and sent to market the leaves also may have value but again only after it is plucked and sent to market under the proposed economy the leaves too have value but can retain value only as long as it is living so that because the photosynthetic biomass has to be acting and in motion to be valuable the leaf has to be living in order to enter the market that we are proposing and is there can we realize this thing is there such a value in the global market yes the value of the global ecosystem services in 2011 was estimated to be 125 trillion dollars a year the question was how can this be realized and what i'd like to talk to you now is about life force a company has provided a way by creating life force units of one way of capturing this value as it values pe s production and then by adding the biodiversity to biomass ratio we can increase value so there is a lot to be gained in restoration activity by going in this direction we feel also when we invest our company invest in creating these units basically what we do is we work with farmers and we pay them for four years for maintaining the leaves of their trees in good condition basically what we're doing is we are underwriting them to the difficult period of maturing a tree so that they can look after the other time and the initiative to look after a tree over this time and of course all the investment that comes into this process 80% goes straight to the farmers of participating here's an example of our smart contracts this is a life force unit in operation this is a small family who's living up in Sri Lanka in the mountains this is their property and here are the units this is the unit of plant they have taken we can follow the growth of the biomass of their plants over the years we can follow the oxygen and the clean water create seen by their plant over this time period and it all comes and appears within the sub-smart contracts that we create and as an example also of what can be achieved is a quantification of PS productions from one of our projects working with the war widows in the north of Sri Lanka here you see that basically three four five seven of these ladies have worked with 45 units which means 45 trees which have been recorded to release 5,731 liters of oxygen plus over 2,000 liters of clean water into the atmosphere this is the potential of working with primary ecosystem services and earth restoration would like to propose that any interested person should come and speak to us about it. Thank you Ranil both theoretical and a very practical way of realizing that so we now have Sheik and Ranil with us and again another 10 minutes for discussion can I are there any hands up in Bogor anybody from Bogor want to ask a question I'm looking also around okay I have a question from the internet our web users and and it says if I have a thousand US dollars to invest in primary ecosystem services what steps would I take and what return on investment might I expect well that's for you Ranil I know it's a commercial question so basically come to our web page it's it was there it's called the RISTO.Earth www.RISTO.Earth and you can happily invest there I mean the whole thing is laid out there will be you see what's happening we are extending slowly from Sri Lanka now into Myanmar hopefully into Costa Rica and what we're hoping listen what we're finding out is that the thing we are working with trees and plants the leaves the leaves account for about four times the surface area of this planet and the frightening thing that was in my last presentation wasn't shown and I'd like to share with you that this incredible balloon four times the surface area of this planet rests on living soil that is merely 10 percent of the land area of this planet if we do not look after the living soil as hard as we look after the trees because in my research without trees and plants living soils cannot exist because it is the exudates of the roots that keeps the soil systems alive all of us all of us have wide enough perspectives and look towards creating not only sustainable systems but systems that promote the increase of photosynthetic biomass or I would say living biomass on this planet living biomass per area should be a metric we all should be planning for thank you okay thank you Randall um Peter Manang thanks a lot thanks shake for for the wonderful presentation I just wanted to to get your your viewpoints on on one of the things I like your slide with the numbers especially looking at the tree commodity side at the bottom of your of your your your slide but you did mention that that we are we are not getting enough out of the three commodities from the continent yet one would see that they have still been the fastest growing land use on the continent if you take the total 10 commodities that Africa depends on at the moment so two questions from my side what in your view can c4 ecraft do to benefit from that growth of the tree commodity land uses to compensate and sort of and address the tradeoffs with with food crops and food security and number two what do you think c4 ecraft can do to sort of help add value to that to to the growth the benefits from from these systems thank you shake two questions Peter was greedy yeah yes exactly thank you so much Peter Peter first of all congratulations for the great work you did which I saw on cashew one of the commodity in west Africa which is taking a lot of land and and from the cashew experience what I would like to to say to respond to your question is that most of those growths in commodity crops are driven only by external markets not necessarily the local market and the local food systems so the approach here is really to see whether we are embracing a food system approach which is trying to balance what the local needs in terms of food is and what is the local and the external need in terms of market if I take the case of synagogue 90% of the cashew nuts are exported to to India or Asia or China and the exported raw it comes back just by a simple transformation processing which is roasting the grains and putting it into into into boxes with a high value in the market in the market in in west Africa so to me two things needs to be done first of all to have a really deliberate program for local transformation of those commodity product coming from trees or commodity product you know only recently we talk about cocoa and coffee transformation in Africa it used to be Europe and and second how to really target those commodity product which has some value in terms of food and it's not only cashew you have sub-synical lenses you have datarium synical lenses you have some of the arabic gums you have all those 100 plants and trees that repatriated eric pansama and myself 120 of species of trees that can become commodity which we did not explore so unless we embrace the diversity of tree commodity that can go into food security and to the market including local transformation the fact of increasing tree commodity cultivation for export crop will not will not be productive for for Africa because it will only benefit the international market as it has been for many many decades so we have to reverse the the rhetoric here to make be sure that whatever we do is something that speaks to the interest of local communities before with the international interest which is you know controlled by few big private companies those companies should be aware that the small enterprises that can be developed around those three product are secure could be a security buffer for the supply of those product to them rather than just killing them in in the continent itself but it requires a whole policy a deliberate policy on promoting them for local communities and for reducing vulnerability responding to climate change thank you very much shake that brings us we're going to have another discussion session after hearing about inequality and we were going to be joined by jemima and juki from un women but unfortunately her father is unwell and she has had to attend to that but we're super lucky that we have susan carrier from award the african women in agricultural research and development here on the campus who was able to step in at the last minute to take the the place of jemima they're very good friends so i'm sure that what susan says will chime with what jemima also would have said that susan thank you very much fagas for the introduction and thank you for inviting me here good morning good afternoon everyone wherever you are it is my pleasure to come and talk to you during the see for ikra of science week i am the new director for the african women in agriculture research and development and what i'll talk to you about our gender inequalities in agriculture and natural resource management research and development and then at the end i'll give you a few slides talking about what award is doing to address this challenge next slide please so the key challenges to achieving a gender responsive agricultural research and development but let me first before i even go to the what is here is to mention that some of the gender inequalities have already been mentioned in some of the presentations we've had today i jennifer talked about gender inequalities in food security and nutrition and actually the data that she presented if we had looked at it more in depth would have seen that there are huge gender gaps in food insecurity there are huge gender gaps between men and women in access to productive resources assets shake talked about land if you look at financial services use of fertilizer access to markets there are huge gender inequalities that need to be addressed if we're going to have an equitable food system so what are some of the issues though why why is this perpetual challenge this gender inequality the first thing that we should talk about is the lack of timely gender data in many of the sdgs we still are not able to track how what progress is being made for women and girls across all of them in several of them i mean they they are starting now to develop methodologies to collect this data but by the time you get national level data where you can do the comparisons it's going to take a long time another issue is the lack of critical uh a critical mass of gender experts in agriculture food security and nutrition i can tell you in natural resource management in climate change lack of experts that can address gender and then of course if you don't have that then gender research is also not well addressed there is there is the enabling environment or the push for scientists to do gender research is is really missing and then finally it's really also thinking about how how do you also address the root causes of gender inequality so it's not only the numbers it's not only participation it is how do you start to think about institutions and even at community level thinking about social norms attitudes behaviors and the social systems that really cause the that are the root causes um next slide please and i just want to give you this example of institutions yeah when you look at institutions and really starting to understand how are men and women in these institutions distributed um i have there a picture of this is a bit older it's a un women report a 2020 report that looks at the distribution of women and men by the level and you can see for far the at p1 p1 is the lowest level there you know it's 70 percent women and 30 percent men now when you come down to the d1 the d2 the assistant secretary general the numbers get lower and lower um and don't worry when you see the usd 60 67 percent it's just because they were only for they were only for um deputy director generals and three were women so it doesn't make don't don't take that as an important figure but if you and to tell you the truth if we did this mapping for aircraft see for aircraft the it will be very similar to that so it is this is a very clear indication of some of the challenges we're facing look at african agriculture research very similar statistics now what you don't see in that diagram is what if we looked at the leadership again the statistics are really really bad next slide please so what can we do and what kind of drivers what are the issues that we need to address to start to tackle some of these gender inequalities next slide please so i i argue that there are several important areas that we need to talk about um the first one is making sure that women's voices and participation and leadership at all levels in the institutions in shaping policies in the communities in households and i think this is where the high-level panel of experts report talks about agency it is alluding to this as an important dimension the other part is to the right side it's really important to think about policies that advance equal rights and access to access to and control over natural and productive resources same for services same for markets and decent work we really need to have policies that are gender responsive that are paying attention to make sure that men and women have equal access to these kinds of services but then for that to really work you have to also look at the institutions themselves making sure that the national agriculture natural resource management institutions have mechanisms to support gender parity they're integrating gender in their research and in their technical work we have to think about making sure that their policies the national policies are paying attention to gender and that they have clear targets they have clear thoughts around budgeting they have indicators that are disaggregated so we can start to collect the kind of data we need and finally we need to think about much more systemic change the mindsets the tackling discriminatory social norms behaviors and attitudes next slide please so what what is award doing in order to address this award has was was established in 2008 and with the aim of really creating a cadre of capable confident influential women in agriculture research and development institutions and we do this we invest in the scientists and in the institutions to make sure that you can drive innovations that are responsive to the needs and the priorities of African women small holders women and men small holders next slide please i have two more slides and be done and what i'd like to say is this is how award has been working so we work at the individual level where we're building the leadership potential of African women researchers building their skills in leadership but we also recognize we must work at the institutional level making sure that these institutions themselves are changing their culture and their practice and finally that we are working at the enabling environment making sure that the policies are gender responsive this is my last slide okay so what have we achieved so far we have actually reached about 514 women scientists and now they're spread all over in institutions we have also the way the award model works is we have mentors so people who are more senior and we have mentees who are more junior so we have this very repo effect where you're really reaching many more people so we can see we've had about 446 award mentors and 415 fellows next slide please so i'd like to end on this one so whatever our fellows told us that they have achieved and you can see there number one it's increased their strength their inner strength their confidence motivation their ability to do very good science to publish their work many have also become leaders in the institutions they've overcome some of the constraints that women face in the workplace it's increased the scope of their collaborations and really empowered women to do they've been empowered to do more gender responsive work i make a plea for this because i think c4 ecraft for c4 ecraft this is an important dimension as well that we are strengthening the gender aspects of our research but also our our scientists women's leadership in the scientists i'll stop there thank you so much and i'm pleased to say that four out of our five theme leaders are women and some of them in the audience well two in the audience here in Nairobi the others online or in bogel could i again we have another 10 minutes for for discussion and i think we have everybody online so if you've got a question for susan or for any of the other panelists please do ask as you could see people were cross referencing each other all the time during these talks showing just how interrelated these these themes are ramney one of our female theme leaders eddy griff thank you susan the really really good presentation actually i just wanted to thank award because i also came through award african women's empowerment program and i've been a mentor for you guys for a while so thank you you guys are doing a great great work i think now you need to work at the institutional level too cheers thank you do do we have anybody in bogel wishing to ask ask a question i am not seeing anybody in bogel you're very silent in bogel okay there is a rick co wishing to ask a question here this is a question that occurred to me while i was listening to andy's presentation but i think there's an element of it in all the presentations and the question is whether the global picture can distract us from the local looking at looking at andy's maps of those hot spots the red spots which is where we need to focus and is there is there a danger that we then say well if i'm not in a red spot it doesn't matter what i do i think all these issues have global and local relevance global and local aspects global and local actions that need taking and we as as researchers we like we're proud of ourselves when we produce these big picture maps that show you know what what's going on at large scale and yet i i how do we keep the balance of attention to things at local scale and all these issues have have aspects to them which apply any anywhere in the world at local scale as well as making these global analysis that tell us where the real hot spots if you like are andy do you want to take a stab at responding to that others may may also wish to because it's a general point andy yeah thank you uh it's a really great point that um the global can distract from the local but the the other way is also a problem um one difficulty with biodiversity um that that climate all this many challenges uh doesn't have have quite so much is the um the fact that a lot of the uh damage that some countries do is at a distance and so there's a concern that if countries try to improve the situation in their own region you know biodiversity state within their own borders they could do so richer countries by effectively exporting the damage through trade uh and and we've heard how unbalanced those trading relationships can be and how the externalities aren't factored in so i think you're right that we need to retain the concern for local but we need to have both the local and global in mind because otherwise if we prioritize either one exclusively then we risk missing um a really important part of the picture so that indicates that being able to work across nested scales is absolutely necessary i i see bernard and and uh rannel also want to comment on this one um and then we'll take another question here so uh bernard yes just briefly that's a really a great point also for the food system as such we have to differentiate because the average is nothing says nothing no message from the average and we have a lot plenty of interactions between the regions and also between the actors all over all over the in the different regions so that it is absolutely necessary to to have a view of the context and the system approach for the whole the system approach for the global situation and look at the different spots on the planet concerning the food security agency and sustainability it's really a great question but also a great challenge thank you okay and rannel can you be brief yeah surely uh well the thing is in terms of ecology and ecosystems as you change scale value changes and in any map or anything you're changing scale move change scale i can see value changes but what's really important here what i'd like to raise and ask andy is a question that's been bugging me for years and years and that is while article two of the biodiversity convention considers biodiversity as genes species and ecosystems article eight h on invasive species does not address invasive ecosystems which are the huge plantations we have all over the planet it's an elephant in the blood excuse me it's an elephant in the living room right and the other is invasive genes with the gmo's getting into our gene pools i mean what on earth is going on okay that that's andy do you want to respond to that and then we'll we'll come back to a question here just that any long document ends up being written by a committee so a superficial answer but there's there's also um i think there hasn't been the appreciation of invasive um species ecosystems genes as much as perhaps with some of the other drivers hopefully the ip best uh assessment on uh invasives that's uh underway at the moment will um rebalance things a bit thank you and we've got a question here um um thank you very much for the presentation however i have a question about the gender gap what do you think is the major reason why we have the gender disparity is it because women are under empowered or is it because they lack the necessary skills in the agricultural sector and um for example uh for the award group what policies have you put in place to empower more women to join your organization thank you thank you thank you for that question so in the agriculture sector uh first of all if you even think about kenya the history when did women start to study agriculture you get on dint admit women for many years yeah so this is it's been an area seen as a male domain it's male dominated uh you know going to the fields to extension on motorbikes you know very doesn't feel very friendly for women so i think this is one of the big challenges and i'm then starting to change what's really important to do is to start to change the narrative you know it's to start to change the narrative to talk about women are capable of actually taking on the STEM subjects you know in there in the biggest if you look at it in the biggest way you know science technology engineering mathematics so it really starts from there yeah it's really starting to empower women to understand they can do the science subjects they can do agriculture and uh and to also create the enabling environment within institutions that women when they are employed there they can actually continue to to work there despite uh it being male dominated despite it sometimes not being such a friendly environment and that's the kind of work we've been doing you know in addition to training or to our training you know giving them skills and leadership we've also been working at the institutions uh level in ARD institutions to to start to change their policies to have them think through about their research and to make sure that they're actually recruiting a critical number of women and moving those women along to the leadership positions thank you thank you very much and and now uh we can go over to the man who is ultimately responsible for uh the the policies in in C4RICRAF that's uh Robert Nassie the managing director and the the future CEO of C4RICRAF acting CEO um to to make some uh some closing remarks for for this session Robert thank you Fergus for a while I was afraid that you were about to say the man which is ultimately responsible for the crisis that we are facing and that was not the case so thank you Fergus uh very rich session so I'm not even trying to summarize but I have three points that I would like to make the first one is really thanking all our presenter and all our staff all the committee for the science week our chief scientist in terms of something that looks like would be one of the the great science week and and organize in two locations with people all over the world so thank you very much uh thank you for your commitment uh this is very important in my source the second point is if you look at the presentation what what is very interesting in our mandate which is forest trees and agroforestry you can see that this is very central to all the crisis and it is not the case if you're working in building dams or in cities or in so we are really at the crucial point a crucial interaction intersection between all the crisis and and and that gives to forest trees and agroforestry if we manage properly if we conserve what has to be conserved if we restore what has to be restored and and manage what needs to be managed to have a crucial role in terms of fighting this crisis because we know that we cannot fight this crisis one by one we cannot solve the food security issue independently of the biodiversity issue or the inequality issue and you the only sector really and maybe with the ocean but that that all this converge is this whole issue of forest tree agroforestry or return large and that's your best solution so that's the positive point I mean a sort of our our agenda is definitely relevant and it's relevant to solve complex crisis uh in synergies the third point is maybe a bit less positive and and I think that we we are still stuck too much in the okay what needs to be done so we need to reduce social we need to stop deforestation we must protect biodiversity unfortunately something that we have already for as long as your career has been spanning in the world so and for me it's over 40 years now and and I don't see enough of the how if it is that we need to protect biodiversity how is it that we can do it and and not do it as a theoretical exercise do it practically so that people will effectively do it we can keep on in the street and repeating that people should eat less meat this is not going to happen unless there is an alternative unless there is a lot of thing happening and and and I think that our role now uh should be to work a bit less on the what and and a bit more on the how and and really providing more than diagnostic providing actionable solution so that we can contribute to our modest extent to mitigating the impact of the various crises that you are facing and and to make the world a better place thank you for this and all thank you Robert and that means you'll be really excited by the innovations session later on in the program which is all about the actionable solutions that are coming out from from C4 aircraft so at this point let me again thank everybody for for for taking part I think it's been a really stimulating session to to kick us off and I look forward to seeing at the end of Science Week the extent to which we will have been able to assess how we are beginning to address these these issues thank you and goodbye thank you


In this video, I look at some overall stats on the potential benefits and risks of eating a plant-based diet. It's a great introductory video if you're just getting started or want to share with friends and family. Check it out. Vegetarian diets and lifestyles have been shown to reduce the risk of many chronic diseases, which now accounts for the major global burden of disease. But the actual direct medical costs had never been quantified before. Here's what they found. Same amount spent on dental work, but compared to meat-eaters that similarly don't smoke or drink, or compared to the general population. Vegetarians had significantly lower inpatient, outpatient, and total medical care expenditures, suggesting more plant-based eating could be an effective strategy to save on health care costs. Here's how it broke down. Significantly lower costs for chronic lifestyle conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. This makes sense. Those eating plant-based diets centered around whole plant foods nailed the targets for cholesterol, triglycerides, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure, 93% of the time, 97% of the time, 88% of the time, and 95% of the time, respectively. Nearly a 50% drop in medical costs due to depression, too. That's interesting, as well as lower costs across the board. Cerebrovascular disease is another name for stroke. Isn't there that study that showed vegetarians had higher stroke risk? True, but that was before two subsequent studies found a lower risk of stroke with a vegetarian diet, and not just by a little. For ischemic stroke, the most common clotting type of stroke, vegetarians consistently had about 60% lower risk, and for bleeding strokes, about 65% lower risk than non-vegetarians. And this, despite higher homocysteine due to lower vitamin B12 intake, stages what may have led to the higher stroke risk in the previous study. Overall, if you do a systematic review of all the major studies, a comprehensive meta-analysis found a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and or mortality from ischemic heart disease and incidence from total cancer, with a vegan diet referring about twice the reduced risk cancer-wise. You can also look at it the other way. What if you decide to stop eating vegetarian or start eating meat? The Adventist Health Study looked at that and found that compared to those who stayed vegetarian, those who started eating meat suffered a 231% increased risk of gaining weight, 166% increase in the risk of developing diabetes, 152% increased risk of having a stroke, and 146% increased risk of being diagnosed with heart disease. And if you keep eating meat, you may cut your lifespan by three and a half years, so better not just cut out meat, but cut it out for good. But it's not all or nothing. Even just cutting down may help. A food pattern that emphasizes plant-derived foods was found to be associated with the reduced risk of all-cause mortality, meaning living a significantly longer life. Here are the cumulative hazards of death across categories of pro-vegetarian eating, meaning the closer you eat towards a completely plant-based diet, the lower your risk of death falls. The researchers conclude that there is now evidence that the simple advice to increase the consumption of plant-derived foods with reduction in the consumption of foods from animal sources confers a survival advantage. So there are multiple benefits, even eating in the direction of a more plant-based diet, but what about any risks? Despite concerns for protein deficiency, adequate amounts of protein, which means 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight about 50 grams a day, can be consumed on a solely plant-based diet, as seen among the other billion-plus people around the world who don't eat meat. Vitamin B12 deficiency, on the other hand, is a very real concern without a regular reliable source, and I have videos on how to do that either through supplements or fortified foods. One benefit you don't hear much about is the role our diets play in the emergence of pandemic infectious diseases, the subject of one of my recent books. It doesn't take much for a virus to jump from one animal to another, but there are no examples of plant viruses ever jumping to humans for the same reason. We don't ever come down with a really bad case of Dutch Elm disease. The largest and oldest association of nutrition professionals in the world is clear. Plant-based diets are appropriate for all stages of life cycle and may actually provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. For example, vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, certain types of cancers, and obesity. And to learn more, they encourage people to go check out a few good websites. As the emeritus dean of the School of Public Health at Loma Linda once said at a nutrition conference, attitudes towards vegetarian diets have progressed from ridicule and skepticism to condescending tolerance to gradual and sometimes grudging acceptance and finally to acclaim.


Welcome to Digital Asset News, the good top stories in cryptocurrency digital assets and break it down to bite-sized pieces. Today, hey, great stuff. First up, Major Milestone Polkadot Treasury funds its first set of projects. And I think this is one of the reasons why Polkadot is in the top five. Also, Jeff Booth, the former CEO of BuildDirect, a $500 million company writes a book titled The Price of Tomorrow, where he talks about that Bitcoin is not just a deflationary asset, it is a must for every single person to have. And also just as a reminder, Uniswap is now available on Coinbase, and if you didn't realize Coinbase has got a hefty stake in Uniswap, and it's why I believe this coin is going to go over $20. And we'll get to the market in a second, but just so you know, every week we try to do a donation. And the one that we like to donate to the most to is Dog is My Co-Pilot. If you don't know, they take dogs and cats from high kill shelters, and the pilot flies them over to areas where these dogs and cats are actually in demand, and the shelters have no dogs and cats. So it's a fantastic charity, and it's one that we try to donate to every single week. So we're going to do that right now. Click the donate button. And of course, without you watching the videos, we couldn't donate to this charity, so thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate it. That's only 50 bucks, that's a percentage of what we have. I'll cover the transaction fees, submit. And there we go, $50 to a worthwhile cause. So again, thanks for watching. Let's jump into today's video. First up, lots going on, lots going on is September 18th, Friday, everybody's favorite day. And I'm going to make this video kind of short. I just did a video, a podcast with Alex Masioli. It'll be up in the next hour or so. It'll be a premiere. So if you want to hear some like behind the scenes type stuff, Alex Masioli is the one of the heads of the Quant Institutional Investing. And this guy's got his pulse on everything. So if you've got time, stop by in an hour. I'll be there. Just chat, just do a little chat. But let's take a look at what's going on in today's market. We got Bitcoin 10.8. I was kind of hoping it would get above 11, like everybody else. But here we are. Pretty much steady. 376 for Ethereum, not too bad. Tether's Tether and XRP. Hey, 24 cents. What are you going to do? Polkadot. Rocketing up in that number five position at $4.7 billion market cap. So we'd like to see that. Bitcoin Cash, number six. Again, I think it'll be flip-flop and polkadot over the next couple of weeks. Binance Coin, damn, seven. Look at that. And Chainlink taking a massive dump. But it's still above $10 is amazing. I thought it'd be like $9 anytime. So just get ready because I think it's going to fall some more. Litecoin, Bitcoin SV, nothing too fantastic. Neal of 5.8%. I don't have it, but if you held it, congratulations. I just didn't. I sold it a long time ago. And then what else we got? What is this guy right here? Uniswap. Have you guys heard of this, Uniswap? Anyhow, of course you have because we've been talking about all the time. So Uniswap is up 12% for today, almost $8. So everybody who has used Uniswap before September 1st, inaccurately says September 15th in my video yesterday. Before it's September 1st, you got 400 Uniswap. If you haven't watched the video, watch that. It was yesterday. And when the first was announced, it was right around $3, 250 somewhere around there. Now we're at 780. And just so you know, I'm just going to leapfrog into the article where it talks about this, Uniswap is now available on Coinbase. Isn't that amazing? 24 hours on Coinbase. Unbelievable. Well, not really, but that's just how it is. But just so you know, Coinbase holds Unitokens and an equity interest in Universal Navigation Inc, the company developing the Uniswap platform. Coinbase intends to maintain its investment for the foreseeable future that maintains internal policies that address the timing of permissible disposition of its digital assets, including Unitokens. So if you don't think it's going to jump up massively, because Coinbase is going to be pushing this, I think you're out of your mind. So I will be holding on to my Unitoken for quite some time. But I will say this, I believe in how they handled this. It wasn't some crazy sushi swap thing where the chef just, you know, ran away with the spoon, the dish ran away with the spoon. I mean, the chef, he took 14 million out, which is for the developers, even though he's a developer, but he just took it and said, I'm taking it. And then all of a sudden he put it back, said, I'm sorry, and he asked up. So I mean, I commend him for that. I don't know why he did it. There's a lot of theories. I don't want to get into it. But for Uniswap, they said, Hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to 60% of the community. Everyone's going to go to advisors and developers and everything else. And it's going to really all go back to make everything great. And I can get behind that. I'm a supporter of that type of action. So Uniswap, I salute you. Good job. All right, let's jump into today's top stories. So first up, I am biased in case you haven't realized that. But I own Polkadot. I own Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, Cardano, EOS, Polkadot, Theta, and some other ones, XRP. But when I talk about these things, it's because I'm biased. I try not to be, but it just kind of slips. It just kind of slips out. So just so you know, but I thought it was fascinating that Polkadot Treasury is already funding its first set of projects and they're doing it in a specific decentralized way. And that's the most important thing. So what's going on here? So the fund management arm of the Polkadot team, known as the Polkadot Treasury, has just funded its first set of projects with rival projects like Ethereum still fund projects in a centralized manner through the Ethereum Foundation or Consensus with Lubin. Polkadot has adopted the Treasury as a way to ensure transparency. To get funded, a project must be proposed by a member of the Polkadot community, and it will be subjected to a vote by the entire community and only gets funded if approved. So the community has to bring it forth. They all have to vote on it and they all agree on it, which I think is awesome. That's how it should be. The community is made up of holders of Polkadot and they have token dot, Hey, that's me. And the funds managed by the Treasury Council, which is a group of people elected from within the community are generated from transaction fees, slashing and staking inefficiencies, and so are essentially raised from the community to fund projects that give traction to the network.  I think this was the whole idea behind decentralization, not to get caught up in a centralized place and have whales come in and venture capitalists buy up everything and they get rich. That's not how it's going to happen. It's all about the community.  I like what they're doing and I'll support it because that's just how I feel. Lastly, it states the first round of funding was approved for projects and three of these key areas, namely infrastructure deployment, continue operations project and software development proposals. So great. They're getting things off the ground. They're doing the things that need to be done to launch it in the stratosphere. And I can totally get behind that with the establishment of the Treasury that ensures transparent. That's a big word, transparent funding of projects through community votes. Polkadot may be on its way to earning a name as a leader in true decentralization in the ecosystem. So let me know what your thoughts are below, but I had just read a fantastic book. It was called The Infinite Machine and it was the whole backstory behind the founders, co-founders of Ethereum. And like I said, it goes all the way back to like when Vitalik Buterin was 17 years old and it goes through all of them. Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson and Joseph Lubin and all these guys and how it all came to be. And I got to tell you it's eye-opening, especially for Charles. Charles didn't have a good time in that whole group. I'll just say that. And Gavin Wood, who is the founder of Polkadot, really was the CTO, the chief technical officer that really got things running. Vitalik has a great mind and he was the one that envisioned this, but it was Wood who really built everything, not everything, but a large part of it and made it run. So when I see something like this, this guy Wood, he's a workhorse and he can get things done. He's already done it before. Now, if they can build everything else around him, like marketing, analysts, the whole infrastructure that they're going to need to actually blow up, fantastic. They're going to go way far and it's why I invested in the Polkadot. Let me just think of the comments section. Let's move on. Last up, I thought this was an interesting little piece. We had talked yesterday about Anthony Pompliano and he had Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy and that gentleman just talked about why he and his whole billion dollar company bought half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin and really just came down to this. He said, look, money is on fire right now.  And he also talked about how the asset inflation is going to 25 to 30% asset inflation. So if you don't have assets or you don't have a deflationary hedge or a hedge against the market, you're going to be in a world to hurt. And that's why they put so much money into it. And that's why I believe that a lot of companies over the next three, six and 12 months are going to follow their suit because they're like, wow, Paul Tudor Jones did it. Michael Saylor did it. You know, Fidelity Digital Assets did it. TD Ameritrade did it. We need to do the same thing. And that's how I see things. But this is another reiteration of the same theme. This is Jeff Booth. And he wrote a little book called Price is Tomorrow. And here's what he says. The co-founder of BuildDirect. If you don't know what BuildDirect is, it's okay. I didn't know what it was either. Jeff Booth is the founder of BuildDirect, which grew to 500 million valuation. It's an online platform for getting home improvement supplies that you can buy just online, have it shipped to you. It's kind of like the Home Depot, but online. And 500 million valuation, not too bad. Anyhow, he published a financial book over this year entitled The Price of Tomorrow, Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future, which I was like, deflation. I don't know if that really works out. But yeah, sure. He notes that even before the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the debt, this is important, stood at $250 trillion in a global economy valued at 80 trillion. So let me do some quick math here. You are in debt, 250 trillion, and you have 80 trillion. So you're just a little bit short. I'm just going to guess. I'm not good with math, but that seems pretty ridiculous. And the most concerning part, however, is that 185 trillion of the total of 250 was added just over the last 20 years alone. So these central banks policies, we need something that is not a quantitative easing, is a quantitative hardening. And we need something that is set in stone. And those are Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, digital assets, and it's why companies are going to FOMO in like crazy over the next 12 months. And I truly believe that. Lastly, it states why owning Bitcoin is a must. Going further, booth posits that countries around the world now have only two choices. One is default through deflationary depression, which would include the collapse of the banking system, which really wouldn't be so bad. The banks do need to go away. They are worthless. Hold on, let me say this again. The banks are worthless. There's a lot of great things, right? I mean, if you're in the wild wild west in the 1800s and you had to put money underneath your pillowcase, chances are you need a little bit safer place than that. So banks have done their job.  And that's what we got. The 2008 financial crisis was all started by central banks. And all these different things that they're doing, I mean, the quantitative easing that they have right now, the Fraction Reserve lending where you give 100 bucks, they lend 100 bucks, and then it just goes on the balance sheet where there's no money that's even created. It's just not a thin air. It can't work like that. And that's the problem with central banks. So, I mean, the bank system does collapse. Hey, we've got one in the wings and it's called DeFi, Cryptocurrency asset. So why not? The second option would be default through hyperinflation. Nobody wants to be willing bundles of cash to go by bread like in Germany. So forget that. In my humble opinion, Bitcoin is a must not just for your wealth, but as a lifeboat. And there was, I was talking to CryptoLove on one of the shows and he said that, I have this fantasy that Bitcoin will be the world reserve currency. And I was like, that's crazy. That'll never happen. But now that I read this article and I'm like, you know what? If everybody could just get a Satoshi, maybe once a Satoshi could be worth $10 or whatever it is, or whatever will be in the future. And it would actually make a lot of sense. So with what's going on right now, I'm worried. I'm worried. And the only thing that gives me comfort is that I have what Palihapitaya, Shamath Palihapitaya says, which is I have Schmuck insurance, which is I am betting against the traditional markets and the banks. And I hold a lot of Bitcoin cryptocurrency assets. Let me know what you think of the comment section. But I want to talk to you real quick about a comment that I got, which talked about Coinbase. I've been given a lot of mal content towards Coinbase. And I really need to rethink my position. And I'm going to talk to you about that right now. So let's jump in the office. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the office. It is Friday, the best days, right? The best days if you have a job. I just work from home. So it's like every day is kind of like a Friday or Monday. It just depends. But I want to do this. It was a cue of the day. It was really a statement of the day. It was from in the comment section about a video that we had done yesterday, which was Coinbase listing Uniswap. And I got to tell you, I did not see that coming. And here we are. Although if you really think about it, I mean, it makes a lot of sense because they're doing a lot of things with DeFi, just like Binance and just like cookthe.com. So, you know, Coinbase is not the one to be left in the dust. So like, you know what, you do that, we'll do that. No problem. So the comment I had, and this really comes about from my own experiences as far as Uniswap. This is Ed Cross. And I have a problem with Coinbase. And I have a problem with Coinbase because they go down at the most inopportune times, even though it's a billion dollar company. It seems like they can't figure out these computer glitches. Sure, whatever. It's a weird thing because every time I go to Amazon, it's always up and it's always taking my money. What are you going to do? But Ed makes a very good point. He says, you know what, Coinbase is a very user-friendly on-ramp, but it's also very easy to buy and sell and learn about crypto. And it's a big thing. Learning about crypto, only Binance does that other part where they have like a Binance learn Coinbase, how they Coinbase learn. Where you can learn about all the different things they list. And it's very well done. It's not an extravagant production. It's usually like three or four videos, two minutes in length of every single thing they have out there. So if people can learn about it and understand it, it's not just like throwing money at nothing. So that's a good point. And it's also very easy. If you are new to the space, which I expect a ton of new people to come in, Coinbase is my recommendation. If you want to, you know, just for ease, just for ease of use. And there's one more part which I get to in a second. But he says, compared to other, everything else I've tried in the US, I would not have gotten the crypto if it was not for Coinbase. And then a second part is he says, I love how everyone complains about Coinbase fees. But they say, oh, Uniswap is the future. Uniswap is the greatest of all time. But Uniswap costs way more than Coinbase to use lol. And I said, Hey, that's a great point. I got to bring that up. So yesterday, we saw the ugliness in action.  I did a video about it. I'll link at the very end. But it was a very easy process and you got 400 just for using Uniswap. I said September 15th, but it's actually September first or before, or before September 1st. So there was a lot of action going on. And the problem with a lot of action is that you have to use a lot of gas, ethereum gas to get your Uniswap tokens. On top of that, because there's so much congestion, as the day progressed, I heard about a lot of people, it was like, like me to get my 400 cost about $15 in gas. No big deal. Which I must remind you that in 2017, when it went up above a dollar, people lost their minds at that point. Now here we are 15 bucks, just keep that in context. And then I was looking through the comments, I would see people say it was 20 and 22 and 24 and off you go. So I was just curious. And I went to take some of my Unit tokens and I went to Uniswap and I went to exchange them for Celsius tokens. Love Celsius, fantastic project. And it was like 30 bucks. It was like $30 at that point.  There's no way I'm going to pay $30 to get $20 worth of Celsius or whatever I had. It was just crazy. So there is a good point to that Coinbase. Now, and I have just seen that Coinbase Pro was going to start having small fees to take cryptocurrency off of that exchange. But before, there was no fees to take any kind of cryptocurrency off the exchange. Same thing with Celsius. They have no fees to take cryptocurrency off their exchange. Will that be different in the future because of what's going on with Ethereum potentially? And that is a problem. Also, I have a one-two punch. And there is a spreadsheet that's in the description of every one of my videos. And it goes over all the different types of exchanges and wallets and decentralized platforms that I have personally used and what I recommend. And it breaks it down by fees and what to expect and everything else. You can look for the link. It's in the description. It looks just like this. And then I'll take you over there. And you can use at the very top there are affiliate links. You don't have to use them. But if you use them, you get $10 and $25 just for opening up account.  Because if not, you could be like me where you get locked out because there's so much action going on Coinbase being one of them. So when we talk about that and all the fees and everything else, my one-two punch is Celsius and Voyager. Celsius I love. I do not recommend to buy anything there because there's a fee of three and a half percent because they weren't set up in the beginning for people to buy everything. It was all about putting your cryptocurrency in there and getting fat interest on your cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is like 6.25. Sometimes it goes a 7. Sometimes it goes a 5. Just depends. USDC is like 11 or 12 percent. And everything in between. So that's what Celsius is all about. Also, Alex Machinsky, pretty smart guy, done a couple of billion dollar companies. So he's in it for the money. I think he's just in it to help the space. But on the flip side is Voyager. And Voyager is the one that I recommend because one is super easy to use. And it's anybody can use it, right? But there's a problem with Voyager that I saw that I was trying to transfer $100 with the USDC off of Voyager into another wallet. And it cost me eight bucks. So I was like, that is eight percent. However, you have to understand with Voyager, it's a flat rate. So if you move $100 or $100 million if you got that, congratulations. But you know what I mean? It doesn't matter how much you use. It's still a flat rate of eight bucks. So $100 is not worth it. $1,000, $10,000. Okay. Now we're talking. But just so you know, it's just all a flat rate. And that's one of the problems. So the ideal exchange for me is to be able to take my fiat money and purchase cryptocurrency because at some point I have to, and then be able to exchange that cryptocurrency for anything that I want to at any point. And the fees are relatively low. And I'm able to take off 100% of all the different cryptocurrencies that I bought on that exchange into my Nano Ledger if I so desire. And or they do loans or they do a fantastic interest rate. So that's all I'm asking for, just the basics. But the last thing I'll say is this, I have poo pooed all over Coinbase for quite a long time. However, after yesterday, I'm going to have to give them more of a look. And I know people will say, ah, well, they're shady, and they do all this and this and this. Well, guess what? The interest or the fees are a little bit higher. That's true. But to take things off is not that much. And they're super easy to use, especially for people here like Ed who talks about it. And right now, if you want to buy any other type of thing, as far as like on Uniswap, well, you're going to be paying a lot. Now, having said that, I will say that Coinbase has a limited amount of tokens and the tokens that they put on there are usually the ones they are invested in. If you don't think they're not invested in Uniswap, watch my video from yesterday. So, but it's business. It's a free market. And that's just how it is. So I'm not going to begrudge anybody on the businessman. I've got a couple of businesses. And really, it's as long as you are as ethical as you possibly can be, and you're not hurting anybody, then go ahead and do it. I'll leave that up for you in the comments section. All right. So that's it. So let's jump back. All right. That's it. So I hope that made a little bit more clear in my position at Coinbase, but I would like to give you some random shout outs just to the members who have joined up at Digital Asset News. So Juan Rizzo, Rizzo, Rizzo, Rizzo, just Rizzo. We've got Mark, Melissa Davis, Sam Keith, Sargent Crypto. Also, I was on a YouTube channel. You should check that out. We've got Kay Numan. I am not I. M.A. Donald Davidson, who kind of looks like Bill Clinton. And that's it for today. So thanks so much for checking out the video. I really appreciate it. If you like this type of videos, it'll be two months going to pop up on your left and right. So check this out if you got time. And also don't forget, I will be on Alex Maschioli's show in about an hour. So I will send it out to all the subscribers in the community tab. So hopefully YouTube sends it to you. You never know. They like to not do that. And that's it. So see you on the next one, or see you at Alex's show. Bye from here.