There comes a point in the spiritual journey where you can start to become aware of things that you're avoiding and that's quite a helpful thing to just start to become just aware of what it is. In this case the fear of non-existence. For many people it's something a little more specific than that. So you often times say what you resist you persist and so there's this sense of an opportunity to move through something that I think is very, very helpful and it's happened to me. I mean when I was extremely shy and I knew that I wanted to go past that experience of being so shy and being such a fixed experience that there were certain classes that I took in university like counseling classes and things where I felt like okay I'm going right at that feeling of shyness. Years ago there was this sense of going to the hospital for a tonsillectomy or something and taking the blood from the fingers and then looking at the blood and getting very nauseous and you're like I've got to get the smelling cells quicker. I'm going to pass out and noticing just I've got an association with what seems to be my blood. There's some kind of association in there which I don't know and I don't understand. I just feel like I'm going to pass out when I see it. And then having an opportunity a few years later to be a part of the vegetarian study where they would literally take the blood on a regular basis and thinking hmm let's know accident that would arise to give me a chance to more fully face and in some sense confront that feeling of wherever there's an association. Your brother's just saying it's exciting I'm going to kind of expose myself to this again and I'm going to gain something from this whether I seem to have a loosening from it and a passing through it or whether I start to have a realization like well this is I'm not ready to go there right now and start to see that either way there's a sense of a benefit spiritually instead of just staying kind of keeping away from it and kind of running from it. I think people have that feeling too when they meet somebody a relationship starts and they go oh here we go I'm going to have to face this and this and this and that's the time to really stand in and allow those emotions to come up and actually face them and work through them instead of just trying to bolt and run away and hide and guard against them. So then what's the distinction then because we don't let you ever say like don't go looking for the fear necessarily and it's not mastery through fear we've been talking about that a bit in our small group it's really like a mastery through following a joy. So where does the line come there? Well it's with the fear however the fear comes up that's where the block is to block to consistently experiencing the joy and the love so I've always felt that it is a path of negation you start to get in touch with the blocks and then allow them to be removed or allow them to be negated which is a way of like clearing the lens so more light can shine through and you can experience the love more consistently so it's not like you go looking for it but it's like when it presents itself you are very very sure that you're not going to disguise it or try to push it down or protect against it or hide it. It's more of like a welcoming, it sounds almost strange to welcome darkness when it arises but actually when you start to see the value of it it's more like okay here it comes and it's like more you can give it a welcome like I would like to move through this and feel this and as it's moving through and you seem to be in it of course there's an impetus to let it go and that's why instead of going searching for it it's more like in community and in relationships and also in meditation practice those things will keep coming and coming not that you're digging for them they just keep coming and coming and in that sense to welcome them I know the early years when I was out traveling I felt a lot of intense emotions and ego was over there chipping away going how are you going to talk to groups and everything when you're so emotionally unstable you could feel like you could turn on a dime some of these sharp emotions come and this and this and and it was a walk of trust and it felt like I guess when you start to take the lid off of the hiding and protecting of those emotions it gets very intense it was like I could kind of look for a visual in my mind but it was like you're in Maui and you're surfing and you've just caught the big wave and you're up on your surfboard on the big wave and this powerful wave is right underneath you and you're kind of a balancing going on like you're on the surfboard psychically balancing and it's a feeling like if you don't stay attentive if you don't really stay attentive here you could flip forward and just get crushed by the wave or you could just go fling and just go flipping right off the back you know like it's rolling right under you and you're right on the edge it's something that's very powerful beneath that was the experience I had when I started to go through this stuff and I was like wow there's nothing that's prepared me for this you know and then being out on the road meeting new people new places to stay there wasn't anything familiar that I could like grab onto like a hole to dive into but like I was totally raw totally exposed and things were coming at me so fast that I can now see that there was a great benefit there the spirit's like trust I've got you trust, trust, trust but I had to trust you know with like it seems like every turn there were meeting new people new opportunities invitations so much coming that it's like okay okay show me show me the wave you know and it really does develop that sense of tuning in listening and following much much sharper then to be kind of playing it safe which I see a lot of denial and repression was what I call playing it safe it wasn't safe at all you're sitting on a volcano that could erupt at any moment and just stuffing down all that energy like oh it's not there keep it together keep your life small and little and regulated you know because that's gonna do it so it was quite it required a lot of attentiveness to hang in there with the spirit I think too you know everyone's talking about how to live on planet earth and when we talk about spiritual communities consensus is a way that it comes to mind you know where you just have an agreement you keep coming to agreements and it just for most people it just seems impractical but then the deeper you get tuned in and you share the same purpose at some point this whole consensus model has to flip from being completely impractical to always looking more and more like the only way to go and not so much a consensus where it's all these separate people have to all come to an agreement but it's more that you find yourself more and more in alignment and it's more just understood like oh we're gonna do this great that is a feeling of like you're flowing with it you're flowing with what's for your greatest good not you know trying to figure out who's gonna make the decisions who are the leaders who are the followers you know who is governing us now who has the power all these kind of things that seem extremely important to the ego start to fade into more of a telepathic experience where it's like oh everything is being taken care of and I noticed that here in Mallorca last year we had I don't know 20 some 30 people and two vellas and with transportation food outings all kinds of things it just felt like as we moved on in the experience it just became more and more telepathic like these concerns and these fears just started to drop and fade like oh we this is fun we're having a ball here this isn't a problem at all this is a fun way to live and people were getting into the vibe and the flow synchronicities happening oh how am I gonna get over there will it be alright oh there's another there's still another space in that car right there okay I'm coming hold on don't go you know it just was like more a reflection of mind like you have a little whim for something and then it's just there not that you've got to go through all these steps and planning and working and figuring out and you know in a kind of an analytical way that's just very tiring to try to figure this world out and act accordingly it's like it's actually insane you think of it and it's interesting me talking about it because when I was back in high school they started telling me I had a very very bright analytical mind you know they didn't say it's worthless but they they said it was kind of held up as this great thing and they were steering me towards engineering and you know ways that I could tap into whatever mathematics and things and then then when I got into yeah University tried out engineering and urban planning some of these things it just it just didn't have a sense of resonance or joy it didn't matter how good the analytical mind was it just didn't resonate didn't feel like that was the way that was not the calling of my heart or the calling of my life so progressively I just seemed to get more and more intuitive and less and less analytical until it was like an eclipse like just turn turn turn and then it was like okay oh there goes the analytical now turning toward the intuitive and then more and more you just you actually realize it you can be 100% intuitive actually you don't need to rely on past learning for anything but it just takes practice


So I'm going to talk about efficient, concentrate on multi-party computation protocol that combines the BMR protocol and speech protocol. And I'm a Vishay and I, and this is joint work with Yehuda Lindel, Benny Pinkas, and Nigel Smart. So in multi-party computation protocol problem, we have a set of parties with private inputs. And the parties want to compute some joint function on their inputs while preserving some security properties like privacy and correctness. So security must be guaranteed even in the presence of an adversary that corrupts some of the parties. So in this work, we are focusing on malicious and static adversary, and we're working on the settings of dishonest majority. So in efficient, secure computation, we have two main approaches, two main approaches. One of them is the GMW approach and the second is, yeah. So in the GMW approach, basically the players have an interaction for every gate in the circuit. So usually the players push the heaviest part of the computation to the off-link phase, and which leads to a very fast and thin online phase. This also leads to a very low bandwidth utilization of the network. Protocol following this approach also have disadvantage in that the number of round communication rounds depends on how complex is the function that they want to compute. So the more the complex is the function, it means that they need more communication rounds to compute this function. In the YAH approach, the parties first computing the garbled circuit, which means that they need to compute heavy operation, heavy cryptographic primitives in order to compute the garbled circuit, and the computation of these cryptographic primitives is also existing in the on-link phase, which means they have heavy operations in the on-link phase. And since the garbled circuit has to be delivered somehow to all the players, they also utilize a significant bandwidth of the network. A big advantage of protocols that follow the YAH approach is that they use a small constant number of rounds of communication, which means that no matter how complex is the function that they want to compute, they will only make only constant number of communication rounds. So in the two-party case, we have a lot of protocols for both approaches. In the GMW, we have the tiny OT and speeds from 2012. And for the YAH approach, we have a lot of protocols under the fast cut and choose class of protocols. And basically, if we are working over a slow network like the internet, we clearly choose to work with protocols that follow the YAH approach. In the multi-party case, the situation is different. So in the GMW approach, we have the extension of the tiny OT and the speeds protocols. Those protocols make a large amount of rounds to compute the circuit. And we will use those protocols only when we are working on settings of fast network like a local area network. And what protocols do we have that follow the YAH approach in multi-party case? Basically, we have no such protocol. And in fact, we have the BMR protocol that is a multi-party version of the YAH protocol. This protocol is very efficient for the semi-honest case, but is extremely inefficient when working in the malicious case. Because the protocol for the malicious case require generic use of zero knowledge. And this is very inefficient. So let me compare the state-of-the-art protocol, tiny OT and speeds with BMR protocol for the multi-party case. So BMR has a constant round, has a constant round number of communication rounds while the other node. And what is it? Sorry. All the protocols has working in the dishonest majority. And only tiny OT and speeds have a concrete efficiency and fast online phase. So the problem is that we don't know of any protocol for the multi-party case that achieves both concrete efficiency. It is secure for the dishonest majority. It has a constant number of communication rounds and as a fast online phase. And while we have a lot of protocols for the two-party case, in the multi-party case is way behind and we are missing this class of protocols. So our goal in this work is to construct such protocol that achieve those properties. So in order to describe our protocol, it is worth to know the basics of the BMR protocol. So in this example, we have a gate G which is part of the circuit that the player want to compute. And it has two input wires, A and B, and an output wire C. So for this example, we have three parties, P1, P2 and P3. And the first step is to compute two random keys for every wire in the circuit. Those two random keys represent, one of them represent the signal zero and the other represent the signal one. The second thing that they do is to compute a PRG on their keys. So the compute the PRG on their keys and they also generate one bit for every wire in the circuit. So here we have three bits, lambda A, lambda B and lambda C for wire A, B and C. And the purpose of those bits is to hide the interpretation of the keys. So if some party hold one key for some wire, it's not necessarily knows what is the interpretation of the key, what signal is passing through that key. So all these masking bits remain secret during the execution of the protocol. So after they get all this data, they input it into another multi-party computation protocol. So in particular, in BMI paper, they used the GMW protocol. And the GMW produced the garbled gate, the garbled table for this gate. The garbled table is for entries A, B, C and D. So for example, if we look at the entry A, this is the result of an X or of three super keys. You can see the super key K A zero, K B zero and either K C zero or K C one. And each super key is a concatenation of the three keys for every wire of the circuit. And which one of the keys for wire C depends on the masking bits. Now, although GMW is not a constant round protocol, all this computation is done in a fixed and constant round of constant communication rounds because the amount of computation here is already constant. So this computation of one gate of a single gate requires a constant number of communication rounds. Now, because the computation of all the garbled gates are independent of each other, then the computation of all the circuit is done also in a constant number of communication rounds. So after they achieved the garbled gates for all the gates in the circuit, the parties move to the only phase in which they only need to exchange keys for the circuit input wires, for the circuit input wires. And once the parties have one key, one super key, which is a concatenation, once they have one super key for each circuit input wires, they can evaluate the circuit using the garbled gate that they computed in the off-lane phase. And this way, they obtain the output of the circuit. So the first thing we do in order to achieve an efficient protocol is to switch the invocation of GMW, since GMW is not an efficient protocol, so we switch it with one of the state-of-the-art protocol that we know, so we switch it with speed. So the parties input the keys, the PRG values and the masking bits into an invocation of speeds, and speeds produce this table for entries for every gate. Now, this is not enough because in the BMR construction for malicious case, the parties, the computation of this garbled gate includes, inside its circuit representation, it includes a representation of a circuit that computes the PRG. And this makes the circuit representation very large and makes the whole protocol very inefficient. So basically, we want to reduce the size of the circuit that garbled the gate. So a very important thing that we observed is that the circuit representation of the PRG inside the garbling circuit is unnecessary, we don't need it there. This way, the parties only compute the PRG locally on their own and just input the result to the speeds invocation for every gate. Sorry. And if a player cheated in one of the PGA, the PRG that it input to the speeds invocation, then the parties will detect it in the only phase because they will encounter a garbled circuit, a garbled gate, they will encounter an invalid garbled gate and then they will abort. And we already know that early abortion is unavoidable in the dishonest majority settings. So this way, we solve the problem of the size of the circuit that compute the garbled gate. The second problem is a potential of inconsistency of the masking bits. So for example, if we have a one gate, for example, with input wire C, this is the red wire, and so it means that the players provide their masking bit for wire C, for the computation of this garbled gate. Now, assume we have another gate, the first one was G tag and this is G. So the output wire of gate G is the same wire, is the same wire C that is input to gate G tag. Now, the parties also need to provide the masking bit for this invocation of speeds. So it means that the cheater has the potential of providing two different values for the masking bit for each invocation of speeds for every gate. So we want to remove this potential. So what we actually do is invoking one, we do only one invocation of speeds computation for the entire circuit. We garbled all the gates together. That means that the parties don't, this removes the potential of inconsistency because the parties input only one time the masking bit for every wire in the circuit. And because we can do all the gates together, in parallel, this remains the depth of the circuit of speeds, shallow. And in particular, we have 13 multiplication operation for AND gate and seven multiplication operation for XOR gate. And we further optimize this solution by using some special feature that speeds provide us. This special feature is that we can ask speeds to generate a lot of random bits and store them in its memory. So what we do is asking speeds to generate a lot of masking bits for us and store them in its memory. And when we want to compute the garbled gates, we ask speeds to use the random bits that it generated before. So this removes completely the potential of inconsistency because the parties now don't even need to input those masking bits. Another important optimization is regard to the representation of the keys in our protocol. So in PMR, they use the keys as a bit strings. So in our protocol, we use keys as finite field elements. And this is first used in the multi-party fair play implementation of Benayim and Hisan and Pinkas in 2008. And but they assume a semi-honest and honest majority settings, which is not the case in our protocol. So as I remember, the parties in the PMR circuit, garbled circuit construction needed to use a concatenation of the keys that they obtained, the random keys. So if one key is an element from a field of size two to the k, then a concatenation of n keys would result an element of a field of size two to the n k. So this may result a huge field size. For example, if we use a security parameter of 128 and we have eight participants in our protocol, this would result a field of size two to 1024, which is really huge. So in our protocol, we represent a concatenation of n keys as a vector of n elements from a field of size two to the k. That means that the field size is independent of the number of participants that participate in the protocol. This is a very good improvement. And also this allows us to make operation over the super keys much more efficient than they were before. So this is a protocol overview of the new protocol. We have two phases as before offline and online. And our offline phase contains two stages. In the first stage, the parties don't necessarily know the function that they are willing to compute. And they only run the offline phase of the speech protocol. And in the second stage of the offline, the parties do know the function, but not necessarily knows the inputs to the functionality. And they compute the online phase of speech in order to generate the garbled circuit of our function. And in the online, as before, the parties only have to exchange the keys for the circuit input wires. And then they can evaluate the circuit on their own without further interaction. And these are some estimated running time. When we use key size of 128 bits and the machine were over a local area network and the parties computed the AES encryption such that some of the parties hold part of the key and some of them hold part of the data that the AES is going to encrypt. So if we look on the four-party entry, we can see that the offline phase takes around 15 minutes, but the online phase is really, really fast. There is no such protocol today that achieved this time of 15 milliseconds for the online phase. So to conclude, we managed to construct a protocol with an offline phase that comparable to the most efficient protocol that we know today, like speech, and it achieved a very fast online. In particular, it has a constant number of communication rounds and allows the parties to locally evaluate the circuit without any further interaction. To conclude, this is the first concretely efficient constant round protocol for the multi-party case and the dishonest majority settings. And this is the first efficient protocol that follows the yaw approach that I've talked about before. And that's all. Thank you.


to this very, very important session, accelerating a nature positive economy for people and planet. This comes towards the end of a wonderful week at the World Economic Forum. I commend the web for really terrific events over the last few days. And they've saved the best almost to last, which is about nature. And that's what we are going to talk about today. It's a bad news, good news story. Most of you know very well that the planet is in trouble. As humans, we've destroyed half of the world's plants. We've lost 60% of the world's wildlife. Critical ecosystems are breaking. In 2014, so concerned about this, the nations of the world committed to stop deforestation by 2020. Instead, deforestation increased by 40%. Climate change has a two-way relationship with nature. Climate change itself is accelerating the loss of nature, but so too the loss of nature is accelerating climate change. How can we get out of this vicious cycle into a more virtuous cycle? But there's also good news, and that's what we're going to talk about today. How do we make this change that we need to make? There's a huge intellectual revolution that's taken place. I just look at the World Economic Forum itself, a remarkable integration of the role of food and agriculture and water and land and forests and seas in a way that's never happened before. And look at COP26 in Glasgow. Never before have we seen the integration of climate change and nature loss in a more wonderful way and all kinds of commitments. Just as the world's nations committed to end deforestation back in 2014 and failed, so too 140 countries have committed at Glasgow to do it much more seriously by 2030. And this time, it seems to have more teeth in it and certainly has more resources. $19 billion were put into the program for that. Philanthropy is also stepping up. I'm Andrew Steer, by the way, president and CEO of the Basos Earth Fund. Our fund alone committed in Glasgow, $3 billion for nature, $1 billion to conserve what we still have, $1 billion to restore what we've lost, and $1 billion to help transform food systems to get onto more sustainable footing. And other foundations also joined in. A total of $5 billion was committed to conserve nature. So that's all good news. We have a panel today that's going to really unpack some of these issues as some really remarkable leaders. And we're gonna try and have a sort of a realistic discussion, recognizing just what a dreadful state actually we're in, but how do we shift that so that we can build upon the hope? And let me say the World Economic Forum itself through a whole range of its own activities is contributing to this intellectual and practical revolution, the nature action agenda, the new nature economy report series, the Tropical Forest Alliance, a whole set of issues on food as well. So we've got some really great analysis and data. We just saw some of that in the film. So let me introduce you to our panelists. First Matilda Ernkranz, who is the Minister of International Development Corporation of Sweden, and Akim Steiner, who is the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, Bill Winters, who's the group Chief Executive Officer of Standard Chartered Bank, Geraldine Machet, who's Co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of the great firm DSM, and Anish Shah, who is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Mahindra Group, one of India's sort of iconic companies. So we can't do better than this. So let's start, and I want to turn to you and Matilda Ernkranz first. This is the 50th anniversary of the famous Stockholm Conference, which created the United Nations Environment Programme and really set us in a new direction. As you look towards celebrating that in June in Stockholm, what are your hopes for this year? And tell us about your own plans. Thank you very much, Andrew, and thank you for being a part of this panel, truly important. And for me, being the Minister of International Development Corporation, it feels very good to take part in this panel and also because my background is very much of the background of an environmentalist. I actually was, for many, many years, I was the chairperson of the committee in the parliament, the Committee on Environment and Agriculture. So I've been working very many years with these kind of questions. And now I've got the opportunity to be in the government as Minister for International Development Corporation and working with this. I've been talking a lot about the first UN Conference on Environment that was held in Stockholm in 1972. So I'm very happy to be a part of Stockholm plus 50. And of course we need a game changer. We know that we need transformation towards net zero, nature-positive and zero pollution. And we need a transformation that leaves no one behind and creates a healthy planet for the prosperity of all. And as you said, in June this year, we will host the Stockholm plus 50 UN Conference on Human Environment to mobilize energy for a strengthened, accelerated action and showcase of solutions for a sustainable future. Because I truly believe that we, knowing what challenges we have ahead of us, we need to also focus on what kind of solutions do we think is necessary and needed. And actually some of them are up and running and we can show that they are doing an immense difference. And I hope that Stockholm plus 50 will provide sort of a timely opportunity for progressive governments, business actors, civil society, youth and other stakeholders to advance the sustainability agenda, bridging the gaps between climate, biodiversity, economy and the recovery from the pandemic. And of course we can't do this without bringing in the youth. And I am very pleased that we have established a youth led Stockholm plus 50 youth task force, which aim to promote structures for meaningful youth participation by strengthening the voice and representation of young people. So that's our hopes. We hope that Stockholm plus 50 will need transformative moment and contributing to new understandings on how our economies, societies and stable climate and resilient biosphere, how they are inseparably interconnected and generating urgent actions towards sustainability and ensuring the well-being of current and future generations. And I stop that so we can have a more interactive conversation in this panel. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Minister. Just one follow-up question. So obviously Sweden is one of the most generous countries your Minister of Development Corporation. As you look at your own portfolio in nature, what will be your priorities moving forward? What other you probably don't want to tell us what big initiatives you're going to announce this year, but give us a hint. No, but I think and I think and I can say so much that you know that Sweden, international Sweden is one of the largest contributors when it comes to international green financing. And we have raising ambitions when it comes to green financing, but also when it comes to biodiversity in development corporation. And we are in this together and we must seize every opportunity to sort of make peace with nature, but with strong focus on implementation and implementation. And as I said, we are offering Stockholm Plus 50 as a stepping stone for urgent actions for this. And as I said, we have as a priority from the Swedish government, we have raised our ambitions when it comes to green financing. And I hope that we can contribute and in this area at Stockholm Plus 50 showing also how we can get financial support from countries, but also from business sectors and so on. And how we can meet the needs and priorities from when it comes from countries developing countries, of course, out of what they need us to support them. Because we're in this together and we have to do this transformation together in a fair way. That's great. Thank you so much, Minister. Let's turn to Akim Steiner. When the history books are written, Akim will be for this point in history, one of the most important players in really moving the sustainable development forward at the international level, a two-term head of the United Nations Environment Programme and now leading the United Nations Development Programme. Akim, this is a pretty important year. You sit at the center of it. We've got a biodiversity convention meeting to make 10-year commitments. We've got the biggest Paria UN Ocean meeting in Portugal. And then obviously we head towards the COP 27 and obviously we have Stockholm Plus 20, with Stockholm Plus 50. What are your aspirations for this year? What gives you hope and what are you doing? Andrew, thank you first of all for the kind introduction. It's a great pleasure to join the WEF and such a distinguished group of panelists. And in the good tradition of WEF, let me be very brief and then perhaps dive a bit deeper. So as you just laid out, it is a very special year, but I think my first priority would be how do we leverage the post-pandemic recovery precisely to mobilize the kind of switches in policy investments and actions that allow us to accelerate that nature-positive economy? Because I think it is critical for us to realize that the world is in a very distressed moment, in a very economically socially disrupted moment. And I think there is an extraordinary opportunity to build forward better and therefore how we combine these aspects of the ministers just forward that you alluded to, to an overall recovery narrative, but also investment plan I think is critical. That immediately links to financing. I think we need to tackle the issue of financing in order to overcome the experimental, the incremental and actually get to scale. And two things here I think will matter in particular. One can be deal with the distortions in our economies, whether it is the fossil fuel subsidies of over $420 billion that still essentially drag us in the wrong direction. And the same is often true for land use, for the use of natural resources. And secondly, how do we make investments more attractive, more effective and scalable? So in UDP, SDG Impact, which is an attempt to develop the norms and standards that would allow governments and businesses to go to the financial markets and actually raise capital through bonds, is one example of how we can actually multiply the finance that is available globally, but also nationally, the task force and nature related financial disclosures that has been set up to also help financial markets and investors to be able to essentially step into this arena that is still in many financial sector daily realities, uncomfortable, unknown or at least very risk associated. And thirdly, digital technology. Clearly much of what will happen in the next few years when it comes to staling has a great deal to do with the Department of Technology. So these are three, let's say, domains with which we can actually not only tackle a nature-specific issue, but actually deal with what is really the context of our economic and policy decisions as consumers, as investors, as producers. Thank you, Akim, very much indeed. Can I just follow up on one of the last things you said about digital and big data? How much of an opportunity does that provide us to hold accountable and find solutions, deliver results in a way that would not have been possible 10 years ago? And I know you at UNDP are doing a lot on this. Someone was just telling me yesterday about your plans to show the impact of climate change at a very, very granular level all around the world. I mean, that's going to be an amazing, amazing gift actually. You know, I have in the last few years really begun to believe that digital is perhaps the single biggest transformative variable in the way that development choices pathways can actually be rethought in the coming years. And this is not to simply dream into a technology realm. It has a lot to do first of all with the ability to better understand what is happening. You have led a WRI Global Forest Watch. And it's a great example of how we can use satellite data literally in real time almost in order to look at what's happening to our forests. It's not only an issue of transparency of illegal deforestation, it's also deal with the risks of fire. I think there are so many examples today that we are able to first of all monitor what's happening on our planet in real time and therefore act with an understanding rather than perhaps a vague notion of risks. Secondly, I think it is tremendously empowering. Citizens are able to now exercise in a sense their role as consumers, as investors, as essentially people who also are voters and elect governments to really be able to see the consequence of their choices and decisions. And therefore much greater public accountability but also empowerment, including in the consumer world that I think is so crucial. And thirdly, I think it empowers communities. I mean, we have an Equator Prize winner last year from Peru, an indigenous community that is now using satellite imagery, mobile phones to monitor forestry management in their domain and have almost managed to reduce it to virtually zero on their land. So also combining the world of indigenous communities, the custodians of so many vital assets, biodiversity assets on the planet with state-of-the-art technology, the frontiers have simply been rewritten and as UNDP also personally, I think we have just begun to gain the kind of digital literacy to then be able to bring the benefits of this technology but also the use and the impact to bear on the way we can actually achieve that nature-positive economy. That's terrific. Thank you so much, Akim. Let's turn to Bill Winters of Standard Chartered Bank. Bill, you've been at the very center of something pretty revolutionary that's been going on, at least in terms of commitments, $130 trillion assets under management committed to net zero by the middle of the century and you have been one of the engineers of that. As you look at that commitment and obviously there are some doubters, you know, is it genuine and so on, what do we need to do in order to get the right amount of that going to where it's needed most with regard to nature and with regard to developing countries? Yeah, well, Andrew, thanks very much for having me and for that question. You're right that the challenges are many. If we could just restate the context a little bit. It's something like one third of the required emission reductions by 2030 need to come from natural climate solutions. We know that something like 90% of the practical solutions are sitting in emerging markets, developing countries. Indonesia and Brazil alone account for close to 30%. We also know that if we actually deliver these solutions, it's a real boost for economies locally, but also globally, something like 400 million incremental jobs, $10 trillion of economic growth. So it's not all about cost, but there are enormous challenges as you point out in your question. The funding gap for nature-based solutions is something like $1 trillion per year. Again, the bulk of the gap is in developing countries. So when we look at some of the research that we've done at the Center Chartered, we can see a reasonable line of sight on something like 60% of the financing being available in developed countries. In the lesser developed countries, it's far less. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it's less than 10%. In other words, 90% of these projects which themselves comprise 90% of the opportunity could go unfunded if we can't get the money, this $130 trillion in the irreference, which is the total assets on our manager for the entire group of asset managers and banks in the defense organization. If we can't get that money to the right place, we're not going to accomplish our objectives. When we ask our clients and do our own research, what are the critical components to delivering this money into the right place? We have to get a good measure of the baseline. Corporations are making net zero commitments, but those mean nothing if we don't know with some clarity where we're starting because that's the beginning of the process to hold the corporate world and everyone else accountable. And I can reference that in the context of TCFD. It couldn't agree more. Second, we've got to identify not just the ESG funds, there's actually enough ESG fund money that's either there or will be there. It's getting it into the hands of the highest impact users of that financing. And that for sure is going to require not just private financing, but also public financing and importantly, that the catalyzing effect of development organizations, governmental organizations crowding in private capital. We're not fully developed there at all. And then broadly developing the other techniques, whether it's standardized to underlying commercial contracts, apportionment of political risk or development risk into the hands of the people that can actually put the financing structures together to deliver this trillion dollars plus per year, recognizing that there's another $2 trillion per year that's necessary for the underlying reduction objectives that corporations have committed to in the context of their own net zero plans. So it's never all about the money. Although the money is a pretty big obstacle right now and that there's a huge amount of work going on IGFans inside the private sector inside the asset management organizations to channel that money but it's definitely going to require some partnership with the public sector as well. Thank you very much, Bill. Could I just ask you about something else that you've been leading on which is the sort of voluntary markets, carbon markets or credit, carbon credit markets for nature. You are heading a committee that's sort of trying to or a task force that's trying to really set standards and get everybody onto the same page as opposed to the past where you couldn't distinguish high quality and low quality and so the whole thing evaporated. Just tell us a little bit about that journey this year. Yeah, it's been fascinating and I think hugely impactful, at least prospective though but I think we're already seeing the effect. The carbon markets have been around for years and we know that there are government-backed markets not least the European emission trading system which have been very effective in reducing carbon emissions within the confines of those programs. Obviously China, the largest emitter has worked on their own government-backed or compliance program and there are early signs that that will also have a make a difference but there's big chunks of the emissions like well over half of the global emissions that aren't covered by government-backed markets and that can only be exchanged through a voluntary market. The voluntary market's been around for 30 years but it became very, very small because there was no confidence that the contracts or the credits that were being originated were actually reducing emissions from the environment. So we set out about a year and a half ago. We ended up with 450 members, 250 separate organizations representing civil society, NGOs, academics, emitters, asset managers, money intermediaries saying we have two objectives. One is to set a very high standard that we can all agree to that they can then be implemented in action. And second to put a governance framework in place so that those standards can be maintained as we have developed a better understanding of the science or as the situation in the world changes, et cetera. And we did that. So in the second half of last year we went from a task force to a formal governing body. It's called the integrity council of the voluntary carbon markets. It's the board of directors who are the ultimate adjudicators are majority non-aligned parties. In other words, NGOs or academics who don't have an economic interest in the underlying market. We've made a first ad at a very clear set of standards for what qualifies as a legitimate and high quality carbon contract. The integrity council is now working through the very specific details of what that means. The governance body is up and running. It's advised by an expert panel of names that we would all recognize as masters of this trade. And we've already seen a dramatic impact in terms of the amount of money that's changing hands in order to for the most part deliver nature-based solutions. And the market's increased in size by about five times. The final headline, if we get this right we go from 2020 reduction through offsets of about 180 million tons to in 2030, 23 gigatons. That's what can be funded if this carbon market ramps up just in the next eight years in the way that we think it can. Simply buy what they ought to be doing within their home turf. So first you've got to get your own house in order then into these credit markets. Good. Let's turn to Geraldine Machette. Geraldine, you run BSN, which is for those of us that know it is a remarkable company that uses science to make the world a better place. A lot of people don't know DSM so well, but you're huge. And you've got all kinds of products that actually are relevant to our discussion today. And you look at the whole food system in an unusual way. Tell us, just tell us a little bit about that. What gives you hope and what are you planning to do? Thank you, Andrew. And I have to say this is already a fascinating panel. I was listening to Bill. I am both a CFO by training and a geographer. And we must never forget that the best mechanism to draw down carbon from the atmosphere is photosynthesis. So actually vegetation, nature, food production has everything to do with carbon credits, carbon markets. And I'm sure we'll get there because it has a lot to do also with scaling some of the innovations that without these well-intreated carbon markets may be a little bit challenging. Maybe just a one thought that I would like to put forward before I talk about DSM and how we see things is that sometimes when we look at food systems there is a bit of a demonizing of food production but it's good to look back for a second and realize that in 70 years, the lifetime of one person, we have three times more human beings to feed on this planet. So from the 2.5 to this nearly 8 billion people and at the very same time, the number of people in extreme poverty shrunk from 70% to eight. Now 8% is still far too many, still 650 million, but it just shows that how we have as humanity managed to find ways of increasing predominantly the production of food. Now, of course, now we're realizing that the scaling of that food production is now coming back to bite us. And the video that we had as an introduction as a good indication of how we have depleted our top soils, how we have basically damaged planet Earth. And the way we like to think about food systems is that it is the flip side of climate, both in terms of cores, but also the most disruptive. And I think it's super important for this audience to realize that effectively when we talk about the food system is in crisis and we are a science-based company, people tend to think about Sub-Saharan Africa, vulnerable populations, no. We're thinking about every single geography is under pressure when it comes to food production. Look at the floods yesterday or the week ago in Brazil, the fires, the droughts, it's everywhere we look, we have an absolute emergency when it comes to food production. So there is a, the climate emergency is actually a food production emergency. And I think in many countries we forgot that food is actually a national security topic. Now, to the point of what can we do because we, I think we all, most of us realize the degree of severity of the situation. And while we've been hearing a lot about some of the more structural actions that one can take, there are also some very pragmatic actions. And as you said, we are a science-based company sitting in the middle of the value chain because we're the company, we mark world leader in what makes food actually nutritious for humans and for animals. Which means that we look upstream to the production of food in particular proteins, whether it be animal-based, eggs, dairy meats, plant-based, but the production, can we make that sustainable? But also what people are eating because currently we're eating ourselves sick, unfortunately. So diets have a lot to do with actually sustaining healthy people on a healthy planet. Now, three topics I would like to throw in and leaving time for debates. One is scaling regenerative agriculture. To the point that photosynthesis is the best mechanism to draw down CO2 and carbon sequestration, scaling regenerative agricultural practices in all geographies at scale must be a priority. For that, we also need to connect producers to consumers and therefore transparency is important. And all of the companies that we work with upstream and downstream are thinking about this and how we tied to capital markets, et cetera. So one food for thought is all about regenerative agriculture and how we tied to capital markets, et cetera. So one food for thought is all about regenerative agriculture. The other one is to be pragmatic, we have found that you need to take value chain by value chain. It's very difficult to talk generically about food production, food systems. But when you start saying, for instance, how do we get to a net zero dairy chain? It's absolutely possible in today's technologies, but how do we do that? And bring together all of the stakeholders, including legislators, technology, digital has been mentioned, to actually value chain by value chain most likely geography by geography go to action. And that is the second sort of thought I would like to put forward. And the third one is actually the true value of food. And there was a great session earlier this week, again, in the context of the WEF week, looking at how do we actually factor in the real value that food production brings? Basically, a society cannot be stable without a stable food production system. And how do we start quantifying not only the cost of food and there's a lot of talk about inflation. So if you bring in the externalities, it doesn't make food too expensive. But if you actually look at the benefits, then you start getting an equation that's much more balanced. And that can help, for instance, countries and legislators to repurpose 700 billion of subsidies that go with food production, which are currently not in the right place. Well, thank you, Geraldine, very much. Could I probe on just one of those examples you gave where you mentioned net zero dairy chains, for example. Now, you, I know, have developed a product, and I'm sure other companies have too, but I bet yours is the best, to change the feedstuff or feedstock for ruminants that will significantly reduce their methane emissions. It strikes me, though, that that's the sort of thing that ought to be subsidized because it costs more than regular animal food. Governments, for the most part, are quite willing to put a lot of money into renewable energy, into electric cars. They're willing to put a lot of money into agriculture, but actually aren't using their money to, if you like, tweak the incentive structure. I mean, are you hoped for? What should we do about that? I mean, should that be part of voluntary carbon markets, for example, subsidizing that? And which countries are taking this issue seriously? Yeah, I mean, this is a very good example of how do we scale a very effective innovation, so in two words, if you add a quarter of a teaspoon of this ingredient into the feed of a cow, you can reduce the methane burnt by cows by 30%. Now, when we started this innovation more than 10 years ago, people thought that was a very weird thing to work on, but of course, if you look at last year with the methane pledge at COP26, agriculture is the second biggest source of methane and we know it's the low-hanging fruit when it comes to climate change. Now, how do we scale the adoption? It requires zero infrastructure. You basically just add something in addition to grains and vitamins and whatever other nutritional ingredient, you just top this up. How do we scale that? And what we're seeing is there's actually, and I'm quite hopeful because we're seeing thanks to the attention on methane, we're seeing a lot more traction from countries realizing in the NBCs, oh, methane is actually something we need to tackle. But voluntary carbon markets could help a lot because farmers need to benefit from transitioning to sustainable practices. If farmers are not better off and see a much brighter future when they're adopt regenerative or adopt Beauvais, which is our feed ingredient as one of the examples, it's very difficult to gain speed. And that's where the support of legislation and regulation can be extremely helpful. And this is one example. And I'm sure we'll talk about track and tracing, digital imagery, all of these technologies can really turn our farmers into the custodians of planet Earth, but we need to be able to put a little more muscle behind scaling these innovations much faster. That's great. Thank you so much, Geraldine. That was great. Let's turn to Anisha, who is CEO of the Mahindra Group. Mahindra Group is quite remarkable for having an integrated approach to the way they treat water and land and climate and so on. I should say, Anisha, we are very grateful to Mahindra because when we established the Science-Based Targets Initiative, it wasn't clear how many companies were really gonna sign up. When the Mahindra Group got all of your companies to say, look, we have to be scientific, we've got to make ourselves accountable, we've got to be transparent, that was an absolute tipping point. And now we have what? 3,000 companies around the world signed up to that. So very grateful. What is on your mind as you think about these issues relating to nature? And first, thank you for your kind words. What's on our mind is that we really need to find a way to reimagine capitalism, where growth and impact should coexist because without companies coming forward to make a significant contribution, this effort's gonna fail. But if we do make a significant contribution, we've got to be bold about the targets we set. At Mahindra we have set a target of getting to net zero by 2040. But 2040 is a long way off and I'm not likely to be the CEO at that point in time. So what we have to do is what are the targets we set for this year, next year and the year after that? And that's really the path we're laying out. But what we've also learned is it's not about just what we do within the confines of the company, it's how we engage with the broader communities. And let me give two examples here. Our journey started about 15 years ago and one of the projects we commenced was Project Hariyali. Hariyali means greenery and we've planted about 20 million trees at around rate of roughly one million a year at this point in time. Our target is to get to five million trees a year in the next five years. But the real difference we've made is the impact that these trees have had on tribal communities in various states. And one example of this is a tribal community in the Arapa Valley of Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India. True trees were planted there with the help of the tribal community that provide soil nutrients and shade to enhance the quality of coffee that is grown by them. And the coffee became so good that they could actually start taking and selling this and has now become famous as Arapa coffee. It now has a store in Paris and it's treated by connoisseurs as some of the best coffee in the world. So this is something that really is transforming livelihood for communities. And based on that, the community has developed a holistic program based on biodynamic farming that has increased the yield of coffee, enhance its taste, help them get premium prices for their produce. And that has resulted in greater community engagement, greater tree plantation. Across the trees we've planted, we have an 83% survival rate, which is quite high and that's really more important in terms of sustainability of these programs. And if you look at the net carbon sequestered annually by the current population of trees, it really covers half our scope one and scope two emissions. So that is a significant step forward for us. A second example I'd talk about is around being water positive. We have been water positive for the last seven years and we've got a large family of employees, 260,000, but we've had a lot of enthusiasm across various companies and they've done extensive rainwater harvesting, adopting water recycling, eliminating leakage, enhancing productivity, et cetera.  An example here is we did a project with about 32 villages in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India. It was a watershed development project that spread over 10,000 hectares. And in partnership with the state government, this led to a three and a half times increase in per capita income for 20,000 rural Indians in five years. And this was essentially due to large scale rainwater harvesting. And that again is changing lives of communities. And these are things that are enabling the communities to get involved in these projects and give us a much bigger impact. So really in summary, the role of corporates I would look at is to be a catalyst for some of these changes and be able to make them much more far reaching. Thank you very much, Anish. Could you say a word about the corporate sector leadership in India as a whole?  And that's why we're asking you these questions.  I think there is a lot of awareness. The awareness really took place a few years ago based on what we've seen around us. But a lot of action has taken place over the last few years. And I see tremendous momentum specifically over the last 12 months. So a lot of companies are realizing that they have to take a leadership role in this without them, this is not going to change. And we're starting to see that happen. So I would be very optimistic on that front. That's encouraging. Thank you very much. I'd like to ask you, before we turn to our final question, I'd like to ask you all a question that's on my mind having listened to you all. And by the way, it's very inspiring to listen to you. We have plenty of commitments right now. I mean, maybe not enough, but we've got a lot of commitments. And we've had commitments before. We've had biodiversity targets that were set 10 years ago. We haven't reached them. We had, as I mentioned before, the forest targets. We didn't reach them. We now have a lot more targets. Let me ask you this. What would it take to create more of a sense of accountability? And do you feel we now have that? And could I link that also to coming back to the very first question about Stockholm plus 50 in Stockholm plus zero in 50 years ago? I mean, that's when the United Nations Environment Program was created. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came and said, you know, and it was part of a real movement. Maurice Strong went out and UNEP has played an incredible role since then. Are there institutional changes that we need to see to bring about the accountability we talk about? Just anyone who wants to address that, please just try and do it. Maybe we turn first to you, Hakim. You've spoken, you've thought a lot about this. And just very brief answers from whoever wants to. Very brief, and I hope Stockholm plus 50 will provide precisely that kind of introspection in order to move forward. And I think certainly targets are important, but we also have to be very clear what makes people then adhere to targets. And one is maybe the accountability to others who signed up to it, but in let's say the political arena, also our citizenry. I think the greatest way in which we can accelerate and scale up action is to have these targets, but then to invest actually in the ability of citizens to hold those who committed those targets accountable. If a corporation commits to doing something, then it should be able to one be recognized for it, but also to be held accountable equally governments. And we know that in the international arena, we will always not have a policing enforcement paradigm that really can be involved. And yet the NDCs, many consider them to be just documents. It's interesting, these national climate strategies that now underpin the Paris agreement, Glasgow, they've actually become more than just a document that you hand to an international process. They're beginning to drive national climate budgeting investments. And I think that is certainly one area. We need to empower those who can actually exercise authority to hold that accountability alive. And secondly, we also need to learn that in the way we set targets, that we cannot solve the world's problems one by one in isolation. This is why the SDG is the 2030 agenda is so fundamental to actually giving us a different paradigm of investment. You can enter it, you know, a climate change investment can happen through the carbonization, renewable energy, a poverty reduction project for that matter. But actually it is when you bring these benefits together, you suddenly talk about transformation. So targets need to be smartly formulated. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much, Hakeem. Anyone else like to take on that question? Bill? I'd be happy. I think Hakeem's answers, which largely focus on what the public sector can do, are critical. What we notice clearly is a big stepping up with the private sector. And the analogy that I tend to use is not very friendly, but it's tightening the news on all of us. And the news starts with measuring properly. And I think that the steps around TCFD have begun that. Second is eliciting commitments. There's no shortage of net zero commitments at this point, although there's clearly more that we can do. But then the key is the ongoing accountability. And that accountability has got to come from the stakeholders for the private sector companies. And the stakeholders, first and foremost, are the owners. So we're talking about the asset managers and the people who fund the asset managers, pension funds, insurance companies, many of whom get back to the public sector. But I think if we circle the problem and remove the excuses that people like me, corporate CEOs, the excuses that we can deploy to explain why we're not quite there and just do that one at a time. And we heard it quite clearly from Anish in terms of the way that Mahindra has approached us. Likewise, DSM, we can remove the excuses, step up the accountability, refocus on consistent measurement. I think the private sector can contribute as fair share. So, Refe, Geraldine. Yeah, I would love to jump in and fully agree with Bill. And I would even add in here the voice of the consumer. I think that what we're seeing very clearly is that the awareness is rising. And that is good news because then it's not about are you gonna commit to what you promised? It actually makes a lot of sense to commit to what you promised. So what we're seeing is a lot of traction around the how do we do it? Not why should we do it? Or are we being pushed and who's pushing us? But very much how can we connect the dots from food production all the way to consumption? And how do we impact diets? And how do we really shift the whole system? So for me, that's one of the big things. But I think we touched upon earlier in the debate that someone said, and sorry I forgot who he was, that digital is the biggest game changer here. And the ability to see what is going on is so different. From space, we heard it earlier this week from the International Space Station, you can actually measure, the astronaut was telling us in Al Gore as well, the sources of methane down to the field, down to the location. And I think that transparency creates much more accountability and responsibility as well. So I think there's a technology and a consumer play here as well. Terrific, terrific. Anybody, Anish and then Matilda. Yeah, I'd like to add that it's about linking the present to the future. As you said, Andrew, we've done a great job in setting science-based targets and we have a lot of companies signed up, but that's all about the future. What are the targets today? And then I go back to what Bill said about measurement and reporting. Are we reporting them in our annual reports? Are we having the same common measurement around it? There's a lot of effort going on there again, led by the World Economic Forum. I think that will help tremendously. And then finally, it's about incentives. I also do agree with Bill that the owners do have to build the stick in some form, but with the stick, there are incentives in terms of funding, in terms of what consumers will look for and companies that they want to associate with. And I think a combination of that will allow companies to start getting on this path a lot faster. Terrific, thank you, Anish. Matilda. Thank you very much. I just want to add some things. As I said, I believe we believe that Stockholm Plus 50 offers a chance to bring together all relevant stakeholders to spotlight how we can step up when it comes to this sustainable transformation and how we can bring together ambitions when it comes to net zero, but also a more nature positive way of thinking. But I also want to add that I think that we sometimes, because I truly believe in international cooperation, where would we have been without international cooperation? But sometimes it feels like we are so into what challenges we have ahead of us. So we sometimes forget to remind ourselves what we have achieved together sort of from where we were to where we are now. And I think we need to be better on that. Yes, look upon in sort of in the Swedish context. 30 years ago, we heated our houses with oil. That is not the question today. No houses are heated by oil. We had sort of 50 years ago, we used methods in our forestry that is not there today. It's much more better today. Look upon how we use chemicals within the EU. We have set up a sort of regulation where we stop using the most dangerous ones. We have to substitute them with better substitutions and so on. So I think we need to be better to also sometimes and acknowledge what we have done together. But with that said, we are just in sort of in the beginning of our sustainability travel. So and some of someone, and we have touched upon it, but I think what we can do is also have sort of more transparency when it comes to sort of nature-related risks. So that companies and also financial institutions, because we want sort of the money to go to good things. But so they can evaluate their exposure to risks such by diversity, degeneration and deforestation and so on and take action to eliminate it. And so that civil society can hold companies and politicians accountable to their commitments and keep up the pressure. So and also when it comes to sort of development policies and development finance, we can also make that more nature positive. So we can see that things are interlinked. But yeah, I told you, but what I wanted to say is that we need to also see and show that we can do better together. We have been and show that we sort of bring in a sense that we actually can do better together. And we have shown it if you look backwards and sort of the challenges we have ahead, how can we must sort of address them together? Thank you. Thank you very much, minister. The stock on plus 50 is going to be a great event. It sounds really. So we have five minutes left. One question, maximum of one minute from each of you. Each of you have two jobs. You have your main job, which is running the huge institution that you are in charge of. But you also have a job globally when you speak, people listen, when you convene, they come and you're all involved in creating coalitions and trying to move across tipping points. So the sentence begins in 2022 in order to advance the nature agenda, I will dot, dot, dot. And why do we go in the reverse order? Can we start with you, Anisha? Thank you, Andrew. In 2022, I will ensure that we have a very clear roadmap laid out to get to net zero by 2040 with specific actions in the field of water positivity, zero waste to landfill, energy productivity and looking for new technologies that will help us get there. Perfect, perfect. Thank you very much. Let's go to Matilda. No, Javrabin. Me? Okay, thanks, Andrew. In 2002, I will seek to maintain the momentum that was built with the UN Food Systems Summit and to get the private sector behind that momentum. And to do that, it is to increase the number of CEO coalition members from the 100 million pharma coalition to bring the different stakeholders because we need to elevate food systems from what it is today, which is about producing and selling food to seeing it as the societal and survival topic that it needs to be. So expanding coalition. Thank you so much. Now it's great, Geraldine. Bill Winters. So in 2022, we are committed to, implementing the net zero transition plan, which was a very detailed plan along with the white paper that we produced last year. It is in full swing, but the commitment is to deliver a disproportionate share of that 10 year transition plan over the course of 2022. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you, Akim. In 2022, I will continue to focus on ensuring that we don't go back to where we were. I think, again, to where I started, it's a very, very difficult moment for many countries, for many communities. The temptation to simply scramble back the way we were would be a terrible lost opportunity. So investing in that transition that allows us to invest precisely in the topics we have covered in our discussion is really at the forefront of my work and that of my institution, I think, of many of us. So with optimism, with perspective and with courage to look forward. Thanks. That's great. Thank you, Akim, very much. Matilda, minister. Thank you very much in 2022. I hope that we have been able to reduce people's poverty by putting together the net zero and the nature positive agenda and that countries throughout the world actually are not only committed to goals, they also deliver on those goals with money and with also a great deal of courage because otherwise we can't do this sustainable travel to sustainability. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Matilda. And in 2022, I will be watching all of you with great joy deliver what you just said you're going to be doing. In addition to that, I will be following up with you and many, many other leaders in the field to try and figure out how we at the Basel's Earth Fund can allocate the precious resources that we've been entrusted with in a way that actually advances the transitions that will be required. And this is not easy, but it's a very exciting task. This is a wonderful discussion and it is not my job to summarize. It would be impossible to do that. But I'm really delighted that Gimwe Nio, the new managing director of the World Economic Forum responsible for the Center for Nature and Climate who's just arrived last month. He is going to summarize for us and take us home. But first, let me, I'm not sure whether it's my job to thank the panel or whether it's yours, Gimwe, but let me thank Geraldine, Matilda, Bill, Akim, Anish, what a treat to listen to all of you. Thank you so much. And welcome, Gimwe. Thank you, Andrew. And thank you for your excellent moderation. And more importantly, thank you for your leadership in this space. And we very much look forward to working very closely with the Earth Basel's Fund to see how we can continue to push the climate action and nature action forward. Thank you to the panelists. Really enjoyed listening to your various comments and insights. Mr. Erncrens, Ms. Geraldine Machit, Mr. Anish Shah, Mr. Akim Steiner and Mr. Bill Winters. It's a very important issue and we really enjoyed hearing from you today. As I listen and reflect on your comments, I'm reminded of the three Rs, the need for us to renew, the need for us to restore and the need for us to revitalize our relationship with nature and its ecosystems. Nature is the source and sustenance of life. Whether it's the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. And every one of us needs that to go about our day-to-day survival. And for any business or society to endure and to prosper, we have to take pause and recognize that we have to live in harmony with nature and be a very responsible steward of the resources it brings. Today's session is reminded us of the need for us to act now before it is too late, time is running out. We have to act together to avoid a tragedy of the commons and we have to act at scale and one of the panelists reminded us that we have to also act schematically, because the dots are all interconnected to achieve the impact that is needed. At the World Economic Forum, we strive to be a force for good. We will continue to work with you, build partnerships where stakeholders can engage to drive positive change. And we have launched several nature-related initiatives, including 100 million farmers, together with Gerardine's group, preventing deforestation through the Tropical Forest Alliance, 1trilliontrees.org, and also to look at how to better protect the oceans with blue food systems. And you can find more information on this initiative on our website, webforum.org. We also invite you to join us in this various endeavours. And in 2022, I together with my team at the Centre will continue to explore more ways to build a nature-positive future with you and support the transition for a more sustainable, just and resilient global economy. And thank you all for being with us today. I wish you a wonderful weekend ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.


which returns us back to pangraph, actually, and Liam, Liam Shaw is going to be talking to us about using pangraph to explore the plasmid diversity. Liam, you've had a warm-up act. I would not describe Marco as my warm-up act, that makes it sound like I'm the headliner. Yeah, thank you very much. So I'm going to talk about using pangraph practically. So I've been visiting the group here who developed pangraph, and I'm very much a user, not a developer. So if I can use it, you can too. So I'll be kind of just talking about some of the explorations I've been doing of plasmids using this very useful tool. To start with, I thought I'd start by mentioning Ulysses, which I think has a lot of similarities with plasmid diversity in that it's vast, extraordinarily diverse, and understanding it may seem like it's a fool's errand, but also because the last line of Ulysses, for anyone who's read it, is Trieste Zurich Paris, and this conference was meant to be in Trieste, of course. Sadly, we're online. But throughout the talk, I'll put Ulysses quotes in the top left. So if you're really bored with plasmids by this point, just look there, and there will be something that is relevant from Ulysses, because really Ulysses has everything in it. So I'm going to talk about why pangraph is a useful tool for exploring plasmids, and then give two examples. I'll spend most of my time on the first example of antimicrobial resistance, plasmids, and then I'll talk about the idea of plasmid architectures in the second example. So why should we think that pangraph is going to be useful to explore plasmids? Now, tools exist to cluster plasmid diversity, and Fernando's talk earlier was a fantastic example of this. So Coppler, the classifier that his group have been developing, is extremely useful. And you have a different range of ways of clustering plasmid diversity. So there's traditional typing schemes, which are based on presence absence or sequence type of a set of known genes. You have alignment free clustering, which is based on the similarity of component camers, so not actually aligning things. And then you have alignment-based clustering based on something like average nucleotide identity. And you have some rules for partitioning up the big messy network that you get into clusters. However, once you have those clusters, understanding the structure within them of what happens to the plasmid evolution within the clusters is more difficult. Those clusters are a fantastic place to start. So this isn't a criticism of those methods. It's just that we have the clusters, now we've got to explore them. And plasmids are actually a special case of pan genomes. So in James' talk, he talked about how you've got a core genome, which is the genes that all strains share, and then the accessory genome, which is unique to particular strains or not seen in all members of a species. And with plasmids, you kind of have a similar thing. You have the core genome might be a backbone plasmid, and that backbone plasmid is found within other plasmids that you might call compound plasmids, as this recent preprint does. And variations on a definition of backbone plasmid could be given. But if we think of it as a minimal entity that can propagate using the genes that are on that backbone, then in plasmid pan genomes, we kind of have a minimum working example approach to pan genomics because the core genome can actually exist on its own. And plasmids are interesting to think of in a pan genome approach because they're tractable. You can sort of make the visualizations and also do the quantitative stuff. Whereas with whole genomes, looking at the big messy graphs that you get, it's just more difficult to work out what's going on. So I think starting with plasmids is a good idea when trying to build models of pan genome evolution, even though they are a bit of a special case. So to start with, I'll give this example of antimicrobial resistance plasmids and why pangraph is useful to look at this type of evolution. So Zam mentioned this paper, which involved a hospital outbreak in a hospital in America over five years, multiple species, multiple plasmids, genetic elements, moving this gene around, it's a nightmare. And it's a really fantastic paper. And I really recommend if you haven't read it, do so because you'll learn a huge amount. And I think that's kind of a real, that was a groundbreaking paper in exploration of this genetic diversity in bacterial genomes. But for the purposes of this talk, suffices to note that plasmid structures can be extremely dynamic. So here I'm taking out a tiny section of that data set to explore. So they did long read sequencing on a subset of isolates at the time, I think 17, which was expensive. And so they only did it on a small subset, but you get the whole plasmid assembly for those reduced set of plasmids. And I'm picking out four plasmids that were, so here's a reference plasmid that was also sequenced as part of this collection of isolates. And it's a 43 kilobase pair plasmid that carries on it, this resistance gene. And here are four other plasmids that were isolated within a two year period from different species. And compared to the reference, these two plasmids P1 and P2, I've simplified the notes from the original publication. They had one single nucleotide variant in the reference sequence. The others had zero changes, but then the structural changes were much larger. And again, this is a table from the original paper. So P1 had no changes with respect to this reference. P2 had a 188 base pair deletion, P3 had an insertion, and P4 had a duplication of this BLAR KPC containing region, and then an insertion as well. That's how they characterised it in the paper. That's what I've taken that description from. So if we look at this with aligning genes, for example, or trying to visualise it, this very common approach to take, to look at gene diagrams, this can be quite confusing. So to make this, I've found genes in the plasmids with prodigal and annotated them with prokka. So prokka will actually run prodigal as part of it. And then produce this visualisation with clink. There are many other methods you could have used. But this is just to point out that some of the things show up quite nicely. So for example, here's an insertion it looks like. So this would be how they worked out that there was a 1,200 base pair insertion in P3 compared to this reference sequence. But the duplication that's going on between P4 and the other ones is kind of all the way off down here. I've truncated it because it's too big. And this is not really quantitative. This is a way of qualitatively looking at the data and trying to work out what's going on. But it would be nice to have a data structure that was based on alignment of blocks of homologous sequence, which is what pangraph is. So here's the commands that I ran on this set of plasmids. And this is what you get. So if you visualise the results of running those commands on these plasmids in Bandage, a programme made by Ryan Wick originally for looking at assembly graphs, but it works equally well here for looking at panginal graphs. You have these sets of blocks. And here's the KPC gene, which is on one of these blocks. So remember from Marco's talk, this is a representation of all of the genomes together, how blocks are connected. Any particular plasmid genome will be a walk through this graph. So a closed loop that goes around the graph. So for example, we have plasmid 1, the reference. And here I'm showing a sort of linear version of the alignment blocks that pangraph has discovered in these plasmids. So if we take plasmid 1, let's start at the purple. So we're going to go purple, red, orange, yellow, green. And then we're back where we started. So that's the circle. If we take plasmid 4, for example, we're going to go purple, red, orange, yellow, green. Then we've got this kind of similar yellow color. We go all the way around that loop. Then we go orange, yellow, green again. And then back where we started. That's the end of the plasmid. So why is this good? Well, that data structure allows us very easily to compute structural distances. And what do I mean by that? Well, this is very much a toy example. So I'm just going to go through it. If we imagine we have the reference plasmid and plasmid 2, say, which had a deletion. If we look for the longest common subsequence of blocks between those two, you'll see that it's purple, red, orange, green. So we just go through and it takes into account both the presence and the order of the blocks. So there's a break point here is what we say, because there's a difference between these two plasmids at that position. If we take, for example, plasmid 4, the longest common subsequence here is purple, red, orange, yellow, green. They both have yellow block in this case. The break point actually comes at the end. And this whole thing is a single break point because it comes between the green and going back to the beginning, the purple. So that's the same number of break points as the previous example, even though there's a vastly different amount of sequence that's been changed in those different cases. So we could choose to weight those differently. And that's something I'd be very interested in people's thoughts on. But for the purposes of this, I'm just going to treat those as the same. So we can have a distance matrix between the plasmids now based on break points. And because this is a very simple example, but it is a real example. It turns out that between plasmid 1 and all of the other plasmids, there's one break point. And for example, if we compare plasmid 2 and plasmid 3, we see that there's two break points. Plasmid 3 has a bit of blue here. And plasmid 3 also has a bit of yellow. So this is the thing that's a deletion in plasmid 2 compared to the others. And that is so that's two break points. And we have a two in the distance matrix here. So we've got evolution going on. We can use different distances to characterize that evolution. And those distances have different information that they're going to contain. So if we use a reference based mapping, the single nucleotide variance against the sequence of the reference plasmid, we will see this tree. So plasmid 1 and plasmid 2 have one position where they vary over that 43 kilobases. And plasmid 3 and plasmid 4 are the same as the reference. So I'm just showing this tree like this, but I could put them on top of the reference here. That would be the same tree structure. If we use camers, so if we ask about the presence or absence of camers, not taking into account like alignment or anything, we're going to get that P1 is the same as the reference. P2 is a little bit different because it's got this deletion. P3 is a bit more different because it's got a slightly larger insertion. And P4 is really different to everything else because it's got this massive insertion. So that's quite a different picture of the evolution. If we were using this to infer stuff about evolution, it's quite a different picture. And now here we're using blocks and the break point distance. So P1 is the same as the reference. All of the other things have one break point with respect to P1 and two with respect to each other. So to go from P2 to P3 is one, two. So this is not a phylogeny, right? It's a tree representation of the distance matrix. And this is sort of very easy to get out of pangraph. We get really easy access to data on the plasmid structure. But what we need is evolutionary models to link those distances to evolution and find minimum parsimony roots. So for example, just thinking about plasmid 4 where the paper says it's a duplication and an insertion, we might want to sort of decouple this one break point into two different things. But we need a model of evolution to do that. So far we're just saying every break point is the same. So in the remaining time, we're just going to talk about another application of pangraph to different plasmid architectures. So there was a recent paper, a preprint or a recent version of a preprint, I should say, on bio archive from these authors, which is a really fascinating paper that I'd recommend everybody read. They searched in human gut metagenome assemblies for plasmid structures. They used read mapping patterns to decide whether a contig was a plasmid or not. And some plasmid classification stuff, they basically got a big data set of plasmids out of that, tens of thousands of plasmids, many of which have no similarity to reference plasmids. Then they group these plasmids into plasmid systems. They basically align, I won't go through all of the details, but they align the plasmids to each other using directed edges to represent containment. So this backbone plasmid is present in all of these compound plasmids. And then they call this connected component of the network of plasmids system. And this is a better starting point for the purposes of pangraph than alignment free clusters where you can actually have cases where the sequence divergence is graced than that tolerates by pangraph at the moment. So when you align the plasmids and make the graph, you'll get disconnected components, which is, yeah, sort of just a current limitation of the tool. So here's plasmid system one, which is the first of these over 1000 different plasmid systems that they report in this preprint. It's 26 plasmids, which are covered from a whole bunch of different cut fence genomes between five and 15 kilobases long. They have a rep be, rep be gene there. I don't know why I've written protein. Sorry. And then there's no hits in Plasdb. There's no PTU assigned by Coppola because this is a mesh genome plasmid, you know, you might want to treat it with some skepticism. Here is the pangraph representation of that. Those sets of 26 plasmids. And I'm showing the core blocks in red and I've just given the blocks numbers so that they're a bit easier to see. And then you can see that the colors wouldn't be informed of here. So I've just used numbers so that I can refer to them. And so if we imagine a particular plasmid, that's not the backbone plasmid. So this core plasmid is, you know, one, three, two. Another plasmid might be one minus seven, ten, three, eleven, two. So one minus seven, ten, three, eleven, two. And then I'm just, I've messed around with this to make the walk through the graph. So if we plot the breakpoint distance as a tree of all of those different plasmids and I've collapsed, this is the most common plasmid sequence of blocks. So that's why that point is bigger than the others. I've just collapsed it to make the tree easier to understand. You can see that here's the backbone plasmid, sequence of blocks one, three, two. And then, for example, this plasmid has one breakpoint where five, ten has been inserted. And you can see that there's a lot of conservation of blocks into me. So one, three, two, this, this, what we're calling the backbone plasmid fugitively appears in the same order in all of those different plasmids. So this is quite interesting because we very quickly get a picture of how symtony is working in the plasmid, how the architecture might be going. So we could think like, why is this region disruptive? Why between three and two, there's only one disruption compared to many other disruptions in the other regions of the graph, for example. So we're already kind of, you can see there's lots of questions we can start to answer once we have this representation of the plasmids as this state structure. The pan graph gives us. So there's future work to do. Obviously I've just presented really rough work in progress using pan graph, which it's a pleasure to use. So pan graph is a scalable way to explore these classes of plasmid diversity. But what are the right metrics? Okay. So we pan graph contains within it, not just the graph of blocks of, you know, paths of blocks that I've been talking about here, but it also does contain the alignments of those blocks. So you could combine the SNP level information with the structural information and that would be very cool. And then there's these kind of two applications that I can think of. One is this recent structural evolution where antimicrobial resistance plasmid should represent an ideal test case to estimate those rates for various processes of structural change. So how common are duplications compared to deletions or something like this? And then also plasmid architectures. So we've got lots of clusters of plasmids. What are the possible topologies of graph structures that exist? How can we connect those to the models of evolution? I think that's a really interesting question. So it remains me just to thank very much Richard for hosting me in his group for this visit. Nick for being the main developer of pan graph and Marco for also developing pan graph and working with you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for helping me in how to use it. And I really welcome people to email me in particular if you know of longitude and or long replasmid data sets. It may be ones that are yet to be published or so on. I'd be very interested in those. And also if you have thoughts about models of structural evolution that could be applied here, that would be fantastic. And I'll stop there. That was really brilliant. I am going to you've got two questions already. I'm going to skip Natasha's for the moment if that's okay Natasha because I think Liam answered it in this talk. So I've got a question from Yana. Liam very interesting and talk for working talk. Can you please say a bit more about the models describing symptom evolution that you're considering or where or how could one where one start developing such a model? Yeah. Okay. Yes. Very good question. I'll say a little bit more about it, but I think more for discussion. So one of the representations of genomes that was popular a while ago or some people still work on is this idea of assigned permutation. And so you have integers say like one to 10 and those can have signs. They can be positive or negative.  So you can represent like your genomes assigned permutations of the numbers one to 10. And then you ask, okay, if I only allow reversals of any size so you can take any sort of block of numbers and flip the sign of them and turn them all around. How can you go from one sign permutation to another? And that there exists algorithms for and that's just kind of very interesting stuff on chromosome evolution, maybe like 20 plus years ago. However, it gets very complicated once you allow things like transposition duplication. So it's an empty hard problem once you start adding those things in. So that's one example of sort of a model that has been applied in the past to this kind of approach. But I don't know that there's one that is ideal at the moment. Okay. That's a great answer. Thank you. I don't think I've seen one that copes with. I mean, most of those are really set up for genomes that contain fundamentally the same genes. Yeah. Yeah. So and once you add super short, there are some models where people allow what are called super short transpositions or things like involving only two genes or blocks because otherwise the combinatorial space just explodes. Yeah. Okay. Anything from anyone else? Okay. I'm sure people will want to talk to you more about this during the discussion with them. I'm going to hand over now to the next speaker.


The story of migration is largely being told in very dark, negative and very apocalyptic terms. A lot of the debate now is not based on facts. A lot of it is actually paranoia and also a lot of it is just emotion. So we need at least the importance of an organisation like REF is to bring the debate to a rational level. Migration is a central feature in the lives of millions of people in the Horn of Africa. The research and evidence facility has been created to understand what motivates it, how people respond to changes in the political and economic environment and how to provide effective protection to people made vulnerable by displacement and irregular migration in the form of evidence and policy relevant knowledge. It is a huge research area, it's very big. Combined with Somalia because they were moving from Somalia in different areas, this is where they were congregating. So you've got people moving from Sudan, moving from Somalia, you have people moving from Ethiopia, going to this area as well as South Sudan. We are asked to carry out research into the broader context in which people are moving. What are some of the drivers, the main reasons that people are on the move? What are some of the experiences of movement? What are some of the intended or unintended impacts of these activities that are now being carried out under other trust fund activities? We're trying to look at that complexity and give some appreciation of that complexity and then I understand what sort of programming can you do that doesn't cripple movement. To unpack this complexity, the REF takes a holistic comprehensive approach and has thus far examined cross-border economies, migration that occurs from the rural to urban areas, experiences of return and reintegration after displacement, and networks of human smuggling and trafficking. It is an approach that was informed by an extensive literature review that highlighted the research gaps and the starting points to take off from. We're so overwhelmed with information. For us it's a kind of guarantee of quality. From the findings and from the recommendations, I'm going to at least use one and be smarter in my next design or be smarter in the way I approach a problem or be smarter in the way that I also engage with a local partner on a very sensitive issue which is migration. So it's like taking, doing your job really, which is to have the information as a quality information to inform the way you are working on an everyday basis. Some part of what the REF does is really about bringing information together. This sort of big stock-taking exercise in the beginning that allowed us to sort of have one idea about what's out there, on migration for the horn, the various dimensions that it encompasses that gives us a starting point. This region has good universities, has very smart people, people who are on the ground who know things that we don't. And being able to access that when there's a question when something comes up, that's a big thing. You definitely get their perspective in the research. They're not just there collecting transcripts and interviewing people. We're getting their reports at the end of it as well and in many cases they're actually contributing and writing to the final report. So there's definitely that feedback mechanism and that feedback process which I think makes a lot of the outputs of the REF particularly relevant to lots of different people. The most difficult part is like how to translate that knowledge generated from below in a language that policymakers also understand. Our own research has generated a lot of expectation from the migrants. We do want to sound extractive, just simply extracting knowledge and go. And then they were constantly asking us, so what is this for? And they have lots of problems and most of the problems are kind of policy related whether at the regional or international level. They were constantly reminding us that, you know, try to kind of like, you know, use this knowledge that you gained from us to inform policy making processes. Studies conducted by the REF have informed programming of the Horn of Africa window of the EU Trust Fund for Africa and the work of UNHCR related to refugees returning to Somalia. We have been very impressed by the reports we received regarding the return of the population of the Somalians who have been in the refugee camps for many years. The research that was done have been of use to me as a special envoy in my advocacy work, so we know the challenges that the retanis are confronted with and how best we can help them to fully integrate into the society. We would like to try to demystify the work that is often very emotive and very sensitive when it comes to working with refugees and a research and evidence facility through independent studies can actually show that it is important and it is possible actually to create a win-win situation between host community and refugees and this is exactly what we are doing through some of our programs. The REF takes a unique approach towards communications and dissemination to reach a broad and diverse range of audiences. Most of the time research activities tend to really think of communication as an afterthought. First the key focus is on the studies, on the analysis, on gathering the data and so you think about the dissemination later and what is really unique about the REF is that we acknowledge that there is a need for communication strategy to be built in to the research itself from the beginning. Thank you.