Hello everyone and welcome to the second in a our series on critical minerals a series of webinars that we've been doing with the support of the Japanese Foreign Ministry of Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The first took place about two weeks ago and focused on the investment needs and the challenges to increasing the raising the investment that is needed to support critical mineral supply increases. And today we will focus on the nexus between critical minerals security and environmental social and governance concerns. So we'll begin with opening remarks. And I'll turn it now to Mr. Asushi Taketani, who is the deputy who is deputy director general at Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Please, please go ahead. Thank you for the introduction. It's a great honor and pleasure for me to give an opening remark for this webinar. This webinar is the second of a two part event funded by us Japanese government. I'd like to thank the secretariat, which has made this event possible with the tremendous efforts at the same time. I'd also like to thank all the participants and speakers who participated in this in your business schedule. I really appreciate that. Actually, as countries embarking on a journey for decarbonization, we will surely need more supply for the critical minerals. There's no doubt about it. It's really crucial to secure the state supply. At the same time, we need to achieve responsible and sustainable supply for the critical minerals. So this is the theme of today's webinar. So I really hope we will have different discussions on this matter. It's quite apparent that we should stick to high ESG standards in resource rich countries. Such standards will surely attract long time investment from the international community. So it will surely help the business sustainability and eventually lead to the robustness of the supply chain. But at the same time, some of the developing countries or resource rich countries encounter difficulties or challenges because of the capacity limits. So it's really difficult for them to implement high ESG standards. Therefore, it's really important or crucial to disseminate ESG related knowledge to these countries. And the Japanese government is already making efforts in these fields. I'd like to point out four examples that Japanese governments are making. First, we are the member of the Mineral Security Partnership, MSE, a multilateral effort to enforce supply security of critical minerals. This partnership at its pre-school meeting last February introduced ESG criteria for responsible critical mineral supply chains. So that's a huge achievement coming from the MSP partnership. Secondly, at the G7 Hiroshima Summit, we hosted the summit last May. At the summit, G7 leaders strongly sent a clear message to the global community. They affirmed that it's crucial to secure benefits for our local communities, including residents, and protect workers' rights through strong ESG standards. At the same time, they emphasized the importance of establishing sustainable and resilient supply chains for critical minerals. On the third achievement, G7 has recently started the partnership for resilience and inclusive supply chain enforcement. This initiative is called RISE, and this is a multilateral finance framework built on the outcomes of Hiroshima Summit. This work will foster sustainable progress via diversification and high value added of industries in developing countries, but financing the programs for processing, production, and manufacturing of critical minerals in accordance with higher ESG standards. So we will finance these projects with high standards with RISE partnership. Finally, we are a member of the IEA Critical Minerals Working Party, CWP. This working party is embarking for the formulating policy recommendation to identify the rules and principles of ESG criteria. We hope the IEA will keep its excellent work to come up with the basis for the necessary rulemaking. The IEA held the summit in September emphasizing the adherence to high ESG standards, and we should create incentives for sustainable and responsible production. I thought that one of the takeaways of the last webinar, which happened two weeks ago, was that we need to have the critical mineral flexibility with a new set of certification systems. So in today's seminar as well, I hope that we would have the other important suggestions as well. We are really working on that. So I need to conclude my remarks. So as a conclusion, I really hope that participants will have the fruitful discussion through the over that can do many. The private sector may have had the experiences to overcome the obstacles in the pursuit of resilience and sustainable supply chain. Such experiences should be widely shared, I believe. And I think this webinar is the best one to share such experiences. I sincerely hope that we have a big success in this webinar, and we'd like to share the knowledge through this seminar. Thank you for your attention and I really hope this webinar will become a great success. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for these welcome remarks, Mr. Takatani. I think we'll be, these are some very wise words that we will, that will feed into this discussion. So from the remainder of this webinar, we will do very briefly, a short presentation of some upcoming work that the IA has been doing on this topic on on the nexus between ESG and critical minerals. And then we will have a panel discussion that we'll turn to immediately after. So if I'll just take one second to share my to share the slides. So, as we've already, as many of us already know, and as the IA has discussed in previous in our previous reporting and analysis, there will be growing pressure to develop new supplies to support clean energy transitions. This can mean new mines, new processing facilities, new refineries, as well as new investments in circularity and other secondary supplies. And this growing pressure will bring increased pressure also on environment on workers, communities, indigenous peoples, and on societies. So the first and foremost reason to take these concerns seriously is to protect people, communities and the environment. Fundamentally, it's the right thing to do. And, you know, there's no going around the fact that this is a, you know, this is important to protect people. But at the same time, and in addition, there are important security of supply benefits as well from, from having greater efforts on the ESG concerns of mining. And this is because ESG failures can lead to a whole bunch of different risks that can discourage supply. They can discourage investment in buyers, increase the likelihood of local conflicts and protests from various stakeholders around mines, as well as causing huge supply disruptions when there are instances of corruption, environmental failings, et cetera. And altogether, these failures can slow progress on climate change. They can limit the amount of supply that's available for clean energy technologies like electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and make it more difficult for us to meet the already ambitious goals that we have. So we at the IEA are currently working on a new report that analyzes and goes into a bit more depth on the nexus between critical mineral security and environmental, social and governance concerns. We're planning to release this next month on the 14th of December. And from that analysis, we have developed five key policy levers that governments can use to improve ESG performance across the critical mineral sector. So the first is to ensure that legal and regulatory protections exist and are adequately enforced and are up to date. The second is to channel public spending and public investment, not just to encourage development of new supplies, but to ensure that any new supplies and existing supplies adopt better environmental, social and governance practices, and also to encourage the industry and the market to reward good performance. The third topic is to or the third policy lever is to strengthen the collection reporting of data. This can enable progress tracking across the industry. It can also help industry demonstrate who is doing better, which can also lead to improvements and also make it easier for governments to channel investment towards high performing companies. The fourth area is around supply chain transparency. Governments have been looking at this issue for a long time and the role of supply chain due diligence, but there's still a need for greater investments in transparency throughout the supply chain, including a range of issues including due diligence mechanisms, improving traceability and public reporting on risks and mitigation actions that companies are taking. And finally, governments can also support the development of initiatives that can help companies demonstrate that their operations are sustainable and responsible. So these are things like environmental sustainability standards. We have Michelle Brullart today with us from the Coppermark, but there are other standards as well from the IRMA towards sustainable mining and others. And there's a lot that governments can do to support the development of these initiatives that can be complementary to legal and regulatory protections. Also, in this report, we've taken a deep dive on six key risks that can impact the availability of supply. These range across all three of the ES and G environmental, social and governance concerns. So we've looked at water, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, as well as human rights, corruption and community engagement and community engagement also includes not just local communities but also engagement with indigenous peoples. And that's not to say that other risks don't have supply security implications. It's just that we have selected this group of six as priority topics following a series of conversations and discussions that we've had with various industry, government and civil society stakeholders. So I won't go fully into the detail, but just to provide a bit of a teaser, a bit of a flavor for the findings of what we've done in these various deep dives, looking first at greenhouse gas emissions. Although many companies have emissions reduction targets and zero targets, so far, we have, there is a lack of demonstrable progress on greenhouse gas emissions on an industry-wide basis. Some companies have started to make progress individual sites, but across the industry, we're not, we haven't yet seen significant process progress on GHG emissions. And this highlights one of the key conclusions of our report on data. Right now, progress tracking is quite limited by the available data and governments and companies can do more to ensure that that data is publicly available to allow us to understand both the greenhouse gas emissions of individual supply chains across an individual supply chain but also progress across the industry as a whole. Looking briefly at corruption, we see that this is a major concern among investors as it raises increased risks, increases the cost of capital, potential for legal liability and other things, and can introduce significant delays depending on the level of corruption in the supply chain. So, obviously, this is a multifaceted issue that doesn't have a simple solution, but at the same time it deserves much more attention than it's gotten in in recent years and in recent discussions, and a more focused effort on transparency, particularly in accordance with the principles of the EITI standard could bring some improvements, but there's also a need for companies to consider their practices as well. In the interest of time, we won't go through all of them, but just wanted to give a bit of a flavor for the kinds of recommendations we've made. For each of the four sessions or each of the six topics, we're walking through what governments can do across the different policy actions available. That's a regulatory side on supporting standards, on supply chain transparency, on data. And so what we have here is on water just as an example, some things that governments can do is to ensure that public investments or public procurements are conditional on certain progress or certain benchmarks or suppliers meeting certain criteria on water stewardship and also addressing water performance metrics. On the community side, governments can ensure that regulations require companies to identify, engage and include local communities, indigenous peoples and other relevant stakeholders in mineral development decisions. And of course, looking at free prior and informed consent where that applies. On the human rights side, governments can promote supply chain transparency by implementing requirements that essentially have to enforce or require companies to embed human rights within to due diligence systems. And on biodiversity, there's also a lot that can be done to mainstream provisions on the required diversity into mining codes and regulations and ensure there's adequate compliance. So I just wanted to say that these are not meant to be exclusive and in fact the idea of making, for example, public investment decisions, critical condition on performance metrics can apply all of these areas. And what we do in the report is we explore exactly what are the potential options and where are the best, you know, the next steps for governments. With that I will stop the screen share, and we will move to our panel discussion. And we have four distinguished panels with us panelists with us today so I'll just introduce them very briefly right now and then we'll go to them one by one for some introductory remarks and then we'll open it up for questions and answer and have a bit of a discussion. So first we have Elizabeth Kaysens who is the founder and executive director of resource matters. Then we will hear from Stefan De Bruyne, who is the director of external affairs, external affairs at SQM. And then we have Andrew Jacob, who is the manager of sustainability standards for BHP. And then we'll go to Michelle Broulart, who is the Executive Director of the Coppermark. And with that, Elizabeth, please go ahead. Thank you so much. So in my presentation I would like to focus on what I would call the ugly duckling in the field of ESG. And that's the G, the G of governance. I think it was just mentioned in the introduction it's often the topic that investors are both really concerned about. What they've seen is that they typically have a hard time knowing how to deal with it. And that's unfortunate because if I look at the experience looking at the country that I know best, which is the Democratic Republic of Congo, it's also the issue where we've seen the most threats to mineral supply security. There's a risk that, you know, threatens, that might actually disrupt production, disrupt development. And so we'd like to shed a bit more light on that. So when we think of corruption, it's really this toxic friendship between companies and state officials who favor their own interests at the expense of the public good. And often it's also practices that favor quick wins over stable operations. And so if you look at Congo, for instance, I think everyone knows very, very rich country you name a natural resource. There's a very good chance that Congo has some of it or even a lot of it in high grades. And when we think specifically of the energy transition, Congo right now is the third copper producer on the planet, and by far the most important cobalt producer, which is a mineral that's really essential for the battery technology. So it's really a country that is at the heart of the energy transition when it comes to supply. So when you think of these numbers, you know, third copper producer and by far the world's biggest cobalt producer, that sounds quite stable, but as soon as you scratch beneath the first surface, you see a lot of drama and disruptions. I'll give one example of about a decade ago. There was this Canadian company developing a really important copper and cobalt asset. The plant was under construction. The pipes needed connecting, but you could see it was almost done. And yet, over, you know, series of dramatic events, the company was eventually forced out of the country and very questionable grounds and handed over the project was handed over to a highly controversial middleman, very close to the president, who then sold it on to a Kazakh company for a massive profit that middleman has since been sanctioned for corruption in the United States, but the launch of production for that project was delayed by six years. As a result of this whole drama and not just one example there's there's many others. Now the problem with corruption is that it's highly addictive. Once you start dealing in bribes, you create bribe addicts that will want more after the first bribe. And so that's an additional risk. And I think, again, going back to Congo, there's another Western company that learned this really in the hard way. When they got into Congo, they saw no problem dealing with this middleman that I just mentioned, even though there were all kinds of red flags of corruption. Now, more than, you know, over the over the first decade that they were present in the DRC they paid more than a million a billion dollars to this middleman. You know, and they were he was achieving all kinds of magic, but they were really turning a blind eye to the fact that he was super close to the president, and most likely using some of that money to bribe the political elite. Now, a bit later this middleman gets sanctioned in the US and then the company decides to stop making payments, at least to try making to stop paying. So the next thing you know, so they stop paying the next thing you know, they face all kinds of problems in the DRC, and they basically risk losing their minds lawsuits, threats of expropriation of the solving a joint venture. And concretely, that means that suddenly a quarter of the world's cobalt supply is under threat. So eventually they decided to keep paying this middleman and Euro instead of US dollars, but they have faced all kinds of anti corruption lawsuits in different jurisdictions across the world since then. And so this is what I call the cocaine effective corruption. If you're going to start acting as a dealer in these countries, then you shouldn't be surprised that you're creating junkies who will basically come after you if you stop providing fresh supplies of bribes. We see the same development now playing out in Congo's lithium sector. Just for reference, there's no single ton of lithium that's been shipped out of Congo so far. Even though there's an incredibly rich rich deposits, about 400 kilometers north of the copper and cobalt sector, but there are already all kinds of investors and shareholders who are in fights with each other for five different lawsuits over one single deposit. Because everyone basically has their own local allies. And so there's lawsuits in provincial courts and national courts in international arbitration. And the result of this is basically that these lithium deposits right now don't have a bright future. And that right now they've been blocked for several years and companies that haven't done the work to get an expert exploitation license are getting an exploitation license. And those have done that have done more work and that are actually more in line with the legal criteria to get an exploitation license are blocked. And so despite this really murky murky situation in the lithium sector, we already see global international players of the energy transition, asking few questions about all those red flags and lining up to sign off take agreements. But the question is, how secure are these off take agreements? How secure will that supply be? And so I think I'd like to come up with a number of recommendations on how to better deal with this. I think the first one is at the international political level. And there's a bit of a trend. And that's both in the West and in the East and you know that it's not really tied to a specific geopolitical faction, but that is to support leaders in these kind of countries that are considered allies, and they're not really supported for their their amazing governance track record for the G, let alone, you know, for their popularity or for their trust among their people. They're supported on the basis of the assumption that they will give access to resources, and that they can be convinced with arguments that don't necessarily guarantee the best outcome for their country. But the problem is that you may have other actors that come with stronger arguments, and that might actually create disruption for the investment that you thought you had just secured. So that's the first thing is for international political players, allies, partners, partner countries to make sure that this topic is taken into account. The second one is for regulators worldwide to not drop the G in their ESG standards because that's something that we're seeing right now. If you look for instance at the EU battery regulation, you know you use control F and you look for the word corruption, it will show up once in 130 pages. In that environment, it features 109 times, right. So same thing is strategic partnerships that are seeing the daylight now, please make sure that the G does not get dropped in the standards. The third thing is for mining companies themselves to stop thinking that this is the only way of doing business in these high risk jurisdictions. We see that that's a trend you know there's often the, this thought, well that's the only way of being present in this country but I'm not convinced that's the case. There's a level that's really based on extractivism, or you ship out as much as you can as fast as you can, while leaving nothing for the community is around. You will not have the local support and local network that you need to be protected against corruption. But if your model is one of long term value addition, local transformation of the minerals, investing in the energy supply not only for your own minerals but also for the communities around it you get vested among local politicians, among national politicians who will have a much harder time to kick you to kick you out basically and come up with these requests. And the last thing that I would like to say is for the supply chain actors, and what we've seen right now is that corruption is a bit the elephant in the room. No one really knows how to deal with it and so there's often, you know, when we ask questions about high level risk, corruption risk, the answer is often our supply chain is so complex and we don't really know how to deal with this. The OECD has come up with a guide on how to better address these specific issues, but we see now that you know there's other excuses that come up. And we really would like to encourage supply chain actors to ask the right questions. When you face a red flag of corruption, ask your supplier, how it can be sure that it is not paying politicians that it is not engaging in bribery, how it has the right to audit suspicious transactions and so on. Make sure to ask those questions because down the line, it might threaten your supply. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you very much for that very interesting intervention. I'll now turn the floor to Stefan to please give his presentation. My screen is coming through. Yes, we see your slides. Perfect. So I'm, I joined SCUM in 2005 and I was responsible for the sales in Asia Pacific for more than 12 years. So I've seen the change in the lithium demand, live and direct. I think it's a very interesting case study. And so I'll try to shed some light on what SCUM is doing towards all the challenges that Elisabeth has mentioned. So before I start, I want to quickly zoom out. I think it's important to talk about ESG in mining, but I think it's equally important not to forget all the fossil mining that we are doing since many decades. I think we are a fossil society. And as most people on the planet, I'm also addicted to fossils, but I would like to change that. And what you see here in this graph in the colored boxes is the cumulative demand for transition minerals and metals. And in the back in gray, you have one year mining volume of coal. So we're talking of a different scale of magnitude, and we're talking of a very different business proposition, because the only way that the mining of the transition minerals and metals can be sustainable is if we are ultimately recycling them and putting them back into the loop. So I think this is a very important mission that everybody in the value chain needs to take on board. And so jumping now from the broad overview into the lithium production. So if you look globally, most of the lithium today is mined actually more than half in Australia. But those lithium concentrates are today exported to China where they are refined. There is three major refinery projects also locally in Australia. One of them is an SQM joint venture. So to change that situation. But the second country in the world where lithium is produced is Chile and responsible for about 27, 28% of lithium chemical supply last year. And all that lithium is coming from one salt flat. In our opinion, it's the best lithium salt flat in the world. It's also one of the biggest lithium salt flats in the world. And so you can see here on the left of the picture, SQM's evaporation ponds. And then there is some dots that are highlighting some very important local stakeholders. So if you look at the orange dots, those are five indigenous communities that live on the side of the Andes Mountain. And so they rely on surface water coming down. And then the blue dots, you can see that our downstream are SQM's water wells. And I think I took this slide to really highlight the dilemma that we face here because on one side you have a mining company we're operating a government concession. So it's a public private partnership. But on the other hand, you have local indigenous people and they have a very different cosmo vision than the mining company SQM or the government. Their cosmo vision is to live with what the earth naturally offers to you. And that means not drilling for water and it also means not drilling for brine or mining. And so that is a huge dilemma. And then the question and the case study, of course, is about how do you handle this dilemma and this fundamental difference of opinions. So first and foremost, I think, and it's been mentioned in the previous talks, transparency is really key in 2020. We made all the data for environmental monitoring network publicly available to all stakeholders. There's more than 225 hydrogeological measuring points, but also there is biotic monitoring. So it's a very robust environmental monitoring system. And it's open to all stakeholders to look at what are the brine levels in the operating area in the marginal zone, which is a protected area and what are the levels of the freshwater aquifers on the eastern border of the solar. That is not enough. We are the biggest lithium producer in the world. And so that is a result of our leadership strategy. Around 2016, 17, 18, we decided that our strategy needed updating. And so we included sustainability as an important attribute of leadership in the value chain. And of course, it's very easy to set an ambition and to have a vision to become the most sustainable lithium producer. The question is, what do you do about that? And then you have to look at things very holistically and you have to take very dedicated action. I will not dive into everything, but I do want to say that we have set ambitious goals. And in the next slides, I'm going to show you some results already of those goals. And I'll start immediately with water. So we set ourselves a target to reduce water company-wide with 65% by 2040. But specifically for Salad Datacama, we wanted to reduce by 50% before 2030. And actually we have already achieved that ambition. So if you look at the last three years of operation, we are now down more than 50% below our allowed extraction limits, which in prior years we did use. If you look at brine, and I know this is very counterintuitive, but these are facts. So we have reduced the absolute extraction of brine by 23% compared to our allowed extraction rate. At the same time, if you look at our refinery, which is in Antofagasta by the Pacific Ocean, there we are quadrupling our output. And we're doing that because the resource gives us this flexibility, but also because of innovations and because of the targets that we have set ourselves and changes to our business strategy. If you combine those and you look at the perceived water intensity, this is where you abandon life cycle assessment and you look at how stakeholders perceive this, we have actually reduced the perceived water intensity by two thirds in the last four years. I've shown you all the initiatives we've taken. We're very encouraged that also now the leading ESG rating companies in the world recognize that we are a leader in this aspect. And I want to draw you to the picture on the left where you see the very recent updates of S&P Global's sustainability yearbook. This is a very comprehensive assessment. And we are very proud that there actually SQM has reached 91. And this is the industry maximum score. So it shows that we're very, very focused on this. And this is also confirmed by the definitive analysis, which also ranks as one of the top companies in the world. Regarding standards and really having independently audit that you're doing things according to the book. And that's on ES and G and also leaving positive legacies. We are the first lithium site to achieve Irma 75 level. And we're very proud of that. This was the result of more than three years of intense work throughout the organization and also outside organization with stakeholders. Why did we choose Irma? Because actually it's a choice that we didn't make alone. It's a standard that is supported by worker union organizations by affected communities, but also by investors, by our customers, by the value chain and also by civil society. That's not to say it's a perfect standard. But we believe that it is going very strongly in that direction to meeting all the requirements that are demanded from us. I leave a link here to a German study which compares mining standards. I know often people say this is very confusing and there's too many standards. And that I think is believed because many standards were initially started as material specific standards. We chose a material agnostic standard, which we believe is the most comprehensive and the most rigorous mining assurance standard in the world today. Final point of my presentation. There was also a lot of comments about value sharing and local transformation. We are producing battery grades, lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide locally in Chile to the highest standards used by cathode producers and battery producers worldwide. Without any transformers in between. The Salad de Atacama is also the lithium mining site with by far the highest value sharing of lithium in the world. Specifically for SQM last year under the lease agreement with the Chilean government. We contributed close to 3.3 billion dollar. We're also a Chilean company. So we pay Chilean corporate taxes, which last year amounted to 1.7 billion dollar overall 5 billion dollar. So I think it's very clear to say that Chile is a country that has managed this very well. It's also an OECD member country. It's in the top quartile of rule of law in the world. And so I think this is an example, but saying that immediately I also think of immediately all the things that we have left to do because there's a lot of work left to be done on the ground in engagement. And in responding to all the demands that are raised by stakeholders. And so that is what drives and motivates us every day. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Thank you, Stefan, for that presentation. We'll now turn to Andrew Jacob from BHP, but I'll just note to the participants, please feel free to send your questions using the Q&A feature of Zoom and we will come to them after this session or after the discussion. Andrew, please. Well, thanks. Thanks for the IA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan for today. I can certainly resonate with Takatani-san's opening comments that the private sector should share its learnings and I'll try to do some of that today focused on the topic of ESG standards. More specifically though, I would like to share reflections on three things. Really the role of ESG performance standards in the context of the energy transition. He barriers limiting the effectiveness of standards today and opportunity to lift the impact of standards for the benefits of everyone. So we believe that in any plausible 1.5 degree scenario, the industry has to both grow rapidly and produce responsibly at the same time. If set up effectively, ESG performance standards have a major role to play in supporting a responsible energy transition by lifting ESG performance and transparency across the global mineral supply chain. By standards, I'm referring here mostly to a responsible production standard set up by organizations such as the copper mark towards the standard mining and the international council, the mining and metals to name just a few. And for us, there's many reasons why the engagement in and the adoption of these standards is very important. Firstly, by engaging in the development of stands, we have an opportunity as a hundred and thirty eight company to contribute learnings working together with the multi-stakeholder community to inform industry better practices and help lift performance across the industry. Secondly, by lining our management systems with industry better practices, it supports our ability to practically manage ESG risks as well as ESG opportunity. Thirdly, independent verification against credible standards by no means perfect is the most objective measures today to report on the ESG performance of a mining operation. So by making performance and actions more transparent, it can support trust with a broad and diverse set of stakeholders. And finally, where we can meet or exceed the expectations of those stakeholders, it can directionally support us to be a supplier, buyer, partner and employer of choice. Now, while standards present great promise, there remain some barriers to their effectiveness today, and I'm going to share just two of them. The first is, perhaps unsurprisingly, proliferation. Despite often originating from positive intent, the proliferation of ESG standards initiatives across the globe has generated unnecessarily high levels of complexity to interpret and implement. It's also hampered stakeholders' ability to make meaningful comparisons between organizations, and that complexity tends to be further elevated by content within standards, which can carry ambiguity leading to varying interpretations and lengthy lead times to implement. Simply put, the world has too many standards today, and we see the growing risk of this distracting rather enabling the industry to focus on the actions that matter the most. We would define the second challenge as fragmented expectations. Many performance standards have transitioned from being voluntary to being a firm expectation from customers, commodity exchanges, industry associations and even regulations. However, we see varying knowledge and expectations on standards across the multi-stakeholder universe, often nuanced by commodity, downstream market and jurisdiction. And while credible standards exist today, there is currently no single best standard as each has its own strengths and weaknesses, be that the scope or specific performance criteria, the assurance process, the degree of multi-stakeholder engagement, or the practicality to implement. So the result of these two things of proliferation and fragmented expectations means that many organizations today are impelled to adopt many standards, which also means many assurance processes, resulting in high inefficiency, audit fatigue, and an orientation around compliance, rather than impact. That being said, we see two clear opportunities to lift the positive impact of standards for everyone. The first is simplification. In order to structurally address proliferation over the mid to long term, we believe that the unification or convergence of major ESG performance standards is necessary. And if done in the right manner, should benefit everyone, society, investors, customers, and other stakeholders. It removes layers of complexity, enables better comparability of companies, and it provides an opportunity to bring the best of all worlds, combining the currently lean infrastructure across the standards landscape and lifecycle spanning standard development, implementation, assurance, and governance. Convergence also provides an opportunity for better continuity of a responsible framework to build from. And that would provide better stability and confidence for organizations to streamline our internal processes, systems, and improvement programs with external standards. And by aligning on a primary responsible production standard, this can create greater headspace to focus on improvements to the sustainability of value chains. Extending from responsible production and processing to responsible products and better positioning value chains for a more circular economy. How this is done is also important. Multistakeholder participation remains crucial in standards development and governance. At the same time, standards need to be clear, risk based and practical for the industry to implement respecting diverse local contexts across our sector. The second opportunity relates to extending this opportunity for simplification into policies and regulations and across all geographies. And there's a few parts to this. You know, firstly, where policies and regulations reference responsible production and responsible sourcing, they should leverage credible standards, rather than an attempt to create a new set of requirements. Secondly, this should not be limited to specific jurisdictions, nor specific raw material, but aims to uncover all types of mining globally. To have real impact, this should be about lifting everyone up, irrespective of where they present a low ESG risk like nickel sulfide production in in Australia or a high ESG risk like nickel laterite production in Indonesia. This would also allow a level playing field for the global production of minerals and metals for for society. To bring in the broader industry up and ingraining continuous improvements means that standards and policies have to be inclusive enough to encourage all types of producers to participate, as well as be sufficiently performance based such that better ESG performance differentiated and incentivize the lift higher wherever possible regulations should also meet these objectives subject to jurisdictional constraints. So let me close here with a few key messages and standards have the potential to catalyze change across mental supply chains. And this next period will define whether the status quo proliferation prevailed, or whether unification and therefore the opportunity for greater impact prospered. It's important that the right foundations are set now to best position this for the midst of long term by unifying standard streamlining policies and regulations and where possible applying this to the industry as a whole. This could significantly lift positive globally as to impact for all types of stakeholders and better support responsible energy transition. Thank you. We'll now turn to our final panelist Michelle who will we'll start from the customer. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for having me here today. It's a pleasure to be in this conversation. It's always a bit of a challenge to go last after a series of speakers. If you allow me just to say a word about the copper market itself. We are an assurance framework for responsible production. So we do. We are one of these standards that are being discussed here. The next question is for a sustainable society to be enabled by the responsible production but also sourcing and recycling of metals and we work predominantly with copper, as well as nickels ink and liptinum today. The copper mark has been around for a bit more than three years and today covers about 30% of globally mined copper so not an insignificant volume of the globally mined commodity in terms of the copper production. It's been very encouraging to hear the recommendations from the IE around transparency, supply chain due diligence and the role of voluntary standards, the role that they can play in supporting policy and supporting governments when it comes to responsible production. At the same time, as has been mentioned just now by Andrew, this has become a pretty complex landscape and a pretty crowded landscape and companies, both SQM and BHP as we've just seen and heard are implementing not just one but really a multitude of different standards. So, you know, what do we do? What do we go from here? Indeed, it's really not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater but it's to understand what the role is of these standards. What kind of tool are they and where do we best use them in the toolbox to achieve responsible, responsibly produced minerals that can support the energy transition. So I wanted to spend my couple of minutes reflecting on the types of standards that we have in this crowded landscape and what some of the aspects are that standards can help to support so how can we best use them. So I think one thing to acknowledge is that, you know, standards are a great tool to help convene different stakeholders where there is a collective issue that needs to be solved. In particular, where there is an absence of a defined set of requirements or there's an absence of a consensus around what is responsible production look like, how do we define that in a particular sector in a particular geography for a particular issue. And so voluntary standards can help drive a shared understanding of what expectations are not just in one jurisdiction, not just in one value chain but more broadly speaking. And because there is this inherent driver around standards to solve a problem as it's being perceived by a number of stakeholders, we typically see standards that are either sort of focused on a specific value chain or a specific sector, in this case, mining or value chains of, in our case, copper for other systems, aluminium or steel, for example. We see standards that are more product focused so a global battery alliance is a great example of that where there is an issue around ensuring sustainable value chains with batteries. Or we have standards that are more issue focused to kind of bringing us back to the topic of transparency and governance with the EITI, or other standards that are very specifically looking to deep dive and address one particular issue. And so that explains part of the complexity here is that we sort of come at this problem with different stakeholders looking to solve either looking to deep dive into specific issues or looking to solve an issue in a specific sector or a specific value chain or a specific geography. And that's led to indeed a bit of a mushrooming of these different voluntary standards. So, you know, how are they helpful? Why are they still a tool that's being used? Because even though we do hear very frequently and very loudly that there is a complexity in the standards landscape, it's overcrowded, it's becoming too difficult to navigate for the users, both for the users who want to implement the standards and those who want to use the results of the standards. We still see it feels like almost daily announcements of initiatives, multi stakeholder initiatives, sustainability initiatives, principles that a group of companies, a group of stakeholders have agreed to implement. So we still see this as a field that's quite dynamic and where new initiatives continue to emerge rather than this being sort of a finite state where we can now just focus on consolidation. And so I think a couple of the ways in which standards help or are able to support moving the industry forward is one by setting the standards. So to my point, creating a shared understanding of what a specific issue, how to tackle that, what are the basic principles, the performance, the practices that we're looking for and how can we make sure that that's agreed. Again, not just across a specific national regulatory context, but then how do we make sure that these expectations really translate across a whole industry and a whole sector. And so in that sense, standards are a tool that can help support the implementation of policies in the national context. They obviously they don't, they don't take away the need for sound policy and sound regulation, but they can support companies in implementing practices that will then be aligned with the requirements in different jurisdiction. Andrew also mentioned that independent verification is something that very often accompanies standards and again this will have a level of independent third party verification anywhere in the world really through these global systems, not tied to national inspections or or the ability of national governments to verify practices which may be looking differently and having different outputs in terms of the results that are communicated etc. So voluntary standards do in many instances provide an opportunity for a independent verification slash assurance process at the site level to be implemented and then to combine that with an expectation of transparency on the results. So a disclosure of what are the performance levels of a specific site against the requirement in that standard, which links back to the recommendation of the need to have more data, more comparability and more information as to how companies and sites are really performing in this space that again is comparable beyond a single sort of geography or jurisdiction or sector. So, you know, we're setting expectations with standards. We often have frameworks in place that allow us to monitor and verify adherence and implementation. And that is combined with transparency in terms of how that verification is conducted and then the results of that verification in terms of the performance levels. And as I sort of started saying here that one of the key aspects of standards is the ability to bring multiple different stakeholders to the table. Now, when we say multi stakeholder, we may have an image of what that looks like in terms of different categories, different types of stakeholders being around the table. But sometimes standards can even just be a tool to bring industries to the table to bring more companies, more different actors, smaller actors, medium sized actors to the conversation that would otherwise not have participated. So I think when we say an ability of a standard to convene different stakeholders is not it's great if that is a multi stakeholder process and that is definitely that the direction of travel that we are going into. But again, I wouldn't want to discuss the single issue standards that, you know, really bring together, for example, actors around a very specific topic that needs some focus and that needs to be addressed in more detail, or even standards and that are sort of cluster around the value chain or around the specific sector to be able to scale our efforts here. Because ultimately, if we want to be successful in the energy transition, and if that energy transition is to be supported by responsibly produced minerals, we really need to get to scale. We need to be able to go beyond the largest producers and we need to be able to bring responsible production standards to the broader set of the industry. We need to bring that to new geographies to potentially not new minerals in the sense that they weren't in the ground before, but you know minerals where there is a significant growth forecasted. We're going to need to have new players, again, new geographies in the in the mix here. And so there's a real opportunity for us to convene and to engage with those stakeholders from the beginning, without having to kind of go back for decades, but to start where we are today in terms of the understanding of what responsible practices are from the companies that are already implementing these standards of years of experience in terms of implementing and demonstrating performance against those standards, so that at the end of the day we can leapfrog, if that's the right term, with the newer producers and the demand that it needs, well, to supply them to follow the demand in terms of the energy transition in a way that doesn't harm people and the planet. Thank you, Michelle for that intervention at this point we have about 35 minutes where we will have more of an open discussion among the panelists. I see a few questions are coming on the Q&A function so we will take those in a few minutes but I want to start with a question of my own. This one is perhaps for primarily for Andrew and perhaps Stefan but of course all please feel free to join me as you see. So, given the complexities of demonstrating and improving ESG performance, we wanted to ask how does this effort emerge as a business case for companies. So from the company side, where are you seeing the pressure to improve ESG standards? Is it coming from investors? Is it coming from customers, from governments? Just wondering if you could speak a little bit about also particularly from Stefan's side, the decision to approach the IRMA standard. That's quite an interesting dynamic we'd like to hear a little bit more about maybe Andrew if you want to start and then you can go to Stefan and then others. Absolutely, great question and probably let me just put it into the two parts, one on the business case and secondly on where we see the pressure coming from. So I guess on the business case for us at its core we believe that proactively managing ESG risks and opportunities means that we're better positioned to protect and grow our reputation, license to operate, market access, product credentials and help to attract the best people. At the same time the value proposition could be stronger in some areas and we believe as one example there should be a stronger correlation between objective ESG performance and access to capital. And we can see that in sort of what you've touched on also as the IEA. I think ambition levels can also shape the case right and any company that wants to be an ESG leader in their industry and credibly shape that agenda has to be able to back that up with compelling ESG performance. And I'd also say that the value proposition on this also extends to an industry level, you know with better transparency there's a better opportunity for closing what has traditionally been a wide trust deficit between society and our industry. And I would add here that lifting multi-stakeholder education awareness programs such as the ESG standards is also important here. Looking to the second part in terms of where the pressure is coming from, look at both external and internal. Externally I'd say the pressure varies mostly by value chain and geography as other types of ESG risk that different stakeholders are focused on. We'd say downstream pressures really led by the automotive sector particularly battery value chain, but other sectors like construction also with steel value chains and big tech with data centers linked to copper value chains are also leaning in more. Civil society investors are playing growing roles as our policymakers through emerging critical minerals acts and the expansion of due diligence regulations. Geographically Europe is leading the charge but it can also risk hindering progress if it generates too much complexity. And external competition of course also plays a healthy pressure of a role across the industry with some producers clearly accelerating efforts in this space. Internally in terms of internal pressure our experience at least has been that our company's purpose value strategy and culture with incentive systems lined around that provides a fairly organic and digital pressure at all levels of the organization to do things responsibly and continuously improved. As there is external competition, there's also internal competition. You don't want to be the leader of an operation scoring poorly on your ESG audit results. There's a lot of reputation, passion and private stake and that in itself drives significant pressure. So for us we think it's been probably less of a question on the business case and where we need to get to and and more about how we and the industry do this in a more effective manner. And the high focus based on opportunities such as such as unifying the standards landscape. Thank you. Yes. So, from our side, we believe the business and the ESG interest are fully aligned. I'll try to give a couple of quick examples to demonstrate that. So, we started doing life cycle assessment back in 2019. Because if you set the goal to be carbon neutral, you need to know where your footprint is coming from and you cannot manage what you don't measure. So, from that LCA, we saw that more than half of our carbon footprint of lithium carbonate is coming from an input, which is soda ash. So, as we had set the goal to become carbon neutral by 2030, then it was up to the engineering teams to to address that footprint. And so we are now working very intensely on a project to produce our own soda ash in house. And so that's a very exciting project where actually the lithium engineers also gave a very good idea to the iodine and the nitrate engineers to piggyback off of that. So, when you see that happening, it really, it's something very, very strong and goals can seem unattainable. But when you put people to work, you can really move things forward. I would say if you look at the stakeholders landscape, we did human rights participatory due diligence process last year. And you can see that the concerns and the perception about water are very, very ingrained in stakeholders. And so based on the outcome of that due diligence process, we then announced our innovation roadmap for water neutral lithium production where we want to combine the LE with sea water reduction desalination and advanced evaporation technologies. And that is something that you can see that the interplay with the stakeholders actually helping us to move forward. And we just announced last week, actually, that we have now invested 20% in the LE technology company in France called Adionix. And so as an employee of a company, it's very exciting to see those things at play. And so to me, there is no divergence or disalignment between the ESG interest and the business interest. If you are a long term company, if you don't tackle this seriously sooner or later, it's going to negatively affect your business. Thanks for that, Stefan. I want to come as a follow up to something that you said and also brings in one of the questions for the floor from the Q&A. Stefan, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how the multi stakeholder process has worked in particular. The question we have is directed at you and the question is, what is the most immediate form of communication and transparency with the indigenous locals in Atacama? And maybe if you could say a little bit more about how you've approached the issue specifically of indigenous peoples and the rights associated with that. Thank you. That's a very good question. And that immediately, and the question mentions some older people don't have access to the internet. Actually, there's local communities that don't have even good cell phone network coverage. So I think to me that brings immediately the importance to mind of horizontality. And so it's understanding those restrictions and then acting towards it. And so we are by origin a fertilizer company. So we are fortunate that we have been working for many, many years with local communities through agricultural support where our agronomist help local farmers. And so we try to continue to build on that. If you look specifically at the five communities, which are to the east of the solar, which are in our environmental permit as defined area of influence. We have now agreements with four out of five of those communities. And those agreements also include environmental working tables. And so what that means is that local communities say, hey, you're reporting transparently on your environmental monitoring system. But how do I know that those data are correct? And so with those four communities, those environmental working tables, they include joint monitoring. And so people from the local community come with us to the wells, the control wells to verify that the measurements are correct. Thank you for that. I know I have another question from the floor that's on a similar topic that's perhaps I'll direct the question at Michelle, but maybe others can have might have thoughts. It's a slightly provocative question from Pierre de Pascal, noting that 99% of the responsible mining standards that have that are, you know, that are really originating with the industry. There's a lot of at least a historical, most of the standards are coming from the industry. And his question is what safeguards do you see as critical to not replicate the mistakes of the industry led initiatives and stakeholders. We've also heard Andrew mentioned the importance of multi stakeholder in the involvement in development of standards. So that's what we could start with Michelle as to what you if you have any thoughts on that and then Andrew please feel free to jump in. Thank you. Yes, thanks for the question. I mean, maybe we'll start by saying I don't entirely agree with the assessment of 99% of the standards being just industry development industry that one can debate over that. Look, I think what we've seen over the past couple of years is really a far, a far more clear definition of what makes a standard credible. There's an increasing set of criteria and requirements whether that's driven in the EU through regulatory developments of trying to define what kinds of standards would be accepted or whether that's, you know, increasing numbers of studies, benchmarks and reports, learnings. I think what we're seeing is a clear set of criteria that are coming out to say if you want to have a voluntary standards, there's, you know, three, four, five things that are essential for this to be considered credible. These are multi stakeholder governance. So engagement of, you know, and in that I mean a governance structure that doesn't allow any single group to unduly influence the process and the outcome. Transparency as I said in process and the results. So not just publishing audit results but also being transparent in terms of what are the requirements, how does the process, how does the assurance process work. Our assessor selected, etc. The requirement to have independent and site level verification and this is where, you know, if we look at some of the kind of more rating agencies that look at corporate policies. What we're seeing as is a clear kind of ask to really goes site level and have that independent verification at that level. And then increasingly sort of grievance management and remedy are other expectations, which are probably slightly less well defined, but there is an expectation for standards also to be able to manage complaints through again transparent and inclusive mechanisms to to manage complaints and grievances as they're being raised. And to either provide or in most cases actually, you know, be able to participate in remedy where where impacts have been where adverse impacts have occurred and again that's that's something where I think we still need to see more developments and more clarity over what the role of standards and standard systems is. So I think the bear that the sort of the safeguards are in those criteria and the, you know, the increasing conversations around what is credible, how is that structured how is that managed and organized are really helpful because it does not only provide transparency in terms of how these standards setting organizations are managed, how these standards are developed and how you know performance against them is verified. But I think it also on this link to the questions I'm seeing around convergence. It provides us with an opportunity for more collaboration in a first instance harmonization potentially convergence going forward off standards because we're all working towards meeting those same criteria and also sort of adjusting our processes to meet those same expectations around what is a credible standard and that brings the systems naturally more together. So I think what you're seeing today is is a result of a more clear expression of what a credible standard is a more clear set of expectations of what a credible standard is. And that helps us really bring standards closer together and it helps us engage among standards as well to understand where are there further opportunities for us to either, you know, cross recognize each other's results, or, you know, potentially bring our respective standards closer together. It's Michelle perhaps we can go to Elizabeth who looks keen to jump in on this topic. Yes, thank you. I wanted to bounce off the idea of a credible standard and the idea of it being led by the industry or not. I think in the end the credible standard is the one that has an impact on the ground. And I think we, we unfortunately are still very much lagging in terms of what we have to show for all the standards that we have, whether they're industry led or multi stakeholder led. Unfortunately, it hasn't been incredibly convincing for communities on the ground. And so again, regardless of who's been developing it. I think there's been a real problem of impact. And so the question becomes why have we waited for so long to take more robust measures in terms of moving beyond the soft law approach right now we do have again a fragmented approach at different jurisdictions that are picking up selective issues in selective regulations but why for instance has the OECD was really been kind of at the heart of standard setting and to which all the different industries are now aligning or testing the alignment of of their standards. Why has the OECD not moved forward towards a convention on due diligence and a real more binding standard that countries could ratify and then implement in their various jurisdictions which would help us create a level playing field that is really much needed. I'll give just one example. You know the OECD guidance on due diligence has an important step which is step five in terms of public reporting on the due diligence efforts that companies have carried out along their supply chain. I would like to see how many companies are really rigorous in publicly reporting on what they have actually done on trying to disclose you know who their supplies are what the issues are that they have faced with concrete examples, rather than you know more general, we faced some issues of human rights violations somewhere on a continent, you know, where where is that reporting where is the public disclosure of of the efforts that have been put into into into proper property diligence that is not a result of international media focusing on an issue but really a genuine engagement with communities on the ground to see what key concerns are. I think it's about time for us to to move to the next step and make those disclosures compulsory rather than up to basically good practices or soft law. One of the things we see for instance it's an easy answer to to again that for me is a testimony to the fact that there's no need to go beyond is for instance oh you know our supply chain is very complex and then we keep it at that. And we fail to really be rigorous in what we're asking from major multinationals who source you know incredible amounts of minerals it's really up to them to see how far they go in mapping their supply chain and planting it and so they can get away with saying it's too complex so it's you know five steps, five steps remote so we don't do it. At resource matters we've taken that that argument to the test, and we've actually mapped the cobalt supply chain, I mean I don't know if there's time to show what we've, how far we've gotten. But it's basically again, how is it possible that organization which is, you know, an organization nonprofit based on public, on public report on public available information. We managed to map a supply chain that big multinationals say that they can't map. I'm just getting to the to the one second. Let me just show. Second, I'm not sure you can see the screen. Yes, we can see. So again this is like it's right now all of this is based on, on, on basically reporting that isn't compulsory. This is us putting together the supply chain of the cobalt of the cobalt sector, mainly focusing on the DRC because that's the country that we know best. And basically this is what we were able to map based on stock reports, news reports, news articles, basically 95% of the information that's on this, on this, on this map is, is publicly available. But there's no compulsory, you know, disclosure requirements so we can do this for cobalt because that's an issue that that's a mineral that's been a lot in the media, a lot in, you know, there's been a lot of attention to selective issues in that sector. And so, as a result, companies have become a bit more transparent in disclosing who they, who they source from, and actually say oh we source from industrial mining therefore there is no problem, again this problem of selectivity. And yet, and yet if we want to do the same with lithium I'm not sure we're going to be able to get so far because there's maybe been a bit less attention to that mineral or to nickel or to magnesium. So that's, I think if we managed to get a compulsory standard that requires this kind of disclosure we would be able to carry out more proper due diligence across different minerals, regardless of which kind of specific topic is in the media. So I'll keep it at that. Thank you, Elizabeth. We're starting to get into some related questions. We know about the what the role of due diligence and the role of traceability and also how those two things fit together because they're not necessarily we don't see them as the same thing. And like what can that play in supply chains and what can governments do to support that we've heard a little bit from from Elizabeth just now is more support on the due diligence potentially the idea of a convention supported by the OECD. And there's also just one of the comments in the question box that I that would draw your attention to from from here about some work that the OECD is done in this area, but I just wanted to raise that for for all to add to in addition to what Elizabeth has raised, please. Andrew, go ahead. I'm happy to go ahead with that question on due diligence and traceability and fully agree that they're different things, albeit quite complimentary to each other. I guess we see due diligence as a pretty powerful vehicle for leverage to lift transparency the issue is the mineral supply chains and ultimately drive action. I think the good thing is that the industry has a base due diligence framework, organized around the OECD guidance and minerals which underpins most standards. The challenge is more that because of standards and arguably regulatory proliferation, the industry needs to integrate varying interpretations of that framework across different standards for all of those regulators customers and other stakeholders. So again, you know, harmonizing standards policies and regulations can can really better empower companies to spend more time capacity building with the mineral supply chain and probably less time distracted by by too many audits. I think with due diligence and respecting Elizabeth's comments as well, I'd say it's just important to stress that aside from conflict mineral, the majority of our industry is still relatively new in our due diligence journey, particularly OECD alignment and meaningful transparency and improvement, particularly with higher risk areas will really come from focused upstream risk based due diligence as that's where the leverage in commercial relations relationships typically resides and regulations, particularly from the EU, in conjunction with the UNGP and OECD guidelines are understandably expanding the scope of due diligence from primary to recycle materials and from human rights to environmental risks. Equally, we think it's important that expansions in the scope of due diligence are done in a very clear and considered manner that the industry does not spread itself too thin or lose focus on capacity building against critical risks with them and also with the EU, which requires time and focus as the traceability, I would say regulations across both sides of the Atlantic and really extended from transparency into traceability over recent times with the EU batch of regulation, perhaps the most non discretionary of those. There's a pretty long journey ahead in our view before we see a world with high quality product level ESG data that's scaled industry wide and flowing excessively along what tends to be pretty long value chain. And we think there's a few prerequisites for a successful traceability ecosystem, we can call it that. I think we need to clearly address interoperability between standards, product passports and traceability platforms. We know that the traceability ecosystem can't afford to proliferate it doesn't have the luxury of time for importers to be ready before key regulatory deadline. I think we also have to respect the supply market for traceability still in its formative years and it's not easy to build sustainable business models with varying motivation levels from active across the value chain and and a high cost of capital environment. And our industry could also benefit from learning from more advanced industries on traceability, while still adopting to prepare for solutions and look some of those challenges are already well recognized and we're certainly engaged with border stakeholder, border multi stakeholder communities I should say that are coming together to try and address those and and we know that you know pragmatism is going to be pretty important there. I'll just add one final comment which is well I think that that ecosystem needs a lot of maturity we do think that product traceability such as Stefan spec about about life cycle assessments has a relatively clear a pathway, particularly as an eloquent approach to supporting carbon footprinting and beyond the missions to and is a natural no regret move for companies that can also serve as primary data into traceability as well. I might have it on some other to make comment. Thanks Andrew, I said Michelle and Stefan both want to come in but I just wanted to know where we might run out of time on the question so I'd encourage the panelists to look at the Q&A and also if you want to provide any written responses to anything please feel free to do that Michelle, please. Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to circle back to Elizabeth's point about the impact because I think after time we do tend to forget a little bit when we get into traceability discussions on why it is that we are asking for traceability. What is the impact we're ultimately trying to achieve here on the ground and I think what we've seen with conflict minerals regulations for example is that you know we we have a risk here of creating paperwork. For the sake of creating paperwork, and that is not going to drive the impact we're looking for. So, that's what to me, making the distinction and continue to make the distinction between traceability and supply chain due diligence and transparency. It's really important. I don't think we're going to progress on making the positive impacts we're trying to make or mitigating the negative impacts in some instances without transparency in supply chains being established. But that doesn't necessarily mean we have to have full traceability in every supply chain for every product. I think the starting point has to be to do that mapping exercise right to understand the supply chains if you are a customer if you are a buyer to understand where the material was coming from because that's going to help you identify where the impacts are, where the negative impacts are, where the opportunities are to create a more positive impact. And so transparency I think is a key tool. Supply chain mapping supply chain due diligence are key tools that we need to use there but I would just caution against the automatic conclusion that traceability is a solution that helps us drive impact in every instance while it undoubtedly has its benefits and its place in the ecosystem of tools here that we have as well. I think Andrew did the far better job right now outlining what some of the challenges are that we have there in terms of traceability. So I think having, you know, having accompanied companies starting with Frank with conflict minerals back in the days and, you know, now today focusing on copper and other minerals more in implementing supply chain due diligence laws. It does take a while it takes a while for these due diligence expectations to be translated into management systems. I think we've come some way over the past years but again to sort of, you know, go back to Elizabeth's point and picking up from Pierre in the chat as well. There continues to be calls for better disclosure, you know, better public reporting on these elements. And so again that goes to the point of transparency and being able to have the information that allows us to understand where the, where the risks are in the value chain and so where do we need to focus our efforts to be able to create the impact we're looking for. Thank you, Michelle. Elizabeth, do you want to respond directly to that point? Sorry, Stefan. Just very, very quickly. I don't think my argument was about setting up traceability schemes. I don't think that was the core of my point. The point was actually about transparency and disclosure and making sure that there's much more rigorous reporting on what companies do to ensure that they have no diligence. They have tried to map their supply chain that they have tried to identify the people centered problems that that are happening in their supply chain, rather than spend a lot of money on consultants involved in traceability initiatives and all kinds of technological feats, but that really miss the impact. So I just really want to clarify that that's my focus was actually on transparency and disclosure, but to make that compulsory rather than the current soft law that we have and that has not been effective enough. Stefan, please go ahead. Okay, so I'll address the three topics in order. So I think on due diligence, one of the strong things about Irma is that the full audit report is publicly available if as a company you want to report your score. So that gives a very good base document for discussion with stakeholders. And of course it allows you to zoom in on the points where work is left to be done, and you don't need to discuss things which are already up to the highest standards. On traceability, I do think that's very important. It's something where a lot of work is still being done. But so we are working with circular to provide data throughout a value chain, ultimately, to reach the final customer. And I just wanted to mention also because you also questioned the lithium supply chain is a bit the large majority of lithium today is produced in OECD countries at least at mining level. The price boom is now more or less over. So the incentive for artisanal and small scale mining is reducing strongly. But there really, you know, we are accountable and there is a good example, which I really love. Besides what the value chain itself is doing. For instance, the French Geo surveyed BRGM wrote a paper on how they can individually trace lithium to it back to its source because lithium sources are so diverse. And they have a very good view of tracing back the lithium. So I think that transparency and that traceability is not necessarily the need of an expensive consultant. You have other chemical solutions as well. Ultimately, we all need to be held accountable. Otherwise, stakeholders will stay with doubts. And so I think that's where we need to work towards. Thank you for that. We have about five minutes left. There's one quite interesting question in the chat that I just wanted to see if there are any perspectives on this is the question is essentially about the dynamics between different renewable different clean energy technologies and how they play to each other specifically the question of how, you know, the substitutability between hydrogen and renewable energy in some places. I just wondered if the question is, is there any danger that the dynamics and competing uses between clean energy technologies may have a negative impact on the kind of improvements of sustainability. Maybe there's a particular question for me that this raises on the need for decarbonizing mining operations themselves and what options are available and how you take into account those kind of choices between technologies. If anybody wants to react to that in our last four or five minutes. We have a quick comment. Of course, I'm a shameless lithium advocate, but I think the main challenge on hydrogen is to get green hydrogen. And today we have a minority of hydrogen produced as green hydrogen. I think we need to solve that that first before we talk about hydrogen as a competing technology for for mobility. When you talk to OEMs today. In most use cases of light and passenger vehicles, buses, even trucks. Lithium mine seems to be the most economic and so the technology of choice going forward. I think we'll need hydrogen in hard to obeyed carbon intent sectors. And so for me, they are kind of separate because we believe very strongly that that lithium mine is is going to be the technology of choice, at least in mobility, but also energy storage going forward. Thanks for that Stefan. Unless any others have a comment on that point, it does raise for me a related question of this is not necessarily one for us to answer today but just for one, just as a point for reflection is how do the ESG impacts of the upstream inputs like lithium cobalt etc. How should how does that and how should that feed into the decisions about what are the choices for whether we use electric vehicles or whether we use other clean energy technologies. I mean this is really an interesting thought obviously we have the big piece about climate, but we shouldn't forget that there are, you know, differences between different technologies so anyway this is really just it also plays into some questions about circularity and how we reuse things. But we were kind of running out of time so if anybody has any thoughts on that please feel free. But the one one last comment that I did want to look at there was a question about working conditions and about how the conditions for workers and safety is addressed in the context of these sustainability questions when anybody wants to have one final word and in one minute on that particular topic which hasn't yet come up. I'm happy to just become, you know, any broader or any comprehensive sustainability standard that covers the ESG and the G will include requirements around working conditions. Things like labor rights, employment terms, worker grievance mechanisms, working hours, occupational health and safety etc are standard topics to be covered in any sustainability standard again that isn't single issue focus but that is comprehensive in its scope. Stefan? I can maybe quickly comment and highlight again why we believe so strongly in Irma. We have labor unions on the governance board of the Irma standard so the standard was designed over a period of more than 10 years and so it takes this into account. And yeah, it's a transformational process because you have to look at everything your supply chain, your workers, your environmental management, communities, how you plan for positive, negative legacies, all of that is considered in the standard and is audited and is transparently available in the audit report for stakeholders to look at and then hopefully reach out to us and start a conversation. Thank you Stefan. I just want to thank all of the panelists and also to thank the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Takatani-san for being here with us today and for encouraging this work. This has been a very interesting discussion and debate and I hope we'll continue this. And there's one last question in the chat about what steps could governments and investors take to supersede the need for a business case and mainstream responsible mining across all companies. And I'll just use that as a shameless plug if that's exactly the question we're trying to answer in our report that will be coming out on 14th of December so please keep an eye out for that. Thank you everyone.


Bear with me. Hi everyone joining right now. Namaste Janice Keith Susan Terje Don Joanne Cherry Janice Karen Angela So glad everybody can join me right now on this n5d Facebook live My name is Greg Prescott. I'll be hosting this for who knows how long as long as it takes to get this information out there I'm so grateful that you're all able To join me this morning Thank you. So I want to start things off with a UFO sighting last night, and it was pretty cool So about 9 30 or so last night Michelle's like let's go to the beach You don't have to twist my arm to go So we go to the beach and we see this light in the western sky over the Gulf of Mexico and and There's this UFO there and it seemed like it was going left and then it would go right And it's not just a small movement These were pretty drastic movements that it was going and go back and forth like that. It was really cool and If to me it seemed like the the UFO was over the Atlantis Stargate as we all know that there's this a major Stargate in the Gulf of Mexico at the Atlantis Stargate and It was almost like as if it was patrolling or protecting that Stargate out there So we we were checking that out for probably I don't know maybe half an hour or so and then we get back to We get back here to my house and All of a sudden I get all these alerts on my Facebook page Saying that Got a picture of it here Saying that we removed your post because it looks like spam go to your support inbox to learn more and This is what I was flooded with So and it was from my other website bodymindsoulspirit.com and I put a link in there As one of the first links on this video to that website and on that website I think I have close to hundred and I think 137,000 followers something like that and What happened was they they went through and they Basically removed all 1200 posts that I had on Facebook And I had to go back and individually for I only went back like two or three months Actually a little more than that till October and had to physically say this is not spam This is not spam. I made a post about it earlier today, too last night and So many people I got so much love and support From everybody and it is true, you know attention flows where attention goes and vice versa, but So many people did put attention there and it did help bring it back up and This morning everything is going great All the posts were brought back and everything's fan friggin. Tastic But I'll talk a little bit more about this coming up so much. I won't I want to talk about here What's interesting, too, is that? They're on Facebook they have what are called organic posts and They stopped they changed the algorithm in 2013 on what organic posts are so These organic posts I started on Facebook in 2009 and I had in 5d and I got like 400,000 Followers in the first four years and I only picked up 37,000 thousand followers in the last four years So, you know, it goes to show you how they're limiting. So it's not just me I know a lot of you out there are going through this and what we're experiencing our shadow bands and this and that There's a bigger picture that's going on though and I'll get to that at the end of this video But the way you can go around this anyway through all this just whatever your favorite websites are most of us have a Subscribe button on our websites where you can receive in your inbox Every update and you can do that on bodymindsoulspirit.com as well as in 5d.com and even on in 5d I have an update where you can Subscribe either to the daily update and get them every every night around midnight or you can get it once a week in a tightly wrapped single email of all the Posts that I had for that week. So just go there and subscribe and you won't miss a thing Okay, so we're not going to let this Facebook shadow banning stuff bother us or get us down And I highly suggest that if you have a website do the same thing just tell people subscribe You know, we'll work around this or go to alternative Websites such as miwi.com. I have a in 5d Facebook page there in form planets. There's a gab It's similar to Twitter, but actually a little bit better So you can check that out or minds calm There's a lot of alternatives. So let's get into it right here Okay, so I was looking at the the Nikkei stock market last night and checked it out again this morning and It was down 1071 points almost 1072 points last night and what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna check out the Dow Jones Real quick and see where it's at seeing how it's 10 o'clock and the Dow Jones is already open But what usually happens is the Nikkei Basically shows what's gonna happen with the Dow Jones and right now the Dow is up 70 58. I don't expect that to last very long We'll see but what we're seeing there's a bigger picture going on right now and That is that the you know the Rockfellers and Rothschilds are fighting back right now for the what's called the draining of the swamp Here in the United States and what's going on in our capital Washington, DC A lot of the swamp is getting drained and what's you have to look at this also from a higher perspective as above so below What's going on here is also being reflected in the aether So what we're seeing is a draining of the swamp above it as well as all these reptilians and Draco's are getting rounded up and just like in Washington, they're being pushed into a corner and Just like here. They have nowhere to run because of this frequency fence that we have around Our planet solar system. They have no place to run or hide anymore. So It's all coming down and to the wire right now What we're seeing in the in the Markets also they're they're rigging the precious metals So if any of you have invested in gold or silver or junk silver like you know any Here in the United States any any coins Like dimes or quarters that are from 1964 or earlier are considered junk metal because they're 90% silver melt value so what we're seeing is You know these these markets being rigged and just recently There were seven people that were arrested for rigging the silver market But as we saw back in 2008 when they were rigging everything else the housing market and everything else No, they basically got a slap on the wrist and you know go continue doing what you're doing But it this time might be different from what I understand with the Silver market is that silver there's about as much physical silver on the planet as there is gold But they use silver and so many more things, you know electronics and everything else that eventually there's gonna be actually less Silver than gold and it could actually they could visibly flip flop in value But none of this really matters anyway But anyway, what some people are speculating is that silver could go to a thousand dollars an ounce once the rigging stops But the bottom line is that the military industrial complex is still playing into all of this So, you know people are saying oh QAnon is doing all this and he's exposing all that and Personally, I'm not Republican. I'm not Democrat. I haven't voted since Ron Paul Who was a Republican and I admit I voted for Hillary when I was in New York State thinking she had to do something As senator in order to you know, eventually run for president.  So What like I said what we're seeing right now is basically the the rock fellers and the Rothschilds the Draco's and the reptilians and the Aethers are panicking as well. So this is getting really interesting as it's boiling down You know to the the final days before the event Which we spoke about yesterday on Candice Crow Goldman's show Michelle walling myself and and Candice all mentioned about that We talked about a new Segment that I have on n5d called new earth news. So check it out. It's up on top You know, it's just with all the categories there new earth news and we have a bunch of writers that are coming in To write about it a girl Jin a just wrote a wonderful article yesterday We have several articles that came out today that probably won't show up on your news feed Unless you actually go to n5d.com and see them because of all the suppression on Facebook But and of course, I'll post them on my individual page as well as the n5d Facebook page But yeah, please check them out and while you're there subscribe so you don't miss a thing So getting back to QAnon the thing about what's going on right now Yeah, QAnon is Making this movement about you know training the swamp and and a lot of positive things are coming out because the truth has a high vibration You know here you have love and truth is like right below it and the truth vibration is basically draining the swamp right now and And those who are guilty of these crimes will be held accountable But none of that matters either and I'll get into that So what we're seeing right now is you know, a lot of people are jumping on the Trump bandwagon And yeah, I commend him for what he has done You know that you know, he is going after these people that are You know have been suppressing society and in turn the world So it really is a global issue As a matter of fact recently that there were US armed insurgents from Syria that shot down a Russian plane That killed the pilot and of course, you know, this these are the stupid things that happen that can instigate World War three, but we're not gonna if that's not gonna happen either Trust me, that's not gonna happen The bottom line is that all of this is A big distraction. It's a big frickin distraction. None of this is real We're just consciousness Experiencing this through our human bodies and what we're co-creating is what's real and that's what's gonna create the new earth We're and this is why we have to experience these polarities here in the third dimension We're deciding what is it we want and what is it? We don't want when we finally wake up out of this dream even though we're awake right now We're still asleep in the dream when we wake up. That's when it happens and in my opinion That's when like I explained before there's this white light that will flood the planet and in an instant It changes everything. That's where we're heading so You know with all this stuff going on You know the Q and on the draining of the swamp The Russian plane being shot down precious metals stock market Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What do you want to create? What do you want to create right now? Do you want to create? Oh, I want silver to go to the thousand dollars. No, it doesn't matter Oh, I don't want world war three even that doesn't matter What do you want the new earth? Do you want to envision like walking out into a water with somebody else that right next to you the person you love and say you like the water cold and The person you're with likes it warm What if the water could adjust itself to the exact temperature that each person wants? That's what I'm talking about creating things and just the thought process alone Thinking about it creates the manifestation. Okay, so right now on this new earth That's been created. So everybody will have the perfect water temperature when you walk in a body of water It'll be perfect for you Okay, start think about stuff that you want. Do you want it to perhaps? For me, I would love this. I'm on the beach. It's sunny out. You got a purple sky. It's no longer blue It's purple and there might be two or three suns. Who knows but it can snow and Ideal air temperature might be, you know, 79 80 degrees. I don't know what that is in in Celsius but The snow would still drop and you feel the coolness of the snow on you and yet the water temperature is still, you know Adjust to whatever you want That's something I would like to see or waterfalls that don't go down, but go up You know, and they're all like sparkly water and You know stuff like that Start envisioning what you want because none of this stuff is real. None of it We're just consciousness Experiencing and co-creating with each other what we want and what we don't want So I hope you got a lot out of this right now As I mentioned while we're still here co-creating you can get some great co-creational ideas on both body-mindsoulspirit.com and infid.com So be sure to subscribe to both newsletters on the body-mindsoulspirit I call it VMSS, but you can get a lot of things on there There's a lot of spiritual stuff on there and I also go into a lot of holistic foods and stuff that I don't cover on infid but infid we go we go the extra mile on that and a lot of woo-woo stuff newer stuff and Cool things that are about to happen. So I'm gonna leave it off at that. Oh, wait, I do have one last thing, too I did have a question from Patty Chambers and she said what is the sleep cycle right before waking up? I noticed I'm being taught by a higher force about how our thoughts or reality was so pure thousands of years ago I was using my mind's eye during this process as images were shifting to better Demonstrate what this higher force is explaining to me okay, so The sleep cycle right before waking up is the REM cycle the rapid-eye movement side cycle That's where you're you get all these dreams the cycle before that's where you get the deep sleep And that's where you most people spend about 50% of their night is in deep sleep Most people not me but you're you're in the REM cycle and that that's a combination of alpha theta and beta waves and as you're waking up it's more more your waking life is in the beta wave, which is a you know a wave like that and It's it's a slow-moving way But you end up going into the theta wave as you go to sleep Which is a slower moving wave and you keep getting slower and slower until you start to wake up And then they start to pick up again, and then you go from the theta to the alpha back to the beta So chances are is you're probably as you're waking up just like when you go to bed You're you're drifting into that alpha state, which is like a hypnagogic Daydreaming kind of state and as a matter of fact have an article on in 5d It says do this before you go to bed to help you open up your third eye And it's a quick and easy way to open up your third eye and to get those visions and to be able to do that In your waking state as well. So what I'm thinking is that that sleep cycle that you're asking about Yeah, you're you're going probably from theta to alpha and you will be able to get those images and see those things So so you might want to do that then instead of before you go to bed When you wake up start working on trying to get your mind into that alpha state And it's easy to do if anyone can get get into meditation a deep meditation where your mind is completely clear You're in the alpha state right there. It's so simple to open up your third eye So I think I'm gonna leave it off at that And I'm so grateful that all of you have joined me tonight today rather and over tonight and on YouTube If you're gonna be watching this later on I'll be uploading it to the in 5d YouTube channel if you haven't subscribed to that Subscribe there as well. So that's it for now. My name is Greg Prescott from in 5d.com


It's going on everyone Sam here late in sports car dripping one box of 22 tops cosmic chrome baseball hobby at one box break or For Justin edge said that already So good luck here Justin see what we got here for you buddy Yeah, definitely That's unreal dude Yeah, second and then those they get to your door. Yep, then you got three of the Lawson orbits coming to Which we did a ton of the J rods and the two case breaks today face. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to hand in those Kareya Gold Marcus Strowman 38 out of 50 nice one there and Jeremy Pena No Scoped Jared Walsh angels J-Rod Jose Brave Bansby Swanson ex-met legend met legend Marcus Strowman Lawson orbit Sammy Sosa blue Ian Hatt nice one there five out of 99 cubs a great year this year India CJ Abrams silver rookie or refractor rookie. I should say there's a Josiah Gray in there as well Say as a zoo key rookie Pita Lonzo refractor Launch an orbit Tati's cover story Jazz chisel scope Did it go here base and base that'll do it for your break of their Justin thanks again for jumping in we'll get those right out to you buddy


I am Dorothy. I convince myself or allow myself to be convinced by others that I need someone else, something else, somewhere else to be content and complete. I believe the myth that presence is the journey, the fabled destination to my yellow brick road, the trophy that comes when I finally arrived. Only like Dorothy, that which I seek has been with me the entire time, perpetually beneath my feet. Home is just a heel click away. Presence is always right here and never out there. Be free where you are, not where you think you ought to be.