Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. We're really thrilled to be launching the 2020 edition of our sustainable development report. Just a couple of logistics as we're getting started, unfortunately, given the very large number of people we have online, our participants are not going to be able to use their microphones and cameras. But there is a section in the go to meeting software where you can ask questions. You can type in your question and we're going to sort of take them as they come in. And a short note that Professor sacks will have to leave early. So if you have a question for him. Please go ahead and send them in right as he's making his opening remarks will try to take one or two quickly before he has to sign off and we turn it over to our next speakers. So without any further ado, it is my great pleasure to turn it over to Professor sacks. Hello everybody thank you so much for joining today's global launch of the 2020 sustainable development report and I'm really grateful to all of the lead authors of this report. Thank you. Thank you, especially Guido Schmidt Troub, Christian Krull, Guillaume La Fortune, Grayson Fuller and Finn Wellen as the lead authors. There's a vast number of people who contribute to. I would like to thank all of the SDSN team and the SDSN networks and so many officials and governments around the world and in civil society that give us ideas and feedback and comments and corrections throughout the year as we work on each annual report. Because obviously, as for all of us and especially challenging report to work on because the ground is shaking under us as we think about the sustainable development goals. We've never had in our lifetimes, the tumultuous events of recent months, the greatest, most significant crisis in the world since World War two was UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez has described at the biggest economic upheaval, since the recession, actually. So, this year's report, not only reviews all of the SDG indicators but tries as we're participating in and trying to make sense of this pandemic, how COVID-19 relates to the SDGs. And there are certainly several ways. Most importantly, as the opening chapter explains, there are very, very heavy impacts and mostly large adverse impacts of COVID-19 on fighting poverty, on hunger, on jobs and employment. And many, many of the other aspects, two billion children suddenly were not physically in school. The health disaster itself is not only an epidemic of infecting probably tens of millions of people. We have had the right measures and leading to the deaths of a half a million confirmed cases at this point, but also impacting heavily the ability to control other diseases as well. So, huge challenges for SDG three. One way that the sustainable development goals are important is that they are guideposts for rebuilding. We know this epidemic will come to an end. It should have been controlled more decisively in many places, including my own country, the United States, that has been true. We have to not only be fighting the transmission of the virus itself but thinking about how we're going to build back better. And the SDGs provide a very crucial roadmap for building the kind of inclusive, safe, resilient, environmentally sustainable societies that we want. That was why the SDGs were adopted in this way they're more important than ever to help us find that path forward. One of the lessons of this epidemic that is starting to be more and more clear is that it is the more unequal societies that are having a much harder time fighting this pandemic. Countries with high inequality of income and wealth like the United States or like Brazil or like Mexico, or other highly unequal countries, don't have the social trust, don't have the social networks, don't have the good governance ability, and have too many vulnerable people. And the result is that high inequality is showing heavy cost for society once again, and the sustainable development goals by emphasizing the universal access to basic needs to decent jobs to healthcare to modern energy services provides a roadmap going forward. We also look at other aspects of the efficiency of the response to the pandemic in a very preliminary snapshot that only carries us through the beginning of May but we emphasize one overriding point. This pandemic in the end can only be fought through public health means the effectiveness of the proper hygiene, people wearing face masks, physical distancing, case testing tracing and isolating. Lockdowns of the economy may be short run desperate actions and often absolutely necessary, but they are not a substitute for public health. And so we put a strong emphasis on quality of public health in response. Korea is an exemplar of an excellence of public health response that has enabled Korea to largely suppress the epidemic and to keep society open at the same time. And so this is one of the early lessons that we have of this report. Finally, let me note one theme that I find every year persuasive and persuasive again this year. The top countries in the overall SDG ranking. This year, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Estonia, the top 10 countries are all European countries. The northern European countries are at the top of the charts. The social democratic ethos, as I like to call it. I don't mean a political party. I mean a way of thinking about society as socially inclusive. Where government has a large role to ensure universal access to health care, education, vacation time, family leave, sick leave, other kinds of social protections has the overall best performance in sustainable development. And not only in the social areas, but also in environmental management and aiming for a green economy. It is not a coincidence that 15 of the 15 top countries are all in Europe. And I think that this provides really some guidance for us of the kinds of institutions to build social inclusion. They haven't guaranteed necessarily a completely effective response against COVID, because that's about public health to a very important extent. Some have done well, others not quite so well, in fact. But in terms of overall social inclusion and building green, the two fundamental pillars of the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement, I think that there's a lot to learn from these very high performing countries. Well, I want to thank my colleagues once again, and I want to thank everybody for participating. We're really in a period of tumult and so we really need guideposts for us, our goals, the future we want, and the metrics to help us get there. And that is the spirit in which we introduced the 2020 Sustainable Development Report. Thank you very much. And back to you, Lauren. Jeff, I'm going to throw you one question. Hopefully it's a complicated question, but maybe you can give us a concise and insightful answer. I will try. And then on the implications of COVID-19 for globalization and the future of global supply chains. What have we learned these past couple months? Our supply chains are now strongly virtual supply chains. So one of the things we've learned is that one can actually lock down an economy and while we lose a lot of the things that we really love in daily life, going for walks or to restaurants or to our local shops, a vast proportion of the economy continues to operate from home or online. One of the things that we've learned from this pandemic is that we have been pushed more rapidly than we could have imagined into a digital age. We were already obviously moving towards a digital age, but it has dramatically accelerated. It is for this reason that I am very skeptical of claims that suddenly we are going to de-globalize or localize supply chains. In the digital world, our supply chains, including our offices are virtual and online and global. Every day I have the experience of having meetings, brainstorming, workshops, education activities that are global. And I believe in the digital age that this globalization will continue because it is mutually beneficial for the world. Of course, the pandemic has locked us up even in our homes or our rooms in many cases for several weeks, so we've been dramatically localized in one sense. But the gains and benefits of globalization are so profound that we should not squander or lose sight of the benefits of an interconnected world. We should use global connections indeed to fight the pandemic more effectively. We should understand that in a digital world we're going to have continued global economy. We're going to do things in a different way, but many of the new ways of doing things, e-commerce, e-banking, e-health, e-education, are going to be even more global. Rather than less global. So my answer, Lauren, is that while there are certainly some areas where production will move closer to home, renewable energy being one of them, rather than shipping fossil fuels halfway around the world, people will happen to their wind and sunshine at home. For many, many things that we do and want to do, we will continue to be a global economy, a lot of it online, but for mutual benefit. Thank you so much, Jeff. And thank you so much for joining us this morning. We know you have to sign off soon. But thank you. It's wonderful that we were able to have, you know, three authors of the report online at the same time, you, Christiana and Guillaume. So now I will turn it over to Guillaume who on behalf of the three of you is going to present some of the key findings from the report. And we'll give you a moment to set up your screen share Guillaume. I have to make you a presenter. Apologies for all waiting on me. There we go. Great. And we can see your slides. So I will turn it over to you and meet myself. Thank you very much, Cheyenne. Thank you also, Jeff. Thank you also to our distinguished speakers today, Ambassador Hoi An Chu from South Korea, Minister Solstrom from Sweden. Also, great to have Dr. Christian Krull who's the co-scientific director of this publication with Dr. Guillaume Schmittraub as well. And obviously thank you to all of you for joining us today. My name is Guillaume Laporte and I'm a senior economist in DSDSN and I coordinate the annual production of the Sustainable Development Report which tracks the performance of all UN member states on the Sustainable Development Goals. So this year's edition is special and I think that reflects the special situation that the world is in. It focuses, the opening sections focus on DSDGs and COVID-19. So what I'll do in the next 15 to 20 minutes is to walk you through some of the key findings and the key charts and results of the publication. A lot of those slides will echo some of the things that were said by Professor Sacks just before. But before I do this, let me just put this report in a broader context of the set of monitoring tools and accountability tools that we've been building over the years in close collaboration with our networks and partner institutions to really make DSDGs a tool for monitoring accountability. So we do those annual report that we present every year since 2015. So this is the sixth edition of the report. But we also do increasingly regional or continental editions of the report which are produced in very close collaboration and sometimes even led by our networks and partner institutions. So we've done reports for Africa, we're actually launching the third edition of this report on July 15th. We've done a report for the Mediterranean region, the Arab region, for Europe and we just launched two weeks ago a report for Latin America. And these reports really help contextualize a little bit more some of the issues. They also help us leverage some of the wealth of data that's available at the regional level, right? So if I take the example of the European report we released last November, we could obviously leverage the wealth of data produced by the European Commission and the fantastic work done by Eurostat and other agencies of the European Commission, something that we cannot do at the global level. And then finally, we also use the SDGs as a monitoring tool at the subnational level, so for provinces, region and cities, municipalities. I think there's a broad consensus that we won't make any major breakthroughs on the SDGs without the strong involvement of local policymakers and mayors. And so it's important also to translate the goals at the subnational level. So we've done a report over the past four or five years for US cities, Italian cities, Spanish cities, European capital cities, and we're working with a lot of other partners throughout the world on this. The common feature of these reports is that we calculate distance to SDG targets. We map out the best available indicators. We aggregate results at the goal level and we estimate when possible, whether countries or cities are on track or off track for achieving the SDGs based on the past year's trend. And we always include obviously policy sections that discuss a bit more in details, the key lessons and findings from these assessments. To mention that the methodology is now, in our view, relatively stable. As you see here, we've been working on this for many years. It's been published in the peer reviewed literature and we have also taken the step to get audited independently and statistically by the European Commission Joint Research Center. So I'm jumping into this year's edition of the Sustainable Development Report. And if we summarize and I'm going to I'm going to show afterwards charts and slides that illustrate each of these findings. But here I want to focus on six key findings from the report and again that echo a lot what Professor Sacks just said before. The first finding is that the highest priority for every government must remain the suppression of the pandemic. And there can be no economic recovery while the pandemic is raging. So one of the hypothesis, the report is that public health right now is probably one of the most important tool for sound macroeconomic policy. And here it goes also a lot of the statements that were made, including by the chief economist of the IMF, the chief economist of the OECD when they launched their respective economic outlooks. Where they basically say that, look, the future is very unpredictable. There's lots of uncertainties. And also that a lot of the growth projections depend on whether we're able to suppress the disease and implement effective public health measures. So depending if we have a second wave, a third wave, a fourth wave, this will necessarily have implications on growth, but also on the SDGs. And so the hypothesis is that the countries that are best able to contain the virus, see in an absence of a treatment or a vaccine, will also see the fastest economic recovery. The second finding is that COVID-19 has short term negative impacts on most SDGs. And these impacts are amplified for the most vulnerable groups. And here by vulnerable groups, I mean groups within countries. So the poorest, low-skilled labor, the migrants. But also mean the most vulnerable country, right? So low-income countries, countries that might already be facing some turmoil, political, economic, social turmoil, and countries that might be in conflicts. The third finding is that the SDGs and the six SDG transformations can help build back better. So that's the roadmap that Professor Sacks was referring to. So that means greener, fairer, and more resilient. So we are doing the report that the recovery will be investment-led and that this should provide an opportunity to target some of the investments towards the achievement of sustainable and inclusive development. So we provide a six transformations framework to support these efforts and we describe in the report what economic recovery plans compatible with the SDGs might look like. The fourth finding is that countries in Asia Pacific have progressed most on the SDGs since 2015 and that they also responded more effectively so far to the COVID-19 outbreak. So what we've done in the report this year is to calculate retroactively the SDG index using this year's measures. And we see that countries in Asia Pacific have progressed most since 2015. And we're also publishing, as mentioned by Professor Sacks, a pilot index of the early COVID-19 response for 33 OECD countries. The fifth finding is that rich countries generate negative spillovers that undermine other countries' ability to achieve the goals and may increase the likelihood of future pandemics. And then the sixth finding is that we need more and not less global partnerships and collaboration. And we mentioned in the report five key measures that global cooperation should include to address the health and economic crisis. So, and here I'm going to go through some of the key charts, the key figures of the report. So the first finding is that COVID-19 has negative short-term impacts on most of the SDGs. Actually when we started drafting this report back in March or April, we used the future tense, we'll have, but some of the impacts are very tangible and visible. And I think here, we've made a comprehensive review of the literature and also used our expert judgment. And we see that no goals are clearly positively affected by the COVID-19 crisis. We see the most negative impact on SDG1, SDG2, SDG3, SDG8 and SDG10 broadly related to poverty, hunger, health, economic growth and inequalities. We see moderate or mixed impact for some other SDGs. And then we see the impact being unclear for SDG12 to SDG15. So on one hand, there's been short-term gains in terms of CO2 emissions or pollution. But at the same time, we see that as countries are reopening the economy, we see those emissions picking up relatively fast and sometimes being higher than the previous year for the same period. And we also see a risk that as countries are looking for ways to mitigate the impact on jobs and unemployment and boost economic growth, that the implementation of climate and biodiversity conventions and strategies including a deforestation of plastic use might slow down. And we see some signs of that happening throughout the world. So for this reason, we consider that the impact here is unclear for SDG12 to SDG15. We also present the very first and pilot assessment of countries' early response on COVID-19. And here we focus on 33 OECD countries and the model takes into account both health and economic considerations. So we focus on OECD countries because these are the countries where we had the most comparable data and because they were hit more or less at the same time by the virus. We excluded here the OECD lack countries, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, which were hit at the later stage. We focused here on the period March 4th to May 12th. So that's really a snapshot for a very specific period and it's meant to be replicated in the future. So this is not final, it's meant to be replicated. And this is really our contribution to the emerging debate on lessons learned for the first couple of months of the pandemic. So the detailed methodology and the mass behind it are explained in section 1.2 of the report. So we acknowledge that COVID-19 represented obviously a non-precedented challenge for many countries. This is obviously a new coronavirus. Pretty much everyone was susceptible to be infected at the start of the pandemic as populations were not immune to it. And the other big challenge is that it's a virus but there's a lot of asymptomatic that are spreading the virus without knowing it. But what we've tried to do here is to assess which countries were best able to contain the virus by containing mortality rates and the effective reproduction rate while also mitigating the impact on the economy, measured in the model by the decline in mobility taken from Google mobility data. And what this preliminary assessment shows is that countries in Asia Pacific, especially South Korea and some Baltic states performed best in the very first few months of the pandemic, as they were able to largely suppress the pandemic in a rather efficient way. So in the case of South Korea, social distancing, the widespread use of protective personal equipment, the testing, tracing, isolating affected patients, and also the use of technologies, new technologies is probably all part of the success. Other countries, as we can see here, were less able to mitigate health impacts and economic impacts. Now, having said that, we also mentioned in the report that strict and prolonged lockdown contributing to saving possibly many lives, especially in countries where test kits and protected personal equipment were missing, and where there were obviously risks that hospitals and intensive care units become overburdened. And many governments have also learned for the first couple of months of the pandemic and increased their ability to test rapidly, but also increased the widespread use of protective personal equipment. There's obviously contextual factors that might explain the differences in this index, including the timing at which countries were impacted, the age pyramid. The difference is also in the data, how data are compiled, including on mortality rates. But again, just to put things into perspective, so our assessment covers March 4 to May 12. As of May 12, there were below 6 per million deaths due to COVID in South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. It was more than 400 per million in a number of Western European countries. So here we see that Korea, South Korea, and we're grateful to have a representative from South Korea with us today, is an outlier in the positive sense. And we also see that in the GDP forecast released earlier this month, or now past month actually, or earlier in June, we see that Korea was also an outlier on the GDP forecast for 2020. So that just emphasizes the fact that the response of South Korea, South Korea was more effective to mitigate the health, but also the economic impact from COVID-19. Another finding of the report is that the measure that we had before the pandemic that would cover SDG 3.D, which calls for strengthening the capacity of all countries for early warning, risk reduction, and management of national and global health risks, the measurement that we had before are poorly predicted predictors of the effectiveness of the management of COVID-19. So we see here, and this is the result of the Global Health Security Index, which was released in November 2019. And this is a report, for instance, that was waived by some policy leaders to mention that they were leaders when it comes to the preparedness of their country to face pandemics. We see that here the United States and the United Kingdom were at the top, were topping these indices of global health security before COVID-19. We see that the country like South Korea performs much lower. It's also the case for New Zealand, Japan, or Vietnam. And on the right side, what we've done in the report is to compare, and here we focused on one sub-pillar of this index, where also the United States was topping the sub-pillar on detection and reporting. We compare the performance of the index to how fast were countries able to test the significant proportion of their population. So these are the curves that you see here. And we see that for March, there's a relatively big gap between the cumulative tests performed as a share of the population by the United States versus South Korea and Germany, despite the United States performing better on the detection and reporting pillar of the Global Health Security Index. So here there's two hypotheses. On one hand, it could be that the GHS might have overestimated the ability of some countries to face these types of pandemics, even though the framework of the GHS and a lot of the data is very relevant actually for the current pandemic. The other interpretation is that the response to a pandemic depends a lot also on political leadership and coordination. And so this is something that is obviously very hard to anticipate for the authors of the GHS. The broader essence is that as we start learning the lessons, we might want to explore ways to better capture and better measure the level of preparedness of countries. We consider some of the metrics that matter most in light of the COVID-19 crisis. And for the moment, we haven't been using, for instance, this measure as part of the SDG index and dashboards. The report also goes into how to build back better. And we argue that this is a type of crisis that requires extensive government support and to limit the impacts of livelihoods and avoid widespread bankruptcies while obviously strengthening public health systems and prevention programs. The absence of the support would most likely result in a much more prolonged crisis. So it gives an opportunity for governments to guide the recovery through investments that support in greener, fairer, more resilient society. And we provide a six transformations framework that are underpinned by two overarching principles to help guide the recovery. The report also discusses some of the do's and the don'ts of a sustainable and inclusive recovery and what a government response compatible with the SDGs might look like. So it's a roadmap that we provide in the report and how the SDGs can be used. We also identified five key measures for global cooperation moving forward. And so one is to disseminate best practices rapidly to address the health consequences of the virus and strengthen public health. And obviously this requires a strong leadership from an organization like the World Health Organization. We also argue that there needs to be a strengthening of financing mechanisms for developing countries or a lot has already been done, including by the MNF. But there might need to be some further support to low income countries and countries that are at risk of sovereign default and financial collapse. And the role of the G20 here is also probably also key. The third key measure is to address the hunger odds plus to avoid a massive humanitarian crisis. The fourth is to ensure social protection. And I think one of the things that this crisis has shown is that some of the countries that had very effective social safety nets were probably better equipped to face and respond to these types of pandemic some things that an organization like the International Labor Organization have been advocating of course for many, many years. And then the fifth finding is that once treatment and vaccines will be available, they should be obviously rolled out widely including to low income and developing countries. We present trends over time of the SDG index and one of the key message of the report is that the COVID-19 should not dismantle all the SDG efforts and the momentum that took place since their adoption in 2015. We calculated population weighted averages of the progress since 2015 on the SDG. And we see that all major regions have made progress. It doesn't mean that all countries have progressed. And we show in the report which countries have progressed most and which ones went a little bit backwards. But overall we see a positive momentum that should be continued and that's why the decade of action is obviously absolutely, absolutely key. And so we've also looked at, we've also presented findings in longitudinal lines taking a longer time span since 2010 and both for region but also by income level where we show progress over time. And here we see that the most progress happened on SDG 1, no poverty SDG 9 on innovation in industry even though here the spread across high income countries and lower income countries is remains quite large. But still we see overall quite good progress on SDG 9 and then SDG 11 related to responsibilities, responsible cities and communities. We see the least progress on SDG 2 with rising obesity rates in parts of the world and also rising under nourishment in other parts of the world and then also the least progress on SDG 15 related to biodiversity. So as mentioned by Jeff, this year the index is stopped by Sweden, Denmark and Finland. This is no such a big news, but I think it's always good to remember and emphasize the fact that the Nordic model seems to be very compatible with the spirit and the content of the SDGs. Most of the top 20 here are OECD countries and high income countries. That doesn't mean that there are no challenges in these countries. And I think this is why the detailed dashboard are very important here, because we see that. And when we look at this, we see that all countries, all OECD countries face major challenges in achieving at least two goals. So those are the red dots here in this chart, but also that no country is actually on track or was on track because this is essentially pre COVID was on track to achieve the SDGs. And for OECD countries, we see three broad types of challenges, one related to the sustainable diets, obesity and sustainable agriculture covered under SDG 2. The issue of inequalities SDG 10 and then go 12 to 15 related to climate and biodiversity action. Another challenge for high income countries OECD countries and also G20 countries is related to the spillovers. So the report measures also the impacts that might be outsourced to other countries so it's one thing to decarbonize domestically but if this is achieved by outsourcing cement or steel to another country and re importing the production. This is not a practice which is compatible with the SDGs and so we have the econometric tools now to measure some of those impact and attribute the responsibility of some CO2 emissions, cars, water and other social impacts to the importing the consuming country. We also include other types of measures, including on the exports of major conventional weapons. We include measures related to financial secrecy tax havens but also positive spillovers like official development assistance and we created an index with those measures and we plotted to GDP per capita. What we see is that high income countries tend to generate the highest level of spillover effects and we also present this year for the first time in the report trends over time on spillover measures and consumption based measures. So that concludes my presentation for today just to say that the report can be downloaded for free on our website. We have a much improved data visualization tool also that allows you to actually select countries for each specific indicators and compare your country to to other countries for each single metrics. We present the results in a very detailed way in the report that we have detailed country profiles. I showed the example of France because that's the country I'm in right now. But we have detailed country profiles for all 193 UN member states and also we have averages for UN regions and also by income level this year. And finally, let me mention that we have just released a new course on measuring sustainable development. So this is the team in the SDSN, the SDG Academy and enrollment are open and the course will start on July 15 and remain available for a year. Thank you very much. Here are my contact information. Thank you so much, Guillaume. And I'm going to suggest maybe that I'll put that into the chat so that people who want to contact you don't need to worry about you taking the screen down so fast. We're going to save the questions to the end. We've been getting a lot of really great questions and we look forward to getting through as many of them as possible. Next we're going to have some reactions from our country representatives. I'm pleased to introduce Ambassador Oh, who's the deputy permanent representative of the Republic of Korea, which as we just saw ranks number 20 in the report. They are the top country in Asia. And I think it's also exciting to note that East and Southeast Asia is the region that progressed the most so far over the past five years on achieving the SDGs. I'm very much looking forward to your remarks, Ambassador Oh. Thank you. Lauren. Sorry. I haven't completely waked up. Thank you, Ambassador Jeffersucks and two authors, and as well as SDSM team and the participants. Good morning. Although I'm being shown on the screen under my colleague's name, Kim Sung Joon Kim, my name is Hyun Joo Oh, and I just newly joined the mission. Actually three months ago, just a couple of days after the homestay order was placed in New York. I've lived in this virtual world since then. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you all on the launch of the report 2020 Sustainable Development Report. And I also would like to thank you for having me here. It's such a wonderful occasion where I'm honored to have a firsthand key findings to hear about the first hand of the key findings of this report. It's been almost six months. First, the findings of the disease of unprecedentedly grave scale in nature and COVID-19 certainly pushed us into a uncharted history, uncharted territory in history as well.  And maybe we just forgot that we have a very strong tool and very accurate device that we can navigate through the crisis to know that where we stand and where we need to go. But I think it's the launch of this report and the occasion of this seminar just remind us of the fact that we have a tool. And we have very strong indices and dashboards that can serve as our navigation system to lead us out of this crisis and also to lead us to the role that we can build back better. I have to admit that as a representative of Republic of Korea, I was particularly drawn to the conclusion of the chapter one, which compares the early COVID-19 control in OECD countries. And I feel very proud of the recognition of the achievements of some achievements so far in terms of the effective control of the pandemic. But at the same time, I feel very humbled by the weight of responsibility towards the Korean people as well as the international community. As we are witnessing the crisis isn't over. The virus is still here and my president always keeps saying that it isn't over until it is really over. And I think it's pandemic is under control in the certain parts of the world, but it's still going around in most of the part of the world. So with this in mind, I would like to share with you some of the experiences that we had in the early stage of the crisis because the Korea was hit hard in the early stage of the crisis. And I was happened to be in Seoul in the foreign ministry dealing with the contributors that we can make towards Korea, towards the world. So I think I can have some hands-on experiences to share with you this morning. So I'd like to introduce a little bit of the Korea's response to the COVID itself as well as our preparation to recover from the pandemic. So to begin with, I'd like to explain the Korea's response to COVID-19 with the five letters, TRUST, which is spelled trust. I think the trust is very important. It is important element that can describe the overall Korea's response. Public trust in government's action is very crucial. And also the government's trust in the individual actions, individual population for the collective action is very much crucial in implementing the health measures and all the precautionary measures. So the five letters which constitute trust, stand for, transparency, rapid response, united action, and science and together in solidarity. I cannot share all with you in the interest of the time saving today, but I can share some of the messages that those letters are standing for. The first principle that we have to keep in mind in dealing with this crisis is transparency. So this is one of the principles that underpin the overall actions of the Korean government. So from the very early stage of the pandemic, the Korean government has tried to keep the public fully informed. Since the day one, the press briefings have taken place twice a day without any interruption. So the briefing was held by, the first one was presided by the chief of the KCDC. And the other is provided by the vice minister, vice health minister. So chief of KCDC has briefed the public about the overall status of the disease, including number of the confirmed cases, including the number of hospitalization, as well as advice how to respond, how to prepare from the perspective of individuals, from the perspective of every citizen. And the vice health minister served as a spokesperson of the Interministerial Committee, crisis management committee, which was founded just right after the crisis and chaired by the PM, and briefed us, briefed the public that what kind of measures the government is going to take and what kind of the recommendations that they are going to present to the public to avoid of being affected. And so, as such the information about the disease itself, the nature of this virus, and as well as all the measures and plans, which will be taken by the government, are fully shared with the public since day one. And the second principle is that the rapid response, the virus travels very fast, you know, and the government has had to act even faster. Otherwise, the public health capacity and institutions will be overwhelmed by virus. So the government has taken all available measures to flatten the curve by carrying out robust testing, tracing, and treating efforts, which we call three T's in short. So among others, massive, aggressive, innovative, vigorous testing was the key to flattening the curve. The testing is central because it detects, it detects early at the early stage of the disease and also it minimizes the spread. And also it can lead to the treating people in the early stage of infection. Thirdly, I can say that the United Action was the key to the tentative success of Korean dealing, Koreans dealing with the crisis. When the first COVID case was confirmed in a neighboring country, the first action of the government was to call out the meeting at the Seoul Central Station with all the research institutions and the biometric companies. And the government encouraged them to develop test kits as soon as possible, and they promised emergency approval. So the government started working together with all public institutions as well as the private companies to develop and supply test kits. And I think that was a very important moment in the whole process of our treating this pandemic. And the public awareness and the civic participation were also crucial. And the Korean people were very eager to know the nature of the virus itself and also they want to know how we can prevent from the spread. So they have actively employed the personal hygiene measures and also sanitary measures and follow the government's recommendations very faithfully. And also they follow the rules of such as voluntary testing, self-quarantine, and other timely protective measures. And two other principles, the science-based approach and the togetherness in solidarity are very self-explanatory, so I can just skip those. And I want to share a little bit of the plan to move forward. Korea, one of the characteristics of the measures we have taken is that we haven't placed a total complete lockdown since the outbreak. So the cafes, restaurants were open, shopping malls were open. Even if the government just advised the people to avoid crowded places and to wear masks. And they closed some of the public facilities. They never placed the complete lockdown and they never placed the travel restraints. So in to a very limited to a certain extent, the economic activities were running even during the crisis, although it's not into the full capacity. So even if we expect a certain contraction in economy, I think at some we tried hard to not mean not to turn this contraction into a long-term recession. So in order to boost the domestic market, the Korean government has taken rapid and bold emergency fiscal measures, including three stimulus packages. So those stimulus packages aim to provide financial support to households as well as the small businesses. And the government also tried to promote the retention of employment, so there wasn't any massive layoff during and just right after the crisis. And also tried to strengthen the economy and invest in anticipation of the post COVID-19 era. But the Korean government is taking this crisis as an opportunity to transform our economy. And at the heart of such efforts lies the we call the Korean New Deal, which specifically highlight the importance of incorporating the green element in the New Deal package. So we will focus on investment and job creation in a green sector as a strategy for sustainable recovery. The details of this green New Deal is being fleshed out, but the basic premise is very clear that we must ensure that the short term recovery measures are aligned with our longer term ambition to tackle climate change and also the carbonization. So we try to transit our economy into a low carbon and a more green economy. So this is the short overview of the Korean response to pandemic in terms of the public health as well as economic issues. And I was looking for look for the further communication with the audience to explain that some of the measures of the Korean government has taken. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ambassador Oh, and I think your comments on sort of solidarity and trust are really resonating with a lot of our participants. There are a bunch of questions and comments saying that one of the many positive things for East and South Asia has been the sort of solidarity of the population in coming together to handle COVID-19. So I definitely think Korea has been a leader in that. I will turn it over to Ola Solstrom, who's the Minister of Counselor for Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs at the permanent mission of Sweden to the United Nations. We're thrilled to have him as Sweden is ranked number one on the index. And I apologize that we don't have camera, but we have very good audio. So Minister Solstrom over to you. Thank you very much, Lauren, and thanks to the whole team of SDSN for the organizing this very timely event. And thank you very much for a very, very interesting report and an excellent presentation by Yu-Gi-Ohm. I find it fascinating and I'm sure that this report also reaches all the colleagues back home in Stockholm and around the world. And finally, also thanks, of course, to Ambassador Oh from Republic of Korea for this overview and also for your leadership down at the UN in most in the recent months. Also into discussions about the EU and response to the COVID outbreak and how to build back better, including your role as a co-chair of the newly established group of friends of Sweden, of course, is a member as well. Now, it's a pleasure, of course, to start the day listening to Jeffrey Sachs. And I wish we can do that every Wednesday morning. And of course, it's very pleasing to see that Sweden is again on top of the ranking on the country ranking on progress towards the SDGs. We find ourselves in this together with our Nordic neighbors, as you noted, Guillaume, and we find ourselves with our EU partners on top of that ranking. We are usually around there somewhere, but I think what's most interesting for us and for all of us is not so much who is on top and who is on bottom, but where you're going with this. For Sweden, it's clear that there are a couple of things that we have been doing well and we have been doing well for some time together with our Nordic partners. But there's something, for example, on poverty, eradication, gender, energy sustainability, issues like that. But there are challenges as well, consumer production and construction sustainability and our impact on climate, like for many OECD countries. And so there is clearly room for progress for us and most of the higher ranked countries there. Our ranking I see is 84,72. That tells me that there is a little bit of a room for improvement for all of us, including Sweden. And I find that the most interesting question is where do we go from here? Where is the room for improvement? How we achieve that as we build back better and greener. And with that in mind, maybe three quick comments because I'm also interested to hear what our audience have to say. But maybe three comments on where we need to go now. There are many new things this spring. There's a new world. We live in a COVID world and hopefully soon in a post-COVID world. We work in different ways, including various platforms virtually and so on. We think in different ways, but maybe counter-intuitively, I think we also need to remind ourselves to hang on to our existing policy frameworks. The way to build back better is not a new policy framework. It's the Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement. We need to implement those. That's how we build back better. We need to hold on to development, our climate commitments, and we need to hold on to our commitments to democratic governance, human rights and inclusion. Including the participation of civil society. When we look around the world, how the world is impacted by the COVID outbreak and how we deal with the recovery, all these issues remain important. They remain more important than ever to make sure that we leave no one behind also in this recovery. That's my first point. Second point is how we do this. It's clear that as we recover from this COVID outbreak, this is not something that we can do isolated as countries, as agencies, as UN body or as regions. This is something that we need to do together in partnership. We need to work together across issue areas. We speak about different nexus, development humanitarian nexus, security development nexus, health security nexus, lots of nexus. What's clear is that we need to be better at bringing policy areas together and work across silos and dossiers and agencies. And we also need to work across regions and this is my third point. Our response needs to be multilateral. We need to do it together with our neighbors in the regions as for us, the Nordic countries in the European Union. But we need to do it also at the global level through the United Nations and together with the leadership of the WHO on the health tracks. But we can only do that if we also support those multilateral organizations. If we give them the resources and political and economic support that they need to lead this response. So as we recover better, as we work towards the agenda 2030, climate commitments, as we work in partnership across different policy areas, we must also support those institutions that are leading the work on this. This needs to be a multilateral approach and a lateral process, but we cannot then forget about the organizations that lead them. So most sure that they're supported and that of course this will remain a strong priority for the European Union, not least. And then finally, to say that and do it in partnership with our neighbors in the Nordics and the EU. And just to note that we will of course from the Swedish side be very pleased to participate in future presentations of this report next year. But I think we will be even more pleased to not be invited at the top ranking, but to be surpassed by some other actors. So please feel free to invite the next year's top performing perhaps the Netherlands or perhaps in Estonia. We will be perfectly content to sit in the audience next year. Thank you very much, Lauren. Thank you so much and I love this idea of a race to the top let's see, you know, who can, who can take you down and improve so much that they become number one. I love that you know very positive sort of competitive spirit. So, this is great we have about 20 or maybe even 25 minutes for some questions and we have quite a lot of them so we're going to try to do as many as we can but I apologize to those that we won't get to. We'll start with some for Guillaume specifically around data, we're getting a lot of different questions on data. Three of the common ones are what is the source of the data that we're using, how many countries are covered in the report. And then there are just a bunch of questions around specific country contexts from people who feel that data is lacking availability in their country and so they're also wondering sort of where you're looking at the source of the data and if anything is estimated, or if it's all sort of official reported officially reported data. Thank you, Lauren. Now these are all great questions. On the source of the data. The goal is to use a mix of official statistics and official statistics. So when I speak about official statistics, what I mean really is data that comes from UN custodian agencies, a large extent. The World Bank, WHO, ILO, UNICEF, UNESCO and other UN custodian agencies, we also use data from the OECD, the OECD dashboards. And these official statistics, which obviously go through a very robust process to ensure compatibility and quality, represent about two thirds of our data, 66% of our data come from official statistics. Now, I think it's fair to say that the SDGs are pushing the boundaries when it comes to what we need to measure. And so that includes, for instance, international data on the biodiversity aspects, but also the issue of spillover effects and consumption based methods, which right now fits primarily outside of official statistics. And so the third of the data that we use comes from what we call non-official statistics. That's primarily data from academia research centers that are published in the peer reviewed literature. So the peer reviewed process is kind of our equivalent for official statistics of the robust processes that are there to ensure compatibility and quality. And some data also come from non-governmental organizations, and that includes some of the data related to financial secrecy, tax havens, and profit sheets. So that's for the sources of the data. How many countries are covered by the report? The report includes country profiles for all the environmental states. We have 193 country profiles. And the reason why we include all of the countries is because the report is obviously a monitoring tool and accountability tool. So we have the SDG ranking, we have the distance to target, but it's also a tool that is meant to inform where we are missing data and which countries are missing, you know, which data point. And what we see over the years, I mean, we've been doing this for five or six years now, we see that by looking at their result as a country profile and seeing a gray for a couple of specific indicators. This actually pushes sometimes some countries to actually report more data to the IMF, to the World Bank and to other international organizations. So it's also a way for us to have a concise way to actually look at how are we doing in terms of data availability. Now, out of the 193 UN member states, we include 166 in the SDG index ranking, because obviously when we do the index and the scoring, we don't want missing data to be a huge bias on the results. And so we have read a strict thresholds for each country where if we are missing more than 20% of the data, we don't include it into the SDG index and ranking. But these countries that are not covered still have a country profile where we report the detailed data. So that's for the questions on how many countries are covered. On the context, which is also related to the missing data issues, I think that's specifically the reason why we also go and do regional editions and continental editions. There's some cases where we might be missing data at the global level, but where we have much more data available, say Latin America from UNICLAC in Europe with the European Commission in Africa from the African Union and other regional and continental organization. And that's also in those regional and continental editions that we really contextualize some of the key findings and the results. Something that we cannot do for the global edition, which really covers very large, but when it comes to the regional editions, we go much deeper in really pinpointing where are the data gaps, the data issues, but also policy-wise where would the main priorities are in terms of implementing the SDGs, the Agenda 2030 and climate. Thank you so much, Kiyom.  I'm going to direct a couple of different questions to our different speakers. Kiyom, it would be great if you could comment on a comment from Karen who says that climate action seems to be one of the worst performing SDGs across the board in all countries. He's wondering if this is correct and why. I think maybe talking about some of the specific indicators that you're tracking and why countries are sort of far from their targets on those would be helpful. I also think this is an interesting question because Ambassador Oh mentioned the green recovery that Korea is trying to do as part of their COVID-19 response. And Minister Counselor Solström also said that sort of climate change is one of the areas where Sweden has a little bit farther to go. So it would be nice if maybe both of you could also comment on a couple of things that your country is doing or some ways that you're thinking about sort of addressing climate change or implementing solutions in countries. But we'll start with Kiyom and then go to Ambassador Oh and then the Minister Counselor. Yeah, I'll give a very brief answer and really focus on the data that we include in the index and I'll let also other speakers mention the broader context. What we track and this is what I mentioned in my presentation is that we track both what's happening at the domestic level. So CO2 emissions at the domestic level. But also what's happening in terms of spillovers. So consumption based emission. And the climate goals SDG 13 is really bad for primarily high income countries, always CD countries and a number also medium income middle income countries, where they often combine to relatively negative results which is on one hand, high CO2 emissions and here also the trends are not always this again until pre COVID period the trends were not going necessarily in the right direction. On the domestic side, there are issues, but in addition to that, a lot of the high income and always CD countries tend to generate a large range of climate impacts internationally through unsustainable supply chains and value chains and impacts generated through trade. And so these are really the two aspects that lead to a relatively low performance on SDG 13 for a large range of high income and and middle income countries in the report. Thank you. And Ambassador Oh, any comments you have on sort of Korea's vision for the green recovery that you mentioned. Yes, I just unmute the climate change has been at the center of the government policies throughout the period of the new government. And we have been preparing for the all the national response, which are obligated by the climate convention. And but this crisis also gave gives the momentum for the government to take slightly much more bold actions from past. I mean, there is always the conflict of interest and as always a little bit of conflict between the environment side of the community as well as the industry. And it is inevitable. And I think it's all applies to all countries. So the government has to taken very balanced the way to deal with this issue for the whole time. I think it's with the crisis, the green recovery and the build back much greener is is the I think it's the only way to get out and to build that builds back better and build even build forward. And I think it's that can gain the sum of the acceptance of the public as well. So I'm I'm quite optimistic. Of course, it's a huge challenge for the entire Korean society and also the industry for Korea. But I mean, we the Korea has heavily, I mean, dependent on the trade and export. So I think it's it's going to be a huge challenge for the industries. But this is I think they at least to share the notion that this is the only way forward. Thank you so much. And Ola, any sort of comments you'd like to add on how sweet in this thinking about this. Oh, I think we unmute you. That would help. Apologies. There we go. Now unmuted. Thank you so much. Thank. No, thank you, Lauren for this. And thanks for an excellent question. I think this is a question we should all ask ourselves every day how we can do better as Sweden as individuals as government as civil society as international institutions. I think the only way to build back better is to build back a greener. I don't think we I don't think it would be building back better if it wasn't greener. I think also it happens to be good business. I think there is a massive investment and profit opportunities for those countries and those companies and those entrepreneurs that can capture this moment and develop the solutions right now. There is a little bit of a moment in history right now where we have to decide and and I hope that there are our governments and entrepreneurs and and companies that are ready to capture that moment and lead the way together with countries of course like Sweden and and the Republic of Korea in Sweden domestically when it comes to climate action we're doing relatively well. One reason is that we have a reasonably good energy mix. Björn mentioned that this report that that's one of the targets that we're doing relatively well on. And we also do it because there is a deep commitment in Sweden for conversion. I mean conservation of nature and climate climate and things in the whole population, not least the younger generations, the most famous example of which is of course are very impressive. Greta Thunberg who is reminding us that we need to do more and to do better regularly. And so I think the challenge for for us and for many, many of our partners is rather what the geom refer to as the spillover effects climate effects that are taking place outside the borders of our country, which links to unsustainable patterns of consumption consumption and production in many developing countries. And there I think it's actually what I mentioned before when this is something we need to tackle together through multilateral action through not least in our region through stronger action through the European Union. And Sweden will continue to to champion that at the at the EU, but also at the United Nations. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I think you made two points that hadn't yet come up that I do think are critical of the role of young people as advocates on all of these issues, and the role of the private sector. I don't have the citation handy but I did see a preliminary analysis that companies that had certain criteria that made the more sustainable more green, more inclusive were actually performing a little bit better relative to maybe their less progressive counterparts during the sort of economic recessions that we're feeling as a as a result of the pandemic. You also mentioned spillovers so there are a bunch of questions about that and I think maybe I will go to one of those. And Guillaume I think it's probably best addressed by you. There are a lot of questions about the charts on spillover effects. Some people are wondering if the low spillover rates are accurate sort of what we're capturing what we're missing. How robust is that data or are there future plans to sort of bring in other things that are spillovers that we might not be measuring now. And there's also a specific question in the context of Latin America and Southeast Asia, some countries that have relatively high consumption, as well as high deforestation in country, not capturing too many spillover effects. And I think I know that the answer to that is perhaps because it's not a spillover, some of it is counted domestically, but it would be great to get your sort of official author statistician response on that. Yeah, this is great. Lauren, great questions. I mean, since we had a get a tongue was mentioned right before that me and then we also refer to great. I mean, she's actually one of those that has been speaking about this issue of spillover effects when she accused rich countries of creative carbon and what this means is basically taking into account only the domestic emissions production based emissions and leaving outside of this emissions that are generated abroad through products that are actually consumed within the country so imported emissions. So to go back to this to this chart, I think one thing that's very important here to mention is that our indicators are we in order to not over penalize the size of countries, we use as a denominator per capita. Right, so each indicator is divided on a per capita basis, which is important so we're not measuring the absolute we're actually missing per individual right and this is why we have countries like Singapore or Luxembourg, for instance, which are relatively small countries with high trade intensity that actually come up as relatively high on this chart and having relatively large spillover effects but that's because obviously we capture spillovers per person, not in absolute terms so that's just an important distinction. What we capture here are three types, three broad types of spillovers. One are the ones that are related to the environment and biodiversity and that are generated through consumption and trade and here the main tool that we are using are what's called multi regional input output tables that are combined with satellite environmental biodiversity and even increasingly social data sets. And here there's, I mean it's a growing area of work but we see lots of very interesting estimates coming out, primarily from the academic community. And so, we have been documenting this issue for many years in this report for for many years and every year we try to integrate a little bit more indicators so for instance this year, one of the new indicators we have is that we're able to separate the impacts that are done on biodiversity threats through the through consumption, both for terrestrial and freshwater versus marine. So marine biodiversity threats is covered under SDG 14 and terrestrial and freshwater under SDG 15 before we only had one single indicator capturing all of this, but we see some differentiated trends when it comes to the impact on marine versus terrestrial. So the first broad part of spillovers related to environment and biodiversity. So, in terms of indicators here we have CO2 nitrogen SO2 biodiversity scarce water scarcity so the impact that countries generate on scarce water. The second broad type is related to social and security types of spillovers and here through multi regional input to output tables we're also able to capture the impact that essentially high income countries are having on other countries, for instance on fatal accidents at work. And here we're what we're doing we're starting a study actually to try to see the impact of the textile supply chains from the consumption of European countries to South Asian countries. And that's basically generated through imports from countries with relatively poor labor standards. And then the, and as part of the social security we also include some data on those countries that export a lot of conventional weapons, and that disrupt situations abroad and this is another another type of data it's not based on multi regional input output table. And then finally a last set of spillovers that we capture are related to what we call financial secrecy or tax heavens right I think this is captured under SDG 17 that calls for that calls for partnerships and sound fiscal management. And obviously I mean tax heavens financial secrecy the undermine the ability of other countries to live either resources that are needed to actually invest and achieve the SDGs. So here we have indicators from Oxfam, the tax justice network and other estimates on profit shifting produced by by academia. The big data gap here on spillovers for us and this is something that we are planning to do much more work on it is related to physical flows right so we're able to capture the impact generated through through consumption. But right now we're not able to capture to attribute the responsibility of emissions generated by let's say a factory that's located at the border of our country, and where most of the emissions are actually being accounted to the neighboring countries right so that applies to air air flows, but also water flows so pollutions that's being done to a river that goes to another country that we can we could attribute to the to the to the actual country of origin so that's, that's a big data gap right now which which we aim to feel in the in the in the coming years. I think I'll stop here. Yeah, thank you. Okay, we're starting to be short on time but I'm going to try to squeeze in one last round of questions before I turn it over to Christian. For Guillaume, we've gotten a lot of questions about SDG 12 data. People are asking why it is not included in the raw trend data worksheet that's used for the report, but it is included in the SDG index score and the rankings. So people are just sort of wondering sort of what SDG 12 data we're using how it was derived and why it is appearing in some places and not others. I also want to give Ambassador Oh and Minister Councillor Solstrom some closing remarks, and I think your final point on some of these cross boundary issues is a good one that also links back to some of the questions we've been getting from participants. There are a lot of questions right now coming in around SDG 17 and the role of partnerships in sort of broadly achieving the SDGs as well as in the COVID response and sort of generally questions about the current sort of political situation we're in where many countries are turning away from multilateralism and looking a little bit more inward. So any thoughts or reflections perhaps from our two country representatives on how we can sort of avoid these worrying twins and foster the kind of collaboration that we need to achieve the SDGs and respond to COVID. But we'll start with Guillaume, we'll do the same order Guillaume and then Ambassador Oh and then Ola. Yeah, thank you Lauren. That's another great question. I'll be brief, I want to make sure that other panelists have time to speak. This is primarily due to the low reliability of some of the trend data that we have to capture SDG 12 related to things like waste data over time and other data that we capture on their SDG 12 responsible consumption and production. So what we do in order to generate a trend arrow is that we try to make sure that we have and we do have a threshold. So if we don't have trend data for a certain number of indicators under a goal. We do not generate a trend arrow and SDG 12 is one of those at the global level where we're struggling to have timely data and enough global global time series estimates for the world. Now, in other regional reports we are often able to actually generate trend. So if I take the case of the European report that we released in November. This is a report where a lot of the indicators that we have for European countries we have much more data on recycling rates and other data that matter for for SDG SDG 12. But at the global level is still in a goal where we see lots of challenges with regards to the quality and the timeliness of the estimates. Thank you. And final reactions, comments from Ambassador Oh particularly around SDG 17 and collaboration. Thank you, Lauren. SDG 17 the partnership is is one of the key principles that we have by divide in dealing with the COVID-19. And I think that's the also the the compass to point us in the direction that we need to go. So the global solidarity and partnership I think it would be the only option that we can have to overcome this crisis as well as to build back better. The one of the lessons that we had in dealing with the crisis that the as the this crisis has exposed very clearly that the all the economic and social. The structural problems of our times and it gives us a stock remote reminder that how important that we have to pursue even in the future and SDGs are things will be the road map as a professor sucks mentioned and will be the tool that we have to navigate. The unclear the future and the so I think it's it's time for the older country that double its efforts to implement the SDGs and all them all of the goals should be should not be should be taken very seriously. And certainly the Korea will remain very strongly and in solidarity in tackling this crisis as well as in fulfilling and implementing the SDGs in the ways of hat. Thank you. Thank you and Minister councillor Solstrom. Thank you very much Lauren. I'll be very brief. I subscribe to everything Ambassador or just said and used to say that for this to happen for two countries and institutions to resist the tendency to look inwards. But continue to look outwards towards your regions towards multilateral institutions towards the multilateral cooperation and partnership that we all I think understand is needed now. For that for that what you need is political leadership in the institutions but also domestically and I hope that the leaders today have the foresight and the strategic courage to continue to look outwards and continue to live on live up to the commitments. This relates to what I raised earlier that if you want multilateral solutions you need multilateral actors and you need to make sure that they have the political and economic support that they need and that's where we are coming from in Sweden. But we will of course call upon all the partners to continue to support this multilateral system and the multiple action that is needed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for all of your comments and apologies that we couldn't get to more questions. It's my pleasure to turn it over to Dr. Christian Kroll one of the authors of the report and a key partner for some concluding and closing remarks. Thank you Lauren. Well it is a great pleasure for us to launch our report today. We're such a fascinating discussion. Thank you first of all to our distinguished guests. Minister Sostrum if I may start with you your humble interpretation of your very good performance in Sweden is so characteristic of what we see from Swedish colleagues and what we see from Swedish audiences over the years in the past in the past years and we've been doing this. I was talking to a journalist from Dargan's industry yesterday in the context of our launch one of the largest papers in Sweden and I told them not to rest on your laurels in Sweden. But I'm absolutely sure that with your leadership there is absolutely a further push for Sweden to get even better in the future. And also and that is very important. I think to get across to to help other countries because our responsibility in in those countries that are doing pretty well relatively speaking in terms of the SDGs is to help the other countries to strike the right balance of economic social and ecological progress. And Ambassador Oh it was so fascinating to learn about the trust framework which we believe is absolutely the gold standard of how the covert crisis can be tackled you've absolutely been leading the way. And we're thrilled that you've spelled this out for us and the audience again. And we do hope that many countries in the world will take this up in the future to learn from from your experience and really flattering was your assessment of our work. I think you said it's something somewhere along the lines of the SDG index and dashboards should be the navigation system to steer us out of the covert crisis. That is, you know, very flattering but also places a huge responsibility on on on our shoulders which we take on with hopefully with grace, and we will try to live up to that expectation. What what does come out absolutely strongly of today's discussion and the questions of the from the audience is that cutting out your analysis and sound data to measure progress on the SDGs is more important than ever. When we started this in 2015. It was pretty much seen as a very crazy exercise you know how can you do this it's far too ambitious 169 targets, 17 goals, statistics from 193 countries, where do you even start. And so we just did we just started. And this is where we are now and we're absolutely thrilled to see the demand rise and rise even further over the years from from communities from governments international organizations NGOs journalists activists ordinary citizens taking up our work and and really breathing into it and that is really what this is about so we look forward over the next at least 10 years to carry on with you this journey of accountability for the SDGs of really putting pressure where it should be. And when it comes to progress on the SDGs and we rely on everyone in the audience and in your networks on giving us feedback so we're grateful for any constructive criticism of course. And of course also do send us your examples of how you're using our report and how it is useful to you and where you think you could we could do an even better job, because we always strive to do better with every report. My final point, I think we've we're all sort of sharing the sentiment after our great discussion today that humanity really is at a crossroads. We could either now with the COVID break if you like, and the pause for reflection that this is giving us we could either carry on with a business as usual scenario afterwards and basically wreck the planet. Or we could use the crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally recalibrate. What we see in our data and in our report, Guillaume has, you know, in a terrific way, spelled this out earlier. What we see is that there is some progress in the environmental SDGs, probably due to, you know, COVID and the, and the, the lessening of activities in the economic and social sphere but we shouldn't be fooled. This is an illusion. Once we restart the economy with the old recipes and once this is met with devastating economic and social conditions, people, more people in poverty, more people really in desperation. So if we carry on with the old recipes of the past and we restart the engine of the economy, we will be actually worse off than before the crisis. And we can already see the effects in the Amazon rainforest, for example, where the sheer desperation of people there, you know, basically means that the Amazon is being being dismantled. My final point shall be clever companies use the crisis by developing business models that are compatible with COVID-19 and the SDGs and clever governments use the crisis by developing policies that are compatible with COVID-19 and the SDGs. We will see that a lot of stuff that we thought wasn't possible before the crisis, you know, this can can be done and that can be done. But actually now we're seeing that we can be a lot more imaginative, flexible and innovative than we thought we would be. And we do hope that this will carry on throughout the crisis and really push us closer to what's fulfillment of the SDGs. So thank you all for listening in today. Thank you so much to all of our distinguished speakers, as well as all of our wonderful participants who joined us will be posting a recording of the meeting online and we will also try to get to some of the other questions that we weren't able today and try to post some answers. So stay tuned for a follow up email from us and thank you so much to everyone for joining us. I wish everybody a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you.


The one thing I kept saying out loud while reading this book was, oh my god, was this written by a 12 year old? And after finishing the final scene of the final chapter, I had to conclude, yes, this book was in fact written by a 12 year old. The premise of this book is the future internet is more like virtual reality, and it is owned and controlled by a trillionaire computer genius who makes it available entirely for free to everybody in the world. And when he dies, he leaves a message saying that he has placed one Easter egg somewhere on the internet and the person who deciphers all the clues and finds it inherits everything, all his money, his business, control over the internet itself, everything. But I can better summarize the book with one sentence, dead Steve Jobs fanfic written by a 12 year old. The characters in this book do not behave like human beings.  That's all you need. The only entertainment value this book has is lengthy lists of pop culture references that go on for pages and pages and pages. Other than that, it has zero substance. I mean zero. That's the short version of the review. Now I've got some other things to say. I have a lot of things to say actually and I doubt I'll get them all in. First of all, I listened to the audio book read by Will Wheaton and going into it, I was thinking, would I be able to tolerate that? But he was fine. In fact, he was perfect for it. And for the first 20, 25% of the book, I was smiling and nodding my head plenty at the obscure references to 80s music and TV shows and video games that I recognized. But then I actually stopped listening and put the book away and was very close to not even finishing it because I was so put out at the unbelievable behavior of the characters. I have the same problem with this book that I have with every book or movie or TV show that I've ever seen or read that involves hackers. The point at which they are confronted by the evil corporation or the evil government or whoever it is that's out to get them, they never behave like people whose lives are in danger or people who are on the run and they don't stay off the internet. They just go to an internet cafe and get right back on with the same usernames, the same passwords and everything. I don't accept that. I've never accepted that in any story in any medium. And I find it a real deal killer. The skinny high school kid who was the protagonist of this book, I didn't believe his behavior or his existence really at all. He could easily outwit every evil corporation and every government agency. He knew every obscure bit of trivia. He could beat every video game. I mean smash every video game. Nothing was ever a problem for him. That's what I was saying before. That's what the term Mary Sue means. I remember when I was eight years old in second grade, first or second grade, I had this complex little fantasy about me and this little girl I had a crush on. We had bionic powers and our fat old teacher would faint when she saw us save the school and lift cars and stuff like that. That was this book. That was exactly this book. I cannot stress enough that there is nothing else in this book. Except huge lists of highly detailed retro gaming TV and movie trivia that you will find familiar and will make you smile when you hear it. And that's the only reason that people love this book. It's really rare to find a negative review of this book. Everybody gives it raging multi-thumbs up. Even Mark Bustler at Classic Game Room gave it a raving review and he doesn't do book reviews. I was surprised to learn that he reads. Ernest Klein is perfectly capable of writing a complete sentence with good grammar and a storyline with a beginning, a middle, and an end and basic character arcs, I guess, which a lot of authors aren't capable of.  So many of the most popular books and movies and TV shows we're seeing now are a complete mystery as to why they're popular. They contain nothing. And I suspect Ernest Klein is very aware of that. I could talk a lot longer about the problems I have with the various characters in this book and their behavior but I won't. It's not worth it. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below. And visit the 30 Seconds Sci-Fi Tumblr. That's my headquarters. In addition to my videos, I publish links and updates there every day.