I think we're about ready to start. We're good. Perfect. Remember, this is a live session. Live television is my specialty. I'm kidding. But I'm very grateful for being here on time and to discuss and share thoughts on this important topic. For a second, just imagine if every person around the world could affordably participate in the digital economy. This is the ambitious goal that inspired the creation of the Edison Alliance, an incredible movement, a network of leaders across private and public sectors that are promoting change and trying to really bring private and public sectors, like I said, in that collaboration in three main areas, financial services, education, and health care. Everyone in this room is part of that mission in some form or another, directly or indirectly. And today, we're focusing on unlocking capital at scale for digital inclusion. The current estimates suggest that between $400 billion and $2 trillion are needed in order to achieve universal digital inclusion. We're talking about around 1 billion people around the world. So the question seems to be how we can mobilize private assets and foster a cooperative policy to achieve an environment that generates this much needed investment in the digital economy and in digital inclusion. And before I introduce the distinguished members of our panel, I want to thank Her Majesty, Queen Maxima, the Queen of the Netherlands, who's here in her capacity as the United Nations Secretary General Advocate or Special Envoy on Inclusive Finance. Thank you so much for being here.  Thank you so much. If you could lead us with some introductory remarks and talk about why this particular topic of financial inclusion is so close to your heart and, of course, the challenge of how we scale action, how we increase action in order to achieve a more inclusive financial digital world. Well, first of all, thank you, everybody. You just mentioned my very long name, a title that I have that was given to me by Secretary General, as things are in the Bretton Ward Institute. Sometimes it's a big negotiation. And you might ask yourself, what is she doing on digital inclusion? Well, to be honest with you, nowadays, if I speak about financial inclusion, we cannot speak about financial inclusion without having a mobile phone and without having access to markets digitally. So this is a very, very important part of my work. So what I found myself in this issue, in this transition when I did study 16 years ago with microfinance to all the way to here, that I'm actually speaking about IDs, I'm speaking about connectivity, I'm speaking about level of handhelds that people are actually using. So I'm completely immersed in this issue of digital inclusion and the importance of actually having this in a way that is really, really inclusive. So it's very nice, therefore, to join you as a champion of the Edison Alliance. I have to say that public and private sector financing is our best chance to mobilize the vast resources you just mentioned needed to provide affordable, accessible and safe digital connections for everyone, especially the nearly three billion people that still are offline. This includes the poor, women, small holder farmers and MSMEs. The pandemic sapped their resources and made it even more expensive to get connected. New data shows today that for the first time in years, fewer, not more, women are using mobile internet, fewer. Many had to choose between owning a mobile phone or putting food at the table. So to avoid a growing digital divide and achieve really universal digital inclusion, the public and private sector really must work and invest together. And I say the Edison Alliance could really make a huge difference. Its goal of actually improving one billion lives through digital solutions by 2025 is really a call to action that we need. We have seen a lot of very encouraging public and commitments from government and industry. So the tools and products being created to do this. Now on the digital financial inclusion front, we need not only digital inclusion, but really a set of what I call public goods that together will assure inclusion, stability and basic sustainability. Too often the digital infrastructure and policies are considered in different silos, but really these public goods work best actually together. Some unlock digital access by expanding, for example, connectivity or agent networks into new areas. Other public goods make markets work better for customers through fair competition and interoperable payment systems, for example. And some others protect the financial system and its users by strengthening data privacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, digital and financial literacy. Some were provided by governments, and others by the private sector, but in any way they will have to be a collective effort. We've actually seen interoperable payment systems now coming up in many, many countries. Some of them we've known, the India case is a very, very good one. A system basically support high number of small value transactions are unlikely to be developed without government encouragement and innovation and incentive. But then we need to have them because if we don't have that, the small transactions and the poorer and the women and the smaller firms will never gonna be able to come in. Propo payments like these were set up in Pakistan and India. They can increase competition between providers, drive down costs, allow infrastructure to be shared between competing firms and open the financial system to potentially millions of new customers. For the private sector, this means serving a bigger market and this will entail other types of products and services. And this of course will challenge innovations to their existing business models. This also means that they need to sit at the table to help build fair government structures, rules and set pricing that makes sense to all stakeholders. And I really want to say this, the decision of actually sitting all together at the table is very important. You cannot from a government standpoint come up with something in which the pricing structure is absolutely not right in which not one private sector player wants to actually participate. Another big example is connectivity. And here, reaching the last mile can be the longest mile. Connecting and serving the poor in rural and remote areas affordably can only be achieved through collaboration. But what are those models of cooperation that enable the last mile clients to really get digitally connected? What are the types of regulations and the right incentives for the private sector to invest and serve this last mile? And we must not forget that connectivity also means access to devices and good quality devices. So to build all these vital digital public goods, we should start of course with dialogue. When countries start sharing their knowledge together, we can really learn from what works, such as the Brazil PIX Interoperable Payment System or the India's stack and the Indian ID system. There are many, many examples and they do not only come from various countries because when I speaking about Nigeria, India or Pakistan, we have amounts of people that we can actually set up several systems that might actually work. But we also have very good examples of countries like Peru, Estonia, that have actually set up these type of corporations that really work with much, much smaller countries. And of course, what is the role of global organizations? They can really help bring governments and private sector together. If I've seen something in all my visits with all my partners is we've been the nexus and the glue to actually bring this dialogue together because without that dialogue, we're not going to move the needle on this front. So the World Economic Forum, UNDP, the Bank of International Settlements can also facilitate discussion and exchange on public digital public goods. The Gates Foundation and the World Bank Group are really ready to provide capital and technical assistance to many of them. So let us not lose ourselves in discussing what are the competing allocations of is it digital, of is it health, or is it education? Without digital inclusion, we will not make health possible. We will not make financial inclusion possible and we're not going to make education for all possible. So if we just sequence our priorities, it will be the way to go. Thank you very much and I'm looking forward to the good discussion of these very talented people here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Queen Maxima. We're grateful for your leadership in that capacity in the UN as a champion of the Edison Alliance and of course for your personal investment and your commitment to this issue. Thank you so much for those introductory remarks and I'm going to start introducing our panel with a couple of housekeeping items. You can share our conversation if you feel inclined to do so on social media using the hashtag WEF22 I'm contractually obligated to say that. No, no, I'm just kidding. And then of course, feel free to make this an interactive conversation. We will have some time for questions at the end and make those questions with a question mark at the end so we can move the conversation forward. Makhtar Diop, the managing director of the International Finance Corporation. Thank you so much for being here today. Hans Besberg, the chairman and the CEO of Verizon and the chair of the Edison Alliance. We're going to talk about a lot today. And Shobana Kimineni, she's the executive vice chairperson of Apollo hospitals and board of the Edison Alliance. Board member of the Edison Alliance. Thank you so much. We were talking offstage in the speaker's room about the fact that it's been a year since, around a year since the creation of the Edison Alliance and Hans, I want to start by asking you now you have a good benchmark to measure tangible results, to sort of figure out the direction that you're heading in. What have been some of the barriers, the main barriers of unlocking capital for digital inclusion? I was going to go back a little bit in time and of course, once in a while my dream was to have the goal 18 of the STGs and that would be that everybody's connected in the world. We all know that it's 17 STGs. So, but during the COVID, I think we all understood that that when the first century's infrastructure is actually mobility, broadband and cloud, give the same chance for anyone, wherever they come from, wherever they're born, wherever they live. And actually, it was pretty good progress during COVID. 800 million people more got connected online during COVID, which is just enormous. 800 million people. 800 million people, but we needed COVID to understand it and do it. But that's far away from where we need to be. We still have 2.9 billion people that are not connected on this planet. So the conversation about the Edison Alliance was of course that, okay, what is needed to address that? You need three pieces. You need the accessibility of the technology. You need affordability and then usability. And you need private public partnership to make it happen. And in the early discussion, we had the Klaus Wobb was about the biggest platform in the world is where the economic forum where basically everyone is here, where the private sector, public sector, where NGOs and everything, there was the idea, can we launch something here to actually address something much larger when it comes to a digital divide? So we agreed upon doing that, but we also said that accessibility affordability and usability has to be the guiding principle. So we decided to have the leading star in education, healthcare, and financial inclusion based on the digital divide, because only having access is not enough. So we started with a smaller group. We ended up now having 46 champions that all are committed, that commit a contribution in kind, or are doing something in order to meet the target that we put up for ourselves in September last year, which was one billion lives connected by 2025, additional one billion that are touched upon it. So far, of course, we have a lot of commitment from different companies, countries that is part of it. We're gonna do the first report during the UN week in September, that's one year after we announce it. I'm extremely encouraged for the capital, the contribution in kind for companies, from private sector, from public sector, in order to make this happen, and the sharing in between them. Is it easy? No, it's super difficult. There are many barriers, and capital is one, of course, to see that you have financing for the digital divide. But I'm encouraged what I see. I see now bonds coming out on digital divide. I can actually finance the same money I can finance Verizon's balance sheet with. I can do a digital bond, and I get the same interest rate because the market is now understanding this is important things to finance. Equal as much as I do a green bond, I get the same interest rate on my green bond as the digital bond, as the digital inclusion bond, as the corporate financing I do on my balance sheet. That is encouraging to see that capital is allocated to this, so that's one thing. There are many other things we need to talk about, of course, because affordability becomes important, handsets become extremely important, or devices in general, and I probably shouldn't spend too much time in the beginning, but that's the outset of what we're doing, and it's a five-year journey we're doing, adding one billion people more into the digital world, and of course, focusing a lot about the most vulnerable females that will have the chance, but trying to do it, not only talking about I need more broadband. If I have the broadband, I need to afford it, and then I need application from healthcare, education, or that I can actually use the mobile phone to make in mobile transactions, financially, as a bank account. So you cannot only talk about one thing, and that's what the alliance is doing. Of course, we are technology partners, but the leaders, like Shobana, she's leading the healthcare, digital healthcare, and Michael Maibach from MasterCard, he's leading the financial inclusion, and then the education is the minister of IT from Rwanda. So we try to lead it, not only by technology, because it has to be a combination of it. Yeah, it's pretty clear that the table has three legs, and without any of those three legs, isn't just gonna be able to maintain itself. Shobana, how do we find these leading business models in sectors like healthcare, for example, that are good models for financial digital health services, for advancing digital health services, especially in rural areas, where they don't have access sometimes to physical space to the actual services? I think that we're actually fortunate. Health is in a very good space, because it makes people think of this as one of the top ESG, so their funds, whether it's ESG, whether it's CSR, whether it's bonds, everyone is interested to give health a break, because they know that it's foundational to a country's development. If a country's not healthy, if they don't have a healthy population, it's very likely that it's going to impact the GDP very negatively, especially as we've seen during COVID. So if you look at it, I think that solving the problem and health is a problem, there will be financing solutions. We've seen it for COVID, for instance, 357 days from the start to a vaccine coming out. It was global, the way that whether it was, it was institutional lending, it was banks, it was CSR, it was foundations, it was countries that were giving money into it. And this is a model that I think is completely replicable when you have a good story behind it, but you have to write that up. The problem has to be sharp now. People don't want vague promises of saying that I will, I'm going to cure, I'm going to eradicate TB, or I'm going to diagnose all the cancers in the country. They want sharper, they want us to go down into the areas. When we talk about rural, what will you do? How are you going to manage it? And I think that's why the Edison Alliance is actually so pivotal in making a billion lives, you know, transforming. Because we can go down and use this digital because your Majesty, you spoke about it, saying that without digital, you're not going to have the steps to go further down. And this is the kind of inclusion that brings it large and makes it affordable. So that's very important too. I can't go into an Indian village. So the best thing that the Indian government has done is our UPI, when you refer to the stack twice or twice, I was super thrilled. But it's really true. Any Indian can just go in there. We don't need credit cards, we don't need cash. You just, you can go in there, scan a QR code, and it just goes into your accounts. Money gets deposited directly. Having said that, I think it's a huge, it makes a huge impact in underserved rural areas because there you have the connections because they have, thanks to Hans and all his colleagues around the world, we have connectivity everywhere. And with that connectivity, we can actually provide a tele-consult, we have digital dispensaries. This is something that we're doing in the Edison Alliance. We already have five models up there. And the state governments are financing it. We are doing it. And I think this blended finance is, the world is going to hear more and more about blended finance. People with different financial, I might need an X return. Someone else might need much less. But we can all work together through a catalyst and a long-term program. As long as that there's a problem that needs to be answered, I think that I have great optimism and faith that the world can overcome that challenge. And we keep highlighting the need for partnerships. Queen Maxima said that during her introduction, your marks, both of you have talked about this right balance between public capital complementing itself with private efforts. And, Mactar, how do you hit the right balance between those two, what it's needed to to make this a successful approach? Because we seem to have momentum. We have leadership. We all agree that this is a crucial project, but then we're starting to see some of the main challenges ahead. No, thank you very much. It's happening, actually. I'm optimistic because a year and a half ago, when you had this big shock, it came to, in front of us, we were wondering what to do. And we created this speedboat. So we got together at GSMAs, Alliance, ITU. Everybody got together and said, we have to solve that problem. We never have that rate of connectivity, never, ever. It means that when we have a shock of this nature, we are able to get things together, and the challenge is to replicate it and to sustain that effort. And I think that's where we are today. And the solution, I agree with you, is multiple dimensions. And I would like really to Queen Maxima to thank you because the work that you've been doing on digital ID has been critical in that process. The resilience of economy after this shock, during this shock, has been linked to the digital inclusion. Countries, which have been able to connect quickly, as you said, we've been able to transfer resources to SOPRA to give them medical services. If we didn't have that foundation ID 4D, it would have been impossible. So I really would like to commend you for really your leadership on that because you've been the big champion of it. And it came from solving a problem. The initial question was how to bring more people to financial inclusion. And realize that it was not only handing some money, give money, give Michael credit here, and then the way to scan it up was to be able to connect the people and to give digital IDs. I think that we have also second good news is that part of the world which were not connected on broadband are receiving more broadband. Let's take Africa. We have two new submarine cable that's been laid off the shore of Africa. Soon, and we really have 300 gigabyte of shore of Africa. Today, for those who don't know, the capacity installed in sub-Saharan Africa is around 30 terabyte or less. So a factor of 10. So that's why policy and public and private will be important because you can bring the fiber of shore at the coast of a country, but if you are not able to do the last mile to connect the poorest, you are not solving the problem. If you don't have the user cases, if you don't have the handheld, which is cheap and accessible, if you don't have a share infrastructure to allow you to be able to connect the largest number of people to 4G, you are not doing so. It will require really working together. And in addition, if you want to do this to the poorest country, not only to be able to consume services, but also to export and to be part of the world economy, we need to give them skills to be able to do that. I was just talking an hour ago with a education service provider. And the model now is to have a hybrid model where they bring training, which is coming from TVT online with the formal degrees. And that's what it is being. So all this development are only possible if you look at different elements. Lastly, let's not forget cybersecurity. We are the time where security is becoming a big problem, even more than before. And as we are moving in that process, a big role of the government will be really to help on creating the framework, the policies for cybersecurity. Otherwise, all the efforts that are being put in place might be to be jeopardized in the near future, including for the poorest who will be needing to use all these handset and all tools. And it's incredible, so you go ahead, Hans. No, I just want to add that I think that it's so good with the talking, but then sometimes we talk high level and then you don't feel that deep enough.  We know in the continent that you come from, it's going to be billion people more. There's no way we can do physical solution. And I just wish we think like that the only way to actually see that every African that comes up and at once being there, the only way for them is actually to have digital solution and the government needs to understand that that's equally important infrastructure as anybody. Of course, food always comes first. But if they have digital skilling with education, healthcare, they will have the same chance as I had when I was born. But we cannot expect that they're going to build brick and mortar because it's just impossible practically to do that. And I think that's the mentality we need to start thinking about that the mobility broad on the cloud is the 21st century infrastructure and we need to work like that and we from the private sector will need to do it and the public sector need to think like that. And that's a very important piece of thinking in order to see that everybody on this planet gonna have the same chance because if you're outside the digital divide, you don't have the same chance anymore. I just want to rebound on this. Example, do you talk about Rwanda? It was a very interesting example. How people use technology to leapfrog. It's a mountainous country. It's a country of 1000 hills, schools. And build a road is very expensive. Because of digital and the coverage they have of 4G, people can order blood samples and have it delivered by drone on a hill. So it's just leapfrogging and make a huge difference in terms of service delivering health. I just wanted to give that example. No, and I think it's a great example. And I was gonna share a personal story. One of my, if not the first assignment I ever had as a reporter back when I worked at a local newspaper in Mexico was to go to the mountains of Guerrero. It's one of the poorest states in Mexico. In a town called Metlatono, which had the lowest levels of human development in Latin America. And one of the main reasons for that was that they were isolated. It would take pregnant women five hours to get to the nearest clinic or children hours to walk to school. And when you come to a place like Davos, even today, and you hear these conversations about remote work and remote education and how healthcare is approaching a new era where everything's gonna be done through digital. This is why this conversation is so important. Because it complements everything that's being discussed outside the Edison Alliance and what's happening here. And it's important to tell that story, Hans. It's part of what you've learned in this few months, first few months of Edison Alliance. Absolutely, no, no. And there are so many great people. And the thing is also, what you start to see, you combine that with the social responsibility that many private company takes today and making it part of the strategy. So even if you start thinking, okay, where all this money coming from, it's actually part of the strategy to be part of doing this for your communities because the community's ultimately your customers and they're part of your society. So the whole sort of, I came here the first time, 2008, and I was super excited. I had been in Africa somewhere. I saw a mobile phone. Somebody was collecting data from a village and they can detect where the disease came from. Of course, nobody really thought it was a good idea. Now, 15 years later, you see everybody start understanding the power of that. But now the movement has to come. And how do we keep that momentum going, especially after the pandemic in sectors like healthcare? We all paid attention to healthcare during the past couple of years, more than ever before, probably in our lives. But how do you keep that attention and that inertia moving forward? Because healthcare has become front and center again. So I think that we might move away from acknowledging that COVID is endemic and we just want to forget that period. But it doesn't mean that we're going to forget how to look after our health on one side. So I think that people have become, because of digital, people have become more aware, it's coming to their own hands, that they can order a test, that they can find out, that they can consult a doctor, that they can actually have their records and actually go to those goals, prevent diabetes, attach it to your fitness. So these kind of things, now we have early warning trackers of through your watch, as your EKG comes in, we can say that it doesn't look good, why don't you come in? So there are that healthcare has actually become democratized, it's in people's hands. But I really think that it's also important that we have to make it, that it's also highly inclusive. By having digital health, we're working on projects in rural India where for five dollars a year, really five dollars a year, we want to be able to write up the patient's initial record, give them basic medicines, and also do the diagnostic that they need per person. And if this can be done at scale, taken to countries that I think even in rural America or wherever, all over the world, that it led such a cost affordability, we were discussing yesterday, a hundred dollars for a smartphone might be too expensive for 25 is already expensive. So that's where we need to get that convergence so people will remember. And the last point I want to say is that it's not just the traditional players that are going to be in healthcare anymore. You have the Googles and the Amazons and the Microsoft and just about everybody who's in technology thinks that they can bring a smarter solution to the table. That's a good thing. Innovation. You see that. Lots of innovation and there is being funded.  No, I just wanted to strengthen her point. I've actually been to many places in Africa in which you see the increase of efficiencies just by having digital systems. So we're actually speaking about sort of how do we finance and the health system and I see what a doctor that used to be feeling informed for every patient to actually get the insurance company and it's all done by the phone. So the doctor, instead of actually seeing three patients per hour, he's seeing like 20 patients per hour. It's the efficiency is a really very big thing. Now the one thing is we might actually have capital but the one problem that I'm actually seeing with a lot of countries are actually asking for investments in the digital sphere, they don't have the technical capacity to do this in a sustainable and safe way. So we have to really pay, we talked about cybersecurity here. We really have to be really mindful of the capacity constraints that some of these countries have in dealing with the risks that we're also taking by doing these humongous transitions to doing everything digital. So we really have to be altogether globally think about these digital public goods. What is good practice? What is standard? And there's right now no work being done on this field and I'm trying to do that with BIS, BIS and other institutions with FSB as well, certainly on the financial side, but extremely important. The whole issue of data agency. So these are very, because these are things that will end up destroying also customer trust and also losing it. We also talk about algorithm biases. Bias can actually exclude more than include. So let us be mindful that while we give them people accessibility, affordability, and viability, that we also give them a way that is safe and actually will increase trust in the whole system. And I'm so glad we're getting it specific. Yeah, and I think this question is so good. And sometimes I make things very simple, which they are not, but I will try it now. So if you are in a company and you start to digitalize in the whole company, what do you do? I mean, you have a chief information secured officer that is seeing that you are resilient, you are resilient with data and all of that. If you are a country and you believe that digitalization is the most important infrastructure have to include all your citizens in having the data, healthcare data, you need to think that you need the chief information secured officer as well, sitting and looking over that, that's sort of the beginning thinking about the infrastructure equally important as a corporation as a government, because you're right. The first time all data from, I don't know from the healthcare system is hacked and out in the market, the trust is just going down for the government. And then we lose that digital inclusion. Max, I want you to react to that, but also I wanna add a question, if you don't mind. We've talked about capital at the beginning and some of the instruments, financial instruments available, like the bonds. But what other instruments is the IFC putting on the table to make sure that these underserved communities also develop that capacity. For low income country, we're doing blended finance. That's exactly what you said. Actually, we are investing in your company for a long time and it's a blended finance. For low income countries, we need to have a cost of capital which is lower. But the good news is that actually, so digital space is naturally a private sector space. Even in the country which are highly dominated by the states, you go to Africa, for instance, 90% of the investment in the digital space is done by the private sector. So what are the questions that we need to address? Taxation, because this is becoming, when you go in a country which have a very weak economy, the digital sector is an easy sector to tax to be able to get more resources. So we have this tension of the minister of finance which tells you, okay, I need to tax this sector very much, but also I need to make sure that the sector develops. So we have been in situations where at a point where we needed to increase the investment in Tower on 4G, some companies were saying, okay, this is becoming more and more difficult for us to do that because taxation. So we need to have the right balance on taxation. Public policy on cybersecurity for me is critical. Data localization. You have also a debate about every country should be keeping their data in the geographical space and not allowing to go to the cloud because of data nationalism, all these questions that you know. So these questions are important questions because there will be in the future an upcycle, protection of consumer. One of the things which is very important now is focusing on facial recognition, all these type of application. You'd be surprised that some countries, the marginal data is very important. If you have, let me for the sake of it, a lot of data, if this is a physical characteristic or racial characteristic and you have very little data on people of my complexion or my physical characteristic. In fact, the algorithm which are written are often not serving everybody. So more and more data that we'd be collecting in the developing countries, I think we have a more important value to be able to serve those. So in all this conversation, as you rightly said, it's important that this developed country at the public level have a good policy framework to be able to think through those issues, protect the consumer and not to do it in an afterthought and also to make sure that they are part comfortably of the world economy on the cloud economy without worrying about those data being hacked and forced. Something I've learned in the past 20 years as a journalist is that I do a better job when I talk less and I listen more. So I think it's a perfect time to ask the audience if they have a question and if we can pass around the microphone or if you can just identify yourself. So if anybody has a question, please go ahead. Raise your hand. If not, we can, oh, please. Thank you so much. George Raidenberg, the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative. We're beginning to develop the infrastructure of how to detect cognitive impairment around the world. So I'm gonna come back to your notion of data security and privacy and nationalism because beginning to get into the health services area, we're gonna have to get personal health information on individuals. Governments for protecting their own citizens are not sure that they want that aggregated in some global fashion. But it would be useful to compare how cognitive impairment occurs in Africa as the United States. So we need to begin to compare and contrast that information in ways. I'm curious as how you're in the health space, how you're getting past this notion of trying to guard against the export of data, all that EU and other countries as we begin to look at how to nationalize or globalize these health services. I think we're still in version one that people have countries, so because we're so naive countries, in terms of cybersecurity and data, that they're overcompensating and saying that everything has to be localized. And in doing so, once the realization comes, there could be areas like, if we can anonymize it properly. And actually, I think that this is where, you know, the Bitcoin concepts and all this thing of data mining and blockchain. If we can really put a good blockchain in process, a lot of this information can go out while keeping the privacy of the user, because at the end of the day, I would not mind my data being used for the good of humanity, as long as it was not used against me by the insurance company or my banks not giving me a loan or increasing my insurance. Very simplistic, but I really feel if we can apply more principles of blockchain, and I think that's where version two will go when countries will start appreciating how we can protect. It seems to be a good problem to have because then you'll reach a scale in which this is becoming problematic, right? I think that in some ways, it's probably essential. The reason that we were able to find a cure for COVID in 354 days is because everyone collaborated. So if the problem is big enough, we'll find it. Well, I mean, at least in my country, the Netherlands, it's already happening. You have a very stringent policy framework, and you have open databases for many of the research issues, and they are completely anonymized data. So I think it's very possible. Now, I know that a lot of people say, if you know 300 points of information of one person, you will know who that person is. So it is something we really need to think about, and when we actually get all those pieces of information on any given patient that we don't go back to one person that we can actually negative influence that person, but certainly something to be thought of. But it's not that right now, this is really happening. I mean, right now, that data has been owned by one hospital or one company, one place, and they do not share data. In the Netherlands, we did for the first time the only one institution that every cancer patient has to give the DNA of their tumor, and they give it for research. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. We have 70,000 new cancer cases per year, and we try to do this as a public good. Now, I know that in other countries, every hospital keeps their own cancer data because they want to do their own research because that's, of course, they monetize on that research. So I think that we need to think is, how do we keep that data agency while sharing the monumental sort of research type of data where we actually derive knowledge from? Please, go ahead. Hi, I'm Sachin Dougal from builder.ai. Once we think about some of the items being discussed, you think about what's happening in the startup and the skate-up space. How do you think young companies can help? Especially when valuations from revenues generated in emerging markets are to follow a multiple than those generated in developed markets. And it's a capital issue as well because capital into early stage tech doesn't really find home in emerging markets. Who has a take on that? I can always use the power of the moderator and assign the question. And all this question, if you had asked it 10 days ago, is very different from the answer you were asking. Now, we are created at IFC, Disruptive Technology Fund, which aims at exactly, I take some help from those startups which are of interest. Just to go out of what we're discussing, the kind of things that we are doing, food waste, about climate change. We talk about a lot of emissions. We don't talk enough about food waste.  For instance, we invest in a company which has a product which is covering the vegetables or fruits and keeps them much longer than they would have done. So this type of intervention, some things that we are working. And we are working also with MIT, where they have also a group of engineers which are working for development. And this is the kind of initiative that we are developing. And we are trying to develop the ecosystem in emerging economies to be able to have that connection between those more advanced economy development fund, but also linking it to things which matter for people alive in developing countries. Hans, you get the last word? Yeah, the only thing I would say, I mean, first of all, first, it's about, of course, the purpose you have for the company, what you want to do. But if you want to scale and make profit very quickly, there's also ways you can help because sometimes you actually start with the more richer countries. And when you have the scale there, then you can bring it to these areas. I think about mobile phones. I mean, that started costing, I'm not sure. $10,000 first mobile phone in Saudi Arabia and Sweden. And of course, that's where it started. And then you scale it and then you can have it in the rest of the world. So there's still parts how you can help even though you need to start in a sort of a capital market that is coming your way. But it's thinking how you want to scale it because I think that many of the solutions you start with in healthcare as well, they start in certain markets and then they go to the rest of the world. I think the best outcome of our conversation today is that it needs to be continued. And I want to thank Queen Maxime again for being here today. Thank you so much for your insights. Of course, Magda, thank you for your presence. Hans Bestberg and Shobana Kimineni, you're great. You made my job easy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.


Hello everyone, I am Dr. Pankaj Kumar Garad, Consultant, Leproscopic and Bariatric Surgery, Manipal Hospital, Patiala. Today we are going to talk about a road traffic accident, which is a young female's experience. After our cold accident, there is an emergency in the blood trauma abdomen. Initially, we managed this patient conservatively, but during the investigation, we found out that this is a grade 4 splinic injury, which is causing the blood to accumulate in the peritoneal cavity. Then we decided that the patient needs splinic tamidi. Generally, this procedure is done with open technique, but this procedure is done with Leproscopic. Now, we have heard that this procedure is done with Leproscopic. My name is Gurmeet Kaur and my accident happened. We have been in Manipal Hospital for 10 years. We have been in treatment for 10 minutes. My blood pressure has increased a lot. My surgery has been done. I have been in surgery for 10 minutes. I have been in surgery for 10 minutes. I have been in procedure for 10 minutes. I have been in surgery for 10 minutes. I have been in surgery for 10 minutes. I have been in surgery for 10 minutes. Dr. Pankaj has done a very good job of the operation. Leproscopic is the benefit that the patient is fine and quickly discharge. న్రచమరి %. ప్రట్రతిర్కత్. మార్రంిని న్మార్యలార్త్ండి. న్న్బివిన్లివర్కత్టికర్ని. � about the


Most facial recognition systems are better at accurately matching images of light skin than they are at matching images of dark skin. Is there a situation where you think facial recognition could eventually be used to aid criminal investigations responsibly? We are nowhere near close to this because the first thing is to point out in each of these instances, it was a black person. Black people in this country are not the only people that have dark skin or brown skin. Typically, when you're using an AI model and you're training the data and you're trying to productionize it into an application, there are a couple of things that you have to keep in mind. One is the data set that you're training on. When you are validating your models, you have a threshold of what's acceptable or what's not, plus or minus 5% is good. Putting forth a product that is responsible and it takes into account the full range of skin tones from the lightest to the darkest.


and welcome. In this webinar we will talk about the benefits of software as a service and why moving to the cloud is so important and if you're not there yet why should your business consider moving to the cloud now. So today we will talk about why cloud is the right alternative for more and more businesses and why now we will talk about digital transformation and the benefits of using a cloud based CRM and also what will happen to your existing solution if you want to migrate your CRM solution to the cloud and then we will talk about what you can do with apps because integrations are often easier with a standardized cloud solution and here we will give you some examples and what should you think about in a possible transition we see that more businesses should evaluate their own processes and clean up after a long period of use and this is an excellent opportunity before migrating your most important data to the cloud and then finally we end the webinar with some tips and information on how you can get started and where to reach us. My name is Jeanette and I work as a customer experience operative in our CX team and our goal is to help you get the most out of your CRM solution by showing tips and tricks, new opportunities and talk about processes and CRM strategies and if you have any questions during the presentation you can use the chat if you log in with your google account but you're of course welcome to send us an email or contact your contact person in supervised directly as well and we'll also we'll send out an follow-up email after the webinar which you can respond to and here we find some inspiration and useful articles and link to the webcast if you missed parts of this and also remember to subscribe to our youtube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we're live or publish a new video the past year have seen unprecedented technological advances driven by lockdown and working remotely and the way people buy communicate work and in general the way of life around the world has been transformed and we've seen how digitalization is more important than ever it has changed how we communicate how we organize our business how we use technology and how we serve our customers and in order to keep up with this new kind of always connected customer your business must embrace technology to deliver an unmatched customer experience and that's why we're talking about CRM in the cloud today because instant access to customer information at any time gives the businesses competitive advantage of meeting and exceeding customer expectations and while the ability to stay flexible always improve and easily adapt this key to keeping up with the digital world so what is SAS or software as a service also known as the ASP or the ASP services and you can also say software on demand or simply service in the cloud it offers a connection and a subscription to IT services built on a shared infrastructure via the cloud and then it's deployed over the internet rather than purchased and downloaded or installed locally so in other words the software that you want to use is delivered and managed remotely which you can access via your preferred web browser or mobile device and according to your research from the 2020 state of cloud report by flexera 61 percent of companies have cited migrating more workload to the cloud as one of their top 2021 cloud initiatives and it ranks second behind optimizing existing use of cloud and the reason is this your business will grow by 19.63 percent if you move to the cloud that's what the report by vanson borne found when they interviewed 460 senior decision makers on the impact of moving their business to the cloud and a decade ago very few businesses were thinking about cloud technologies in fact in 2008 only 12 percent of businesses were using cloud based apps and today it's a different story and it's no longer a question of if but when and we've talked about this a lot in our previous webinars and events but it's so important to understand this journey for your business success and the customer journey is to complete some of experiences that customers or potential customers go through when interacting with our company or brand and instead of looking at just part of a transaction or an experience this customer journey documents the full experience of being customer and the touch points are seen from their side and not from our own and this helps us to prevent an inside out thinking and why do you need to regularly update and improve because the customer journey are all the touch points your business has with your customers from they first engage with you until they buy from you through the experience and the loyalty phases and I suspect many of you already looked at your own company and identified areas you can digitalize and automate but let me take you through our own company as an example and we've also been on the path of digitalizing our own internal processes systems and the way of working to better meet the customer journey of our customers and this didn't happen overnight but in step by step and we're still streamlining our processes standardizing so that we can automate what can be automated and use our valuable human resources to what they're best at developing customer relations and we started this journey by looking at our systems but we didn't really get anywhere before we defined the processes and implemented a common way of talking about our business with the common sales marketing and service process and then we developed tools that we can automate the way we worked by linking systems together for a better data flow and automating to streamline and move more and more of our data and solutions to the cloud and the strategy is that all IT solutions will be cloud based and in November last year even our own internal super office solution was moved to the cloud because the cloud is the future not just for us but for everyone but let's focus on why we in super office and the majority of our customers now choose the cloud and our cloud solution which is called super office CRM online gives you the freedom to access your CRM data at any time and from anywhere so it's hosted in the cloud and it's accessible over the internet and it will always keep you connected no matter where you work from if it's from your office from home or on the go and it's automatically upgraded to our latest CRM version so you don't have to worry about technicalities such as maintenance of servers updates or backups all we'll be taken care of by us and the world is changing at a rapid pace and your needs change with it you want your CRM system to be flexible and adapt to the new requirements so you can change user plans you can increase storage space you can add services or users and tailor the system to match your business processes and pay only for what you actually use today and you can connect and expand and integrate as you want because customer data in your CRM should not only be accessible to all teams but also move freely between systems and super office CRM online can be connected to and integrated with existing back office systems by using one of many standard apps add-ons and collaboration tools available in our app store and we're going to talk a little bit more about this later on and you get instant access to the latest tools and features with super office CRM online you can be sure that your team will automatically get the new and improved functionality as soon as it's released so there's no need to wait for an upgrade or deal with downtime or booking a consultant every new function is delivered and ready to be used instantaneously you also get all GDPR functionality which will help you process customer's information in line with the EU law where you can register the purposes for storing personal data you can manage consent and subscriptions and also use customer service to report data breaches and this is to show your customers that you value and respect their privacy and stay GDPR compliant another benefit is that you can focus more on your business and less on it with super office online you can free your it personnel from the need to perform system upgrades or server maintenance and run backups or security checks all upgrades and installations and maintenance and new users are connected to the systems without any effort on your side this means that your IT people can use their time on developing new business solutions or working on other technology related issues that will advance your company in the market there is another advantage cloud based CRM can actually be a real money saver in fact in terms of importance lower overall cost is the second biggest driver of SaaS adoption and super office online is based on a pay as you go model resulting in a lower total cost of ownership while enjoying access to the state of the art technologies you can forget about spending extra money on hardware or people maintaining the system with applications and data hardware servers storage and network being managed by the provider running a cloud solution over time is going to cost you considerably less money than running the same software on premises and according to a study by logic monitor 66% of IT professionals say that security is their greatest concern in adopting an enterprise cloud computing strategy but trust your data is safe and secure at super office we take data protection extremely seriously invest in secure servers perform automatic backups and ensure the highest data security levels safeguarding privacy compliance and transparency in all our cloud products and services and we're also very happy that so many of our existing customers choose to move their CRM solution to the cloud to stay up to date so what happens if you decide to migrate it means to move super office from a local on premises data center hosted by you or a third party provider to our cloud service where we run everything for you and you will have access to everything as before but super office is always available over the internet no matter where you are so the first step is to talk to your contact in super office talk about the possibilities or will change how the subscription plans will look like and how you can mix and match user plans to your processes and user roles in your business and then you will do a technical check before the migration and this is already made walkthrough document and the purpose of this document is to uncover whether it's possible for you to migrate to the cloud and the items in this list is also input for the technical clarification carried out by the consultant and then we take care of the actual technical migration and we make sure you get everything transferred and that it works as intended when it's in place and we will also help you to get started after the migration to make sure that you and everyone can log on to the solution and then we'll take a walkthrough of new features and other things relevant or new to the cloud based CRM and this is what we call a go live and if you're wondering about customizations and or integrations we know that these can be a barrier to upgrade or migrate but there are actually many benefits of migrating to the cloud because we can connect systems using apps that simplify integrations and that's why we offer standard integrations in our app store to expand your surface solution so here you will find over hundred apps modules and integrations and we're all used to apps on our phones and we just click install and it's done but linking to business applications may require some more work it can be a little project to define your processes or set up and link existing fields and lists but we're still talking days and not weeks or months and we all know integration can be very complex and expensive so integrations via the app store is easy it's fast to set up it's very robust and it's stable to run and apps removes the barriers to migrate and help you discover new ways of working by automating synchronizing or collaborating with tools you already using today and companies they usually use more than one system or application and they're happy to use up to several if it helps to simplify their daily operation and everyday life and all businesses want to grow they want to digitalize and they want to work smarter and our apps in the app store helps customer do just that and there are different types of apps to choose from the first one is add-ons which basically extend the capabilities of super office and this can be a connection to office 365 or outlook it can be a calendar synchronizer you can use get accept digital signature or we can use Nebula panels to adjust how you see and organize data in super office and then we have the standard integrations which our partners offer which is ready made integration so that you can connect two systems together to make it feel like one and you can sync data between CRM and ERP and other accounting systems like Visma it can be business dynamics unit four and so on and then also we have the standardized tools expanding your ability to customize and this doesn't require any programming skills and here we can use data bridge we can use connect my apps we can use SAP year to help automate workflows and synchronize important data between systems and in addition to the standard apps available in the app store you have an option of creating customizations and custom integrations for your super office CRM solution with our custom app so once you decided to migrate and you know all the possibilities that the cloud can offer you're ready for the digital transformation to succeed in the digital age you need to continuously innovate and improve the way you run your business people and processes and technology must work together to achieve maximum flexibility agility and effectiveness so digitalization is actually less about technology like robots that it is about goals and processes and people and then systems you need the three and it has to be anchored in how your processes support your customer journey how your people operate and their needs and then you let the tool support you and CRM is not just software it's a strategy it's to decide what works for you and your business and it may be that the customer journey itself is something you want to improve or to simplify daily tasks to work more effectively how do you want to work what defines success in your business this is something we always highlight when implementing a CRM system but also for existing solutions because a company changes over time and a CRM system that supports the most important processes must also keep up when we talk about change and we see that many CRM projects fail without a strategy and and user adoption and that's why it's important to come up with a plan and this is actually something our consultants can help you with define your processes and put them into a system to get the most out of the CRM solution so take the opportunity to address what bothers you and does not work optimal today and take the opportunity when you migrate to focus on doing it right and bring everyone on board and make sure everything is done according to how you want to run your business so to summarize we have talked about why it's important to go to the cloud why now the digital transformation will give businesses a competitive advantage of meeting and exceeding customer expectations and Supervis Online will give you the freedom to access your CRM data at any time and from anywhere and you're automatically upgraded to new versions and you don't have to invest in servers and IT infrastructure you will also get the safety and the flexibility where you can change user plans increase storage space add services or users and then also we can connect we can expand and we can integrate with the standardized apps in our app store and we also given you some tips to look at your solution today is there something to optimize to clean up and here you can get help from our CRM experts you can implement a new strategy and you can get all users on board when you're moving to the cloud and if you want to learn more about Supervis CRM online and wondering maybe how your data will look like in the cloud solution you'll be able to test your own data in the system with a copy of your data so you can actually do a test drive and talk to your contact in Supervis you could also take a meeting with us find out more before you decide we recommend booking a meeting with us or one of our partners and we'll be happy to answer any questions and walk you through the different options and then lastly you can attend one of our webinars or seminars to learn more about possibilities with our cloud solution our new apps and their latest features so you can check our webpage for upcoming events so what now we will send out an email with some tips articles and a link to this webcast after the webinar so don't hesitate to reply if you want to get in touch with us and if you did not register and instead joined us from youtube or linked in directly you can fill out the contact form which my colleague will add in the chat right now and then we will follow up shortly so that's it for today thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you again at one of our schedule webinars soon and remember to like and subscribe to our youtube channel for more tips and videos have a great day


orward and some, indeed, are carried forward to this one. So we think that that would be very important in terms of providing that clarity and bringing in the private investment. I think that that is all I will have to say on that. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you. Again, Natalie, picking up on your question about the ambiguity around it. We have no concerns per se about what is in the spatial strategy but, when you look across them, they are quite inconsistent. Some mention renewable energy, some do not. As Kirsten has already said, there is some very major part of the grid infrastructure that are not there. When you look at the sections of the NPF board document in comparison with all the other sections, it is not clear how they relate to each other. Having looked at those sections, again, it is not clear how someone who is making decisions in the planning system could view those and take what is in those sections into their decision making. That would come to another overarching concern that we have about the NPF4 in general. There are many important priorities in there. As has already been mentioned, there is fuel poverty, there is the need for decent homes, there is the need for a just transition, there is the need to protect the environment, and there is the need to address climate change among many others. However, there is absolutely no hierarchy anywhere in the document to give any kind of guidance of how you balance out those things. We want all those priorities to be delivered, but we want them to be mutually reinforcing. We do them in a joined up and coherent way, but at the moment there is nothing to join them up and create that coherence. We are in danger of all our priorities that are so important to us, competing with each other and beginning to undermine each other rather than being a mutually reinforcing thing that delivers the Scotland that we all want to see, which is low-carbon. It is a thriving nature. Our communities are thriving. We have community wealth, we have a just transition. People are no longer living in fuel poverty, but we are not seeing how that all comes together in a coherent way from what is currently there. We think that it can. It is just that potential has not yet been realised. Thank you both. That is very useful to know. I will pass back to the convener now. We know that there are 18 national developments proposed, including key developments for the energy sector. I was reading Scottish renewables written submission to the committee, which Elizabeth Latton just touched on the point that several national developments from NPF 3 have been carried forward to NPF 4. I will come to Morag first, but Scottish renewables say to the committee that designation as a national development provides negligible benefits within the planning system and sites those projects from NPF 3 have been carried over as further evidence that national development designation does not work as a planning mechanism. I will come to Morag just to get you to elaborate on that and to ask what you see as being the key barriers to the national developments being realised. Thank you, Monica. That just picks up on the theme that is developing through this. It is very welcome that we have national designations to reinforce their importance, but it does not really follow through into the planning system of how does that get treated in the planning balance. If you are a decision maker and one of those developments is coming in front of you, how should you treat it differently from any other consenting application that comes forward? That is not clear. We have this category into which we put things, but it is not clear what that category means. What we have seen in the past, as you very clearly said, is that things that were under national planning framework 3, as those national developments, still have not been consented and have not been done. You would think that being a national development would confer some kind of advantage in the consenting process, but case evidence would be that it does not. That is something that we would be looking to address in the MPF4. If those things are of national importance to us, we should have a process by which they are treated as nationally important. It weighs somehow in the planning balance. It is obviously open to debate as to how it should weigh in the balance and how much weight should be afforded to it, but it should certainly have some kind of weight attached to it, which it does not appear to do. I have already mentioned Elizabeth Leighton, so can I turn to Elizabeth Leighton next, please? Yes, just to say that the national developments are not in the programme for government, they are not in the infrastructure investment plan. Only a few exceptions to that, such as digital fibre. It makes you wonder how that is going to happen. What confidence does that give to the planning system in terms of the significance of those and addressing the concerns that Morag was raising? It is important to see the framework in the context of those wider decisions by Government in their budget statements or in the forthcoming national economic transformation strategy. It is particularly significant in that case. Do those all add up to the same picture that is being promoted to give that confidence to the planners but also to investors? Thank you very much. Thank you for the same question. Can I turn next to Dr Care to get your view on that? In your opinion, how important are those national developments in relation to energy production and consumption in terms of, hopefully, radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Dr Care, please. It is not something that I am aware of, but it seems that the points that Morag is making seem very sensible. If projects that were national developments in 2013 are not yet in development, that seems that some serious consideration needs to be given to the way that the designation carries, but it is not something that I am particularly expert on. Thank you for that. Can I then come finally to Kirstan land, please? Just to get your thoughts on that, Kirstan, you are still on mute, so you will have to repeat your answer again. Sorry about that. I just wanted to say that I support the feedback that other panel members have given so far. As a businessman, we are obviously very welcoming of the fact that transmission infrastructure has been included as a national development, because it gives added strength or weighting within MPF4 as a type of development that is going to be fundamental to support net zero delivery. My point comes back to the policies again, because the way that the policies are kind of drafted in MPF4, some of them are creating blockers for national developments to go ahead, the way that they are drafted at present. You can see within those policies that there is potential for direct inconsistencies between them, but some are not very detailed in terms of what they are trying to deliver, which makes it difficult from a decision-making perspective and provides inconsistency. In particular, I talked about the policy for trees, woodland and forestry previously, but that will certainly be a huge blocker for transmission infrastructure as a national development, the way that it is currently drafted. Although we try to, if we have to remove a tree, we always look to replace any trees that we remove and we also try to not remove any trees if we do not have to. We are very supportive of a desire to limit any impact on forestry, and woodlands absolutely support that, but there is no flexibility in the wording of the policy at the moment. It could be possible—it is not always possible—for us to not develop in an area that is woodland, because just in the nature of where we develop our projects in the north of Scotland, there tends to be woodland cover in our operational area. I think that the lack of flexibility in some of the policies is already creating a blocker to the development of national development projects. Within that policy, in particular for woodland, I think that there should be an exclusion made for essential infrastructure, obviously where there is a locational need, if there is no other option and if no other site is suitable. At the moment, there is no recognition of that within the MPF4, and it would be helpful to do that in the context of net zero delivery and delivery of national developments in the future. Thank you. I can return to one final question. I will aim this one at Morag Watson, because Morag used earlier on that we need to start from loading on how planned decisions are made and how the public engage. Can you elaborate on that and what is the missing link? From my understanding, we have been talking about front-loading and planning for a very long time now, so what is missing? Is it resources or is it something else? One of the key things that we are hearing, particularly from the statutory stakeholders, is that it is a capacity issue for them. We just do not have enough time, but it does end up being one of those catch-22 situations. In planning, there has always been a pre-consultation phase where it would be normal for our developer members to go to those statutory consultees and to the community and to test the idea with them to hear their thoughts on it. Based on the feedback that they get, you redesign your scheme so that you have addressed concerns that people had before you even go into planning. When we are constrained, there is a requirement for those statutory consultees to respond to planning applications but not to pre-consultation.  The catch-22 then comes in that that planning application is not quite what they would have wanted had they been able to engage in the pre-consultation stage. It probably would have been a lot closer to what they wanted, but because that is not what happened, you then, as I said earlier, go back through the process that has to be revised, resubmit it, everybody has to look at it again. If there are more comments from another statutory consultee, another set of adjustments needs to be made and it all goes round again. We just end up in this loop of going over the same ground again and again as we make adjustments to meet everybody's needs. That could be prevented, but at the moment, it is a capacity strain, but then it creates a bottleneck further down. As I said, a catch-22 at the moment would be to find ourselves in. That is helpful. I know that, for the national development, that status means that the principle of those developments will not need to be agreed in the later consenting process, but they will still have to have relevant statutory consent. On paper, it looks like it should be a quicker process, but there might be other reasons why some projects are not getting off the ground. Points of time, so I will hand back to the convener. Next up is Jackie Dunbar, to be followed by Mark Ruskell. If I can go back to a question that was touched on earlier for more clarity, on the Scottish Government's offshore wind policy statement, some of the panel said that they agreed that changes were needed to be made to align the NPS4 and the OWS, but they did not say what they thought those changes should be. If I could dig down a little more, I am sorry, I cannot remember which panel member actually said that it needed change. Can I ask Morag for her comments on that first place? Absolutely, yes, I can respond to that one for you. What we will see in the future as we move towards net zero is that our offshore wind industry becomes the backbone of our energy generation infrastructure. What we will see is that all of that has to come on shore. There will also be operations and maintenance centres and so on happening. Particularly when we have looked at the strategies and the spatial area plans that are in the NPS4, they have often not included the huge amounts of development that is going to be happening offshore adjacent to those areas. As Kerstin has already said, grid infrastructure is going to be important. As we bring all that electricity that is generated, particularly in the north and north sea, into the east coast, there will need to be grid infrastructure that will then transport that electricity to where it is needed. Again, we are not seeing that coming through in that joined-up thinking of just what we will need to consider as we move towards 2045. Maybe that is an unfair question, but how do you see that developing, what is needed for that to happen? Right. In terms of strategies written into the national planning framework for, we need to particularly get it down on. Simply included in the policy is the first step to make everybody aware and the planners aware that this is happening and this is going to be something that we will develop over time. As we have said in many other places, there needs to be guidance on how that should be treated in the planning balance. That offshore generation capacity is going to be key to Scotland's low-carbon energy generation in the future. It is also key to our just transition, as we transition from a fossil fuel-based energy system and much of our economy, depending on that, into renewables. Again, this will be a very new thing for our planning decision makers. It will often be something that they have not come across before. What they will be looking for is the NPF-4 to provide them with guidance on how they should be thinking about it, what kind of decisions are they expected to make around it and how should they weigh those decisions against other considerations in the planning balance. That is what is missing at the moment. I agree with everything that Morag has raised. We are obviously the company that is responsible for connecting the projects, but Scotland is going to be a huge focus for us as a business. The co-ordination point is particularly important to connect the projects in the most efficient way, but to produce impact on communities wherever possible. I agree with what Morag has said. I think that that is right. I can touch on that as well. Do you think that we should need some regional framework, or should it be all-national? Some regions may need a difference to others, as far as what I was trying to get at. NPF-4 does touch on that a little, but it seems to have split up different regions with different priorities in the document. From looking at the detail in NPF-4 at the moment, we did not have any huge concerns about what was proposed, but I would say that that there are certain generic priorities that are featured in some of the areas and not others. For example, by a diversity, it is only referenced in a couple of the action areas and it is not in all of them. The transmission infrastructure is not referenced across all, but it is only referenced in the islands, which makes sense. That is obviously a key focus in terms of improving resilience and supporting their journey to net zero too, but we think that perhaps that should be recognised across all of the action areas in Scotland, because the transmission network will play such a key role in that transition to net zero, and I do not think that that is recognised at the moment. Mark Ruskell, please. If I could just follow on from that, I might turn to Kirsten first. Previous iterations of NPF-4 have had specific transmission projects such as Bule Denny being cited as national developments. It seems that NPF-4 is a bit light on specific infrastructure projects that are needed and where they are going to be. 25 gigawatts from Scotland, 10 gigawatts of onshore wind, I do not know from solar, maybe six gigawatts from solar. As a transmission business, are you looking at this and thinking that, actually, there are about five bits of major chunky transmission infrastructure that needs to be written in to this NPF, or is the wording in here the detail in here enough at the moment? It is important that the wording remains quite flexible, because, as you say, there is going to be a lot of investment required in the transmission network. We obviously know what projects we have as priorities just now. We are keen to take forward as a business, for example the East Coast HVDC link, which will be absolutely crucial to deliver Scotland projects. We have investments in our Gail and Skye that we are looking to take forward the connection of the islands and Western Isles and Orkney, which is key for us to do. The key thing is that, as further investments come forward and as further projects need to come forward in order to meet renewable targets, we might find that there are more projects that come on board that we need to progress as well. At the moment in the plan, there is not so much name reference but drawn on the map in terms of projects that, for transmission, are key, but there are also ones that are not included on there that are equally as important. Keeping that flexibility is right, because it gives us that flexibility to progress the other investments that need to happen. If we just list the key projects, that could potentially be problematic for future investment. Is there a potential conflict? Is there a potential limit on capacity for transmission? You might have projects competing against each other on-shore versus offshore versus solar. Is that a realistic prospect or does NPF allow everything to be built out? It obviously depends on a project by project basis. We are hugely reliant on the planning process in order to take forward our projects and ensure that they are delivered in a timely way. It is obviously one of the factors that we have in delivering the projects. As long as NPF 4 is supportive of the delivery of transmission infrastructure, it is making a couple of tweaks in terms of rewording to some of the specific policies in there, particularly by the diversity side and the woodland policy in particular, would make a huge difference in just trying to remove some of the blockers. I think that that can be delivered if the NPF 4 is just tweaked a little bit. I don't know if Morag wants to come in on that specifically. Thank you, Mark. One of the things that we have been calling for that we really think the NPF 4 needs to do is that it needs to have a much stronger relationship with other Scottish Government policies, particularly around energy and net zero. We are expecting the NPF 4 to govern planning for 10 years, and we know that in that 10 years there is going to be a lot of dynamic change. As new information comes forward from the Climate Change Committee on advice and research, how we are moving towards net zero is going to have to evolve and change. One of our key concerns around the NPF 4 is that we start to put specific things in there, but as more data comes forward, we realise that those things need to evolve and change. The NPF 4 needs to be flexible enough to accommodate that change going forward. One of the things that we think is very helpful is that the Scottish Government is starting to set targets, so it is consulting around one for onshore wind, for example. We know that it is starting to look at a strategy for solar energy in Scotland, which would hopefully bring forward a target. Again, that gives our planning decision makers an understanding of the scale of what it needs to happen. Likewise, it gives us an opportunity to monitor how we are progressing towards those targets. Is planning an enabler, is planning a blocker? Again, if it proves to be a blocker, that gives us the opportunity to evolve all our policies and advice to make sure that it no longer becomes that way. As Kerstin says, as a business, SSEN has a very clear plan of what infrastructure is needed. Through the Scotland process, for example, we know what the pipeline looks like going forward. We will know what the pipeline looks like going forward for onshore wind, and we need to be able to support and facilitate those things rather than planning becoming a blocker to them. If I could just stay with you more agon, I think that it was in Scottish Renewables submission that you were talking about visual impact being perhaps the main reason why renewables are turned down. From an industry perspective, what changes are you looking for in the way that projects are assessed and who is responsible for that? Is it NatureScot? You mentioned very briefly wild land earlier on. Are you looking for a change in the way landscape is assessed? It seems that that is the major contention. If there is a contention, because public support is very strongly in favour of onshore wind, that is the main reason why projects are being turned down or why it is taking a long time for them to get through planning. What kind of changes are you specifically looking for? That is a really interesting question. When we look at why planning applications, particularly for onshore wind, are turned down, the vast majority of them are turned down on visual impact. For us Scottish Renewables is that the industry body has commissioned independent research, the UK Government has commissioned independent research, and it has consistently found that the public support for onshore renewables, particularly onshore wind, sits around that 70% to 80%. Again, when we have specifically surveyed people who live within five miles of a wind farm, we find that there are very high levels of public support, so people do not seem concerned about how they look. Recently, a report came out from bigger economics specifically looking at the question of having wind farms' present impact on tourism, because we know that that is again a big concern about how they look, and they found that there was no relationship between the two. Tourism had gone up in areas where there were more wind farms, so it weighs disproportionately in the planning balance. That brings me back to the very first point that I made to the committee. There is no guidance in the NPF for how we should be considering climate change, the combined emergency in the planning balance. We know very clearly that we need more onshore renewables to hit our targets, and we know that we are going to need to consent them, but if we keep refusing them based on a minority of people who object to how they look, we are never going to get there. The Scottish Government itself says in the NPF for that we must radically change the planning balance. That is what needs to happen. We all agree that it has said all the right priorities about how it needs to be rebalanced, but, again, back to that original point, there is no guidance on how that should happen and how a planning decision maker should do that. It is essential that we get that guidance in so that we stop having this very disproportionate skewing of the planning balance decisions. In terms of the materiality of climate change vis-à-vis landscape, is that the primary way to rebalance decision making? Or are there other aspects? It has been proposed in the past that community economic benefit could be a material consideration in planning. Material consideration in planning is a very interesting one, and it comes up a lot. Essentially, for people who are less familiar with the legal decision making around it, material considerations are a group of things that get placed in the decision making basket and balanced up against each other. To date, that has been a very prudent approach in our planning system, but now that we are in a climate emergency, as Elizabeth MacDonald said, we need to move to an emergency balance in how we think. Climate change is not equal with all other considerations. It is a serious threat to us as a nation and more widely. As a nation, we were one of the first on the earth to declare a climate emergency, and we are taking that very seriously. That needs to be reflected in our planning decision. We cannot treat climate change as just the same as all other considerations any more than we can do so with the biodiversity emergency. As the Scottish Government has said, they need to be the prime considerations in decision making, but we need guidance on what that means. We need to start consenting things that will move us towards net zero, and there is also the question mark of whether we cease to consent things that increase our emissions. That is where the decision making around balance and guidance needs to come. Just a couple more brief questions. It was just a wrap-up question. Again, if I could stay more longer, I will invite others to come in if they want to wrap up on anything that I have asked. You mentioned earlier on to colleagues about local planning and some of the constraints there and the capacity and resources of local planning. Is this an issue also with section 36, section 37 planning as well? With Government planning processes, is it just about local authorities and their role as planning authorities for smaller developments that do not meet that threshold? We have seen a big issue with timescales in the section 36 process. There is guidance on how long the public local inquiry should take. There is no guidance on how long it should take the reporter to write up the report once the public local inquiry has taken place. We have no timescales for how long it should take the minister or the cabinet secretary to then decide based on the report that they have received from the reporters. During the pandemic, we saw that decision making stretched from nine months to 27 months to make a decision after a public local inquiry. At the moment, the timeframe for making a decision around planning from the first conception of a project to consenting is seven years. We have eight years to hit our onshore wind targets. The two just do not go together. In England, for example, there is a three-month timeframe for the reporter to write the report, and then there is a three-month timeframe for the minister or the cabinet secretary to make their decision. We think that it would be exceptionally helpful if we had those kind of timeframes established in Scotland. Do you have any project that is investable if it takes seven years to get a decision? I just wondered if Niall or Elizabeth had anything to add. I know that this is not perhaps directly in your area of expertise, but if you wanted to come in on any of those, Elizabeth. Yes, just quickly two points. One is on this balancing language. I pulled out a couple of points on what is actually in the text of the MPF4. It talks about what should not be supported. The level of emissions is the minimum that can be achieved for the development to be viable, and it has also demonstrated that the proposed development is in the long-term public interest. One might question how could something that is going to increase our emissions or not really support our transition to net zero, not be in the long-term public interest. I think that that is an example of the type of language that is not as helpful as it could be of giving a strong push on what significant weight being given to climate emergency should be. That is an example there. I wanted to give one other example. That would be about the leadership issue and giving more confidence to the planning system. We have called for the Scottish Government to make a statement that they will call in major developments where they believe that climate impacts have not been properly considered. That would be in terms of emissions reduction but also in adapting to climate impacts. We think that that would send a very strong message to the planners to know that if they are making decisions that they think are risky in terms of the way that we think of planning now, that they are going to be backed up. Or if they do not, if they go with business as usual, that they are going to be called out. I think that that is a really important leadership rule for the Government to take. I do not know if Nile has anything to add to that. If not, I will go back. I have no specific points to pick on those issues. Dr Kerr, I have a very brief final question for you. The Scottish Government has created the Public Energy Agency to help to implement the heat and building strategy. However, as we have heard today, it is a virtual only agency that has no additional budget or resource and will not be up and running until 2024. Very briefly, is that enough in your view, is that enough resource and support to help to meet the 2030 heat and buildings targets? I think that it is fair to say also a point that was made with respect to this earlier, is that the other things are on-going, they do not rely on the national public agency to happen. I hope that that would be the case. There are Scottish incentive schemes coming in and they do not rely on the national public energy agency. However, bearing in mind what I was saying about the scale of the challenge for new carbon and for a few poverty targets, I think that a really important point for people to be aware of is the scale of the challenge. With that in mind, perhaps it might be more critical that a co-ordinating body—whether that is a public energy agency or what exact form that takes—could be prioritised, could be brought in quicker, perhaps. However, it is important to think about what exact rule that body will have, and that is something that the Scottish Government is doing at the moment. However, considering the scale of the challenge and if that body is going to play a critical role, it is fair to say that that body should be in as soon as possible to play a critical role. That brings us to the end of questions and our allocated time. Thank you to the panel once again for joining us this morning. Thank you for your time and enjoyed the rest of your day. Next week, the committee will have one more evidence session on NPF4, looking at transport, the environment and the circular economy. We will then share our findings with the lead committee towards the end of this month. Thank you very much. We will now move straight into the next agenda item, which is consideration of one negative instrument, the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme, amendment order 2021. Like the affirmative instrument that we considered earlier, this is a joint instrument between the four UK Administrations. It amends the UK-wide emissions trading scheme established by the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme order 2020. This is a negative instrument laid under the negative procedure, which means that its provisions will come into force unless the Parliament agrees a motion to annul it. No such motion to annul has been laid. I refer members to paper number six from the clerk. I have to put on record that paragraph 10 requires a correction. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered the instrument on 18 January and determined that it should formally draw the Parliament's attention on the ground of a defect in the drafting of the instrument. However, it also welcomed an assurance that the Scottish Government was working to correct that with other Administrations. Do members have any comments on the instrument? No comments. I therefore invite the committee to agree that it does not wish to make any further recommendations in relation to the instrument. Are we agreed? That is agreed. Thank you very much. I now close the public part of the committee meeting.