Thank you very much. Before I start to talk about what I'm supposed to talk about,
let me say how happy and how privileged I feel to be back here,
seeing in the audience so many faces, so many faces of my teachers,
and I would like to mention specifically Hartmut here,
because he has been one of my teachers in the international scene of climate, water hydrology.
It was him and Lydia, yet another one, colleague, friend, also teacher,
and some other Stefan, younger generation, but also Viktor Brofkin, colleague of Martin Klausen.
So this is a place which is very close to my heart, through what you did,
through what you brought to the world, and through what you taught me to do in my own career.
I'm here today, as Béron said, to talk a little bit about this very special place,
which, like you, Bjorn, before I was asked to become director there,
just director is, you know, director general, as I call it.
I knew it was a place which was wanted, and many people went.
I know from you in the room, many people went to Yassa, but I didn't know very much about it.
So I went there, and I was asked to consider, to think about leading that,
and then I started to think about it, and then I discovered, this is a place.
How can we do not know about it? Because it's so different from anything else.
I'm going to tell you how different it is, and then to move from that to some of the scientific fields
and aspects of the results and the research there, both in the fundamental system science,
but mainly to the science and policy interface.
I will start with this. Those who know, don't say, those who don't know, try to give me an answer.
If you look at this, and ask you, what is this?
Probably you would say, this is a bad print of a book page, right?
And I wouldn't buy such a book with such a bad printed page, neither would you, I guess,
unless you would like to really know what is this book about.
So you will buy it, I will buy it, then pay some money to, I think it's the graphologist we call these people,
and after some time you will get back this.
You will get back the same page, but then, through this procedure the graphologist is using,
you will see some clearly printed words, and this is summer, and winds, and rough winds, and shade,
and yet another summer, hot and cold.
So many of us probably would guess this book must be about methodology, about climate.
It's actually Shakespeare's tale.
I'm using this cartoon when I'm given like 30 seconds, like I was given by President Obama,
to explain what is system thinking, what is the need to integrate, what is the need to think out of the box,
what is the need to think out of disciplines.
Because we are trained and taught to be good, to be best in our own field, mathematics, climatology,
physiology, evolution ecology, what have you.
And then we try to pretend to ourselves that we do understand how the system, earth system,
climate system, human system works, based on a quite ad hoc collection of this disciplinary knowledge.
This is of course not a case that it always works.
We are building models, we are building systems based on a very fundamentally low understanding
of the connectivities, feedbacks across those particular fields.
If I translate this notion to, for example, earth system, which is familiar to you,
I remember 80s when I was brought first to this field of hydro climatology, and it was Jim Shuttleworth,
who brought me there and others, and at that time in 1990, and Lydia knows it because she was before us,
the climate models were coupled to ocean models, and the land was one slime, it was even though the green slime, right?
And we thought in 1980s that we could do a job to understand the behavior of the climate system, not having cleanse in it at all.
It took us some time to develop this dialogue between hydrologists and land people and climatologists to get to the feedback.
And then we discovered a lot of surprising things which we would never have discovered without having discovered.
Now if you forget about this and go to other systems, which is the human system,
the way how governance is structured, the way how we structure our institutions,
we have a sectoral ministries doing energy, doing water, doing environment,
and we don't have a national, international system policies.
Instead of investing in energy, water, climate, next to solutions, we do compete in the cabinet for the budgets.
So the system thinking is lacking not only within the fundamental scientific integrative holistically,
but also in the institutional governance legal thing.
So when I am faced with the question explained in a way we would remember what is the thrive behind system thinking,
I say it is the way to be able to put together disciplines, fields, equations, understanding of the governance,
human cognitive behavior, in a way that this story which will come out, the tale,
will be the tale which has some plausibility rather than empirical number crunching phenomenon.
Bridge the divide. This is how the world looked like in the 70s, just only 55 years ago.
We had a Cuba crisis which ended up without war, but it was a Cuba crisis.
After the mass of death, the Berlin Wall was up and very active.
Oil crisis. I remember at the time I was 10, and I remember I was asking my father why we cannot go on the road,
because there were weekends, Sundays, Saturdays he cannot go on the road, because there was an oil crisis,
and the threat of the space wars.
At the time it was a vision of Lyndon Johnson, the American president, who followed the notion which JFK did before he was assassinated,
and he reached out to the Soviets at the time with an idea, look, we have all these complex issues of possible competition,
and maybe even geopolitical conflicts again. Why don't we try to build a bridge through science?
So science diplomacy was born. Use science to bridge over divided world. At the time it was the eastern and western world.
Now, from Soviet side, the telephone call, which is documented in the White House archives,
it was answered by Prime Minister Kosegin, and it was answered with a very positive enthusiasm. Let's discuss.
So in 1968 it started, and discussion negotiation took four years, until October 1972.
Yassa was established by 12 founding member countries, United States and Soviet Union, leading also the funding,
and the remaining nine were half from the former east, half from the former west.
We had two Germanys at the time. Again, it's only 50 years ago, DDR and BRD.
That was the reason, by the way, that Yassa became non-governmental, because DDR was not recognized by United States government.
Sometimes I am saying to the leaders, including Angela Merkel, it was the best accident which could have happened to Yassa ever,
because not being governmental, not being UN, you are extremely meaningless compared to UN competitors.
By the way, Mrs. Merkel was one of the postdocs at Yassa for six months, and she was operating from DDR as well.
It was founded by 12 member countries, and it is a charter which is very special, because the charter says it is a non-governmental organization.
The membership of a country is not governmental, but it must be supported by three top levels of the governmental structures,
which is the government funding and academia.
For example, in the United States, Yassa is supported as a priority of the US government.
There is a law, actually, Yassa law passed, so is the law passed in Austria.
We have an OSTP on the Yassa Council, together with NAS, Academy President, and together with NSF.
NSF funding, OSTP, John Holoden, by the way, Yassa alumni, together with Ralph Cicero, representing the United States on the Yassa Council.
In the country, then, there is a network based on the Yassa national committees,
and the network is then making sure that there is enough interaction, enough contribution from Yassa to the country, and vice versa.
Yassa developed over 40 years.
It developed in the first 20 years until 1990.
In an impressive way, we are still trying to understand how is it possible in this very complicated, contested time of the political tensions.
I think it's partly because of the Yassa Charter, which also says member countries are paying fees and dues,
but they are not prescribing anything in terms of the hiring policies.
So, for example, at present, we have 22 member countries and a staff from more than 65 nations around the world.
Yassa has no overhead and no taxes.
Yassa has a special law passed in Austria for the foreign policies,
meaning that we can employ anybody from any county in the world, basically overnight.
But nobody has a penament contract.
Even people who have been there for 30 years, like Nakitsenovich, are extended every single year,
based on a very stringent evaluation of the performance and the funding.
Yassa has no retirement age.
When you are a researcher, good enough, you stay.
We have some of our colleagues, mathematicians, who are above 90, still at Yassa,
being extended every year, like Tom Schelling, 93, working with the brilliant kids from Korea and Japan, who are just 19, 20.
The membership of Yassa, as I said, based on this tripod of top government, top academia, top funding, is growing.
At present, we have 22 countries.
I must say there is an episode which I would like to share with you.
In 1990, of course, the question was, with the Berlin Wall going down,
with the World War II revolution in many countries, do we need Yassa as a eligible institution?
It was, again, visionary at the time of the Austrian and German governments,
which called a ministerial conference in Vienna.
Seventy-four countries came and declared Yassa a mission,
scientific bridge across the world, to be a global mission.
Since then, Yassa grew.
We are very fortunate to see that it grows in the regions where the same notion of need for a bridge building is still there.
And at present, we are 22.
We will be 25 by end of this year.
I was very privileged.
I have been director for three years now, and four countries joined, Australia, Indonesia joined,
Mexico joined, and Vietnam joined.
These are countries which are now on our list of becoming a member.
UK, UK is interesting because UK left Yassa.
This is also a story I would like to share with you.
It was in Reagan time.
Reagan started in the 80s, so it is free.
And he declared a war towards cooling down in the relationship which was there between US and Russian-Sovietian agencies.
It was a story, again, documented Friday noon Washington time.
He made a press conference, and he said that the United States would leave Yassa because Yassa is through this system supporting the Soviet spies.
And he invited his western allies to leave Yassa, too.
Because what happened, it was Friday, and the best kid in this class was Margaret Thatcher.
So Margaret Thatcher did a press conference in London Monday morning announcing the UK leaving Yassa.
Of course, the US never left, they never do, and the UK left in 1983.
And Yassa has this policy of not stopping collaboration with anyone, so the UK collaboration went on and on and on,
and they never really tried to rejoin us or to pay back their dues until last year.
So we had a visit of chief scientist of the UK government, Robert, with a couple of heads of organizations, Julius Linco, Yassa Alumni, Martin Perias, Alumni, Peter Cox, Yassa Alumni, all of these people.
And we have made a deal, and they will rejoin us first of February.
But also Israel and Jordan and Iran.
I was there in Israel last December to negotiate with Israel government.
You feel almost like a missionary, because you go there, and you go there with this perception of war and crisis and everything.
But when you come there with this notion, let's put science together as a diplomacy, let's build a bridge.
Let's see how hungry they are for the positive narrative.
And we will probably have, by the end of this year, Israel and Iran together on one ground, like we have Pakistan and India through Yassa.
Now, when you go to Yassa's website at some point, maybe tonight, maybe later in the week, you will find that every country has a huge portfolio with Yassa.
I just shared with Bjorn a couple of minutes before this, Germany is a big player.
And there is the statistics on Germany, if you go to the website over the last five years, showing that, for example,
we have a collaboration with more than 70 German institutions.
We have more than 500 German staff on our staff last six years.
We published almost 700 publications across Yassa and German institutions together as an example.
So just an example of how this works.
The United States, you will look at Germany hopefully later.
72 founding members, 60 organizations as primary research partners across universities,
a big fight from Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, all the way down to DOE and NOAA.
These are a couple of fields of collaboration.
70 young scientists over the last five years, part of our training program, going by becoming alumni,
publication 640 US nationals every year, edition of the Yassa staff.
Now, this is for the UK, for example.
Yassa, I sometimes try to explain, is a two-legs, academic leg, which means the leading scientists who has been to Yassa,
come to Yassa, become Yassa alumni or otherwise, and the lack of designs to policy.
From the US side, this is some of the examples of the leading personalities from the governmental,
think who are Yassa alumni, McBundy in the government, but also Stefan Chu, who spent two years at Yassa.
As you know, he left Obama's administration because of dissatisfaction with the DOE policies.
Bill Colegier, John Holdren, typical example.
He was leading the energy program at Yassa for four years, from 1973, and then he fella.
He fella probably not too cold.
John is now leading Obama's OSTP.
McNamara, a normal writer.
From the academics, George Dunsink and Nathan Kiefis, Dunsink and Kompmans, they got a Nobel Prize.
Yassa has 11 Nobel Prizes in 40 years, and first one were from Kompmans and Dunsink in 1973.
Nathan Kiefis, father of the modern demography.
Both Meadows spent seven summers at Yassa in two years.
Bill Nordhaus, still on our example, Jeffrey Sachs, two years.
Thomas Schelling is one of the Nobel Prizes.
So it's a combination.
Sometimes people ask me, how is this all working?
I think one of the formulas behind is this interactive, almost synthetic combination,
collaboration between the top science and the people who ended up in the policy.
How is funding done?
We have funding which is coming from the national member country contributions.
There is a fee structure.
Of course, it's structured according to the size.
We have five categories.
Just to give you some size of the funding, the United States is paying every year 4 million US dollars.
Euros, Germany 1.4 million euros.
A country like Finland 0.7 million.
On top of it, we have specific projects paid by agencies like DOE,
like Japanese agencies like Toyota Corporation.
So the overall turnover will be between 100, 150 million a year,
depending on how you calculate the external faculty and the internal funding.
Because we are very proud that there is a quality behind,
and must be because of the system, such a flexibility.
So we received seven ERC grants just last two years,
and all together 17 ERC grants over the last five years at YASA.
Ten of them is a senior grant and seven junior grants.
Some people left these grants to other institutions.
So in summary, what is YASA?
400 staff in residence in Luxembourg, Austria, Vienna, from more than 50 countries.
We have about 4,000 alumni.
We have almost 320 institutional collaborations formalized,
meaning we are having fee contracts with the researchers.
For example, this big five-year university in the US,
Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Yale, Columbia,
we are hosting every summer like 50 professors for three months.
So this is a formalized contract,
where they are coming to us every three months,
the rest of the time spending at home.
So for example, in 2014, about 2,050 researchers,
external faculty plus 400 residents,
is the YASA size over the year operation, more or less.
It is truly interdisciplinary about one set of natural scientists engineers,
one set of social scientists, and one set of mathematicians and others,
and we are very careful to keep this particular balance.
So it's natural science, social science, and some alphas as well.
And due to this combination of flexibility, any contract possible,
any lengths visit, online offline collaboration,
I am still trying to discover this and believe myself.
It has been at the beginning of almost every issue,
which is now playing the key role in the international sustainability research agenda.
For example, in 1978, when Heffler and Holden were there,
much before IPCC and FCC,
first meeting was on the YASA about CO2 and climate connectivity,
carbon dioxide, climate society.
Pache was leading the discussion.
Pache is president of the Club of Rome,
and Club of Rome met at YASA a couple of times.
In 1981, first ever energy outlook for the world,
much before IIAA or interagency agencies.
In 1983, climate energy systems, biosphere,
before CBD was established, and others.
And I think, again, this is because of this extremely flexible system,
doesn't matter who you are, where you are from,
you are welcome as long as you perform,
and as long as you are willing to spend some time together with others in this wonderful place.
I mentioned all of the successes of this.
This is there to remind you that network,
as YASA also works with distinguished visiting scholars.
We have prominent scholars around the world who are on our external faculty.
This is just one of the last honorary fellowships given to Jeffrey Sachs,
about 100 of them who stick to YASA network,
who are YASA ambassadors around the world,
who help us to get young scientists to apply for the programs.
Very important element of the YASA system.
The other element is a young scientist program.
I know we have a very successful Max Planck summer school, a Max Planck school.
YASA is from 1977, this young scientist summer program,
which really is a research triplet program.
It's not a teaching program.
From Germany, we had 180 participants in 1977.
A program where people are selected, usually 50 people out of a couple of thousand applications,
and then they are subjected to a research,
guided at least by two, sometimes three, YASA programs.
So to assure the transdisciplinary.
Most of them stay in YASA networks.
Usually it should lead to a punk paper or at least chapter and paper in their PhD.
These are PhD students,
and these are becoming the ambassadors of the transdisciplinary thinking around the world.
Some about the way how we measure also at YASA standard output.
This is a number of citations and publications in a big five, we call it,
but it's Nature, PNDS, Science, Proceeded World Society, 205 a year.
And this is the age index of the institute.
I don't know how you measure it here at MPI, probably the same way across the institute.
Showing that there is a scientific indices which we also apply to our system.
Scientific LEC, right leg is the expert advisory role of YASA.
We are sitting on 80 advisory boards at the highest levels across the world,
including Webe Geu.
There are two people from Webe Geu.
Just a couple of them listed here.
There are different ways on top of this tale of Shakespeare to explain what is the system approach.
Couple of characteristics of system analysis at YASA.
Integrated, Inter and Transdisciplinary.
International too, because as I already mentioned,
divide is not only disciplinary but also in terms of governance.
Independent, very important.
Not being governmental means that you can be independent from governments.
YASA system is very flexible in a way, similar to Max Planck.
The funding coming to YASA from the countries is the discretion of the director.
So like you, or you beyond, could change the institute by the appointment,
that can also happen at YASA.
It's a completely flexible system.
Solution oriented, going from paper and science to policy impact directly,
long-term and trade-offs all benefit.
That's one of the ways to put system analysis system together.
Now how we put it in the practice?
We have for this five years, coming five years, three major research.
Big areas, food and water, energy and climate, poverty and equity.
And then we have a number of cross-cutting teams,
fundamental system analysis, mainly mathematics,
drivers, population dynamics for example, and policy governance.
And the projects which we are sitting together,
of course they are sitting sometimes very deep in this disciplines,
but we do prefer those which are sitting across most of them,
to try to understand the system feedbacks and system behavior.
Some of the past successes, the dynamic system theory was actually developed
at YASA applied across disciplines, but holing, evolution, dynamics,
multi-criteria decision system analysis, both linear programming based
and the dynamic program based, adaptive dynamic story,
which started in the evolution ecology,
is now used for studying with the financial markets.
Game theories, maybe you know a beautiful mind, John Nash.
John Nash has been there as well for a couple of summers.
And the game theory, now presented by Carl Sigmund,
is still a big round of many of the YASA research projects.
In the current phase, we are also focusing on advances of dynamic system modeling,
coupling agent based models with the physical models,
extreme behavior, integrated modeling, and we have advanced system analysis
for which I will tell you a little bit about later.
I decided to give you three or four examples
of what I call illustration of benefit of the system approach.
First one is coming from one of the major study which YASA accomplished in 2012,
so-called global energy assessment.
You see here we finalized this in 2012.
I was privileged to hand this over to the Secretary General who came to YASA
and it was a major subject of discussion at Rio Plus 20.
And we were asked in 2005, at the time,
that Bolin was still alive and he was leading the YASA Science Advisory Council
to do a study into three major goals in the energy sector.
Is it possible to ensure universal access to the energy services around the world?
At present, 2.5 billion people don't have the access to the energy
in a way we understand it now,
which leads to, of course, the major things around the world in India, for example.
Is it possible by 2050 to double the rate of the energy efficiency?
And is it possible to double the share of renewables in energy mix by 2050?
Of course, what we would have done, because we have the energy history,
we could have started energy study with the best partners in the world.
We said, well, look at this scheme.
Energy, isn't it also linked to emissions and the air quality?
So why don't we add one more sector to this study, which is the air quality?
So we said, we will do this, Secretary General,
but let us also do a modelling which will assure that the emissions
which are caused by development will stay within the limits
of air quality thresholds around the world.
Energy, climate, 85% of the climate mitigation is focused on energy sector.
So we said, we will do this energy sector study,
but let us do it within the two-degree global warming.
So you've got all these three sectors, energy originating study,
air quality and climate.
Every year, 44,000 people, as the last number dies,
because of the attributable causes to PM2.5, PM10 air quality problem.
We said, number four sector will be health.
We do the study, but we also connect to the health sector
and we do the scenarios, calculations, under the condition
that is 45,000 will be 10 times less, 4,000.
So the challenge which was sectoral,
which would have been tackled by sectoral models,
was broadened to four sectors, more integrated holistic system view.
So we did all these studies.
It led to this enormous book which you saw passing by.
It's 5.8 kilo door stopper, but of course,
this is not the main thing which is coming out of it.
It's all on the website, all the scenarios,
all the models are behind the data.
I don't have it with me here, but you can download it.
You can press open access.
So what came out of it as an example,
a 41 combinations, plausible combinations of the energy mixes
around the world for the major countries and blocs,
how to transit into this sustainable 2030, 2050 energy availability,
at the same time safeguarding the climate targets,
air quality targets and the health targets.
So this is an example of a Brahmin energy mix, one of the 4041.
This is 1850, of course.
This is the industrial revolution beginning.
This is where we are now, roughly.
This is in extra juice.
So we see biomass coal, oil, gas, nuclear renewables.
This is how we calculated transition to 2050.
This particular case, 40% efficiency improvement renewables up.
This is still oil there.
You see biomass going up.
In this case, we excluded nuclear and carbon capture and storage.
Is that just so I can interrupt, but from my understanding,
biomass is about twice as much as all the other renewables combined?
I mean, even 2000.
In this particular, yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Because all the others would include wind and solar.
But biomass also includes firewood here.
That's right.
On a global scale, almost negligible at this point.
It's less than one percent, actually less than half a percent at this point.
It's quite different in Germany or in Holland, but it's global in this one.
Now, this type of transition, of course, they are backed by many other calculations.
This nuclear phase-out policy is interesting because it happened after Fukushima.
We have done all the scenarios, and after Fukushima,
Japanese government came to us, KU do global with this.
A week later, the German government came with the same request.
So we have done nuclear phase-out,
and all the energy vendors are also part of the special studies on this.
This is yet another one, out of 41, which shows some of the limited bioenergy,
much, much less here because of the competition with food,
but intermittent renewables.
You see here a little bit more coal out there.
Another one is for the continents.
African transition here, 50 percent renewables, mainly solar by 2030.
There's a tech plus, so to speak, but in different setting.
China, the Chinese government is now implementing a framework strategy
based on this calculation.
In China, you see the coal is much bigger than everywhere else.
You see gas everywhere, quite a large portion.
Europe, you see here quite a large gas rolling in as well.
Of course, this was before Russia, Ukraine.
I will come later to the newest scenario to show you then.
Now, the real interesting story is, of course, I could show you all those scenarios,
and I will not because time is limiting,
but the real story is to come back to the benefits of the system.
Of course, we have done all the costing and everything.
I will not bother you with details.
Look at this with me patiently.
This is showing the cost of the operation to achieve the goals
as it were in the sectoral sense, as we do it now.
This is the scale percentage of the global total GDP,
currently about 90 trillion US dollars.
If you do all the energy security thing, the energy goals,
we will need about 0.2 percent of this 90 trillion every year for next 40 years.
If we do only air pollution control from China all the way up to Mexico City,
we will need to spend about 0.6 percent of the global GDP
to achieve the threshold within the health limit.
The climate change, the mitigation to about 0.8, 0.9 percent.
If you put these three together, 0.8 to 0.6, 1.4,
it's about 1.6, 1.7 percent GDP every year to be invested to achieve those goals.
In parallel, not simultaneously, not in the system.
If you invest upfront across those four three sectors,
this is the total cost, 0.8 percent GDP.
Almost 40 percent, less money needed to achieve the major goals of the planet,
which is the climate, air quality and the security energy,
when you do it in an upfront, systemic way,
respecting the investments across the sectors.
I think this is a very convincing, one of the most convincing examples
of the value of the system integrative thinking.
Now, the frustration, of course, comes as follows.
When you explain this, Bank of America, I did.
United Nations Assembly, I did.
I did the Ban Ki-moon.
We did the Snaki, the heads of states.
They understand.
At the moment you close the door, they are back to their business.
We are still not having enough leverage
in terms of understanding the governance behind cross-sectoral thinking in this context.
Of course, there are many results showing why these core benefits are there.
For example, in the health assessment of these scenarios,
you see that we could save 2.6 million lives every year
because of the reducing those particular factors,
which are leading also as a core benefit to the energy policy satisfaction.
This is China portfolio, this is energy access.
I'll just skip it a little bit because maybe it's too much detail.
I'm travelling to India next Monday,
and the new government of India, Modi government, has set up priorities
which looks like YASA priorities.
It's air quality, it's energy access.
They ask us to support them in a plausible vision about how to do it.
So this is our analysis for the energy access.
We have like 20 Indian colleagues working energy access there,
trying to convince them that investment across the sector will be better than just one sector.
I think it's closer to your speciality because it's about air pollution and it's about air quality.
This is based on the YASA GAINS model system approach.
GAINS is a model which has been developing at YASA over the last 15 years.
It has atmospheric chemistry, external components, both reactive and non-reactive.
It has an emission part of it, it has an economic cost benefit,
and it has a basket of measures.
It does optimisation across the system behaviour
and across the investment to achieve the particular goals.
It has been at the background of many of the EU and global policies.
For example, Sulfur Protocol 93, Gotemba Protocol, Revise Protocol,
but also European Commission directives,
including the 2017 Clean Air Policy Package,
which was taken up from Barroso government to the Junkers leadership.
For example, this package which was developed in 13,
there were 17 reports from this GAINS model,
this GAINS model for the informing commission,
a couple of directorates about how to do this.
We have an interaction with the parliament,
with the ministries of member countries about what they propose
as a suggestion, and we do calculate the cost,
but we also calculate the marginal and non-marginal benefits and cost of it.
In the end, we arrive at a compromise,
which is somewhere between the Commission proposal, the original one,
and between the optimal situation which we will be doing based on the modelling.
Now, this is both involving the desktop modelling,
but also a lot of discussion, a lot of internationalisation.
We are receiving the European Commission delegates
to discuss, internalise the model, to understand the numbers.
We are receiving the delegation from every single member country for a week
to explain to them on which directive is going to be based.
Again, the key element in this particular calculation
was the cross-sectoral benefit.
To sell the air quality control package in European context
was only possible based on the calculations of the core benefits
for the energy sector and for the health sector.
Without that, member countries would have never agreed to adopt it,
because it would have been too costly.
Very interesting thing which we are proud of happened
around a core benefit of the short-lived gases' air quality climate.
You know this, of course, I don't need to go through it.
We have been putting together a study which was published in Science,
which was merely a study about reducing the short-lived gases
for the air quality purpose,
but it was at a time when the climate paragraph was very contested.
At that time, 2011, 2012, as you know, even climate as a word
was not allowed in the US Congress.
So after the publication in Science, which was pointing out
the possible core benefit of the short-lived measures
for the air quality control for climate, half a degree,
it was Hillary Clinton who came to answer with a suggestion,
why don't we try to use it as an entry point?
Climate core benefit from investing into the air quality control policies.
And we have formed, together with initially five countries,
a coalition which calculated all possible measures,
and the whole coalition became an international coalition,
climate and clean air coalition, currently having 50 countries
and 54 NGOs in part of it, and we are chairing the Science Advisory Panel.
We've learned the examples where the publication in a leading journal
led to almost immediate intake by the policymakers at the highest level.
And we are supporting through this international work
the negotiations of this coalition.
Most recent example, we were in China in November,
and I was leading this program.
China has this huge program by 2017
to lower the air quality, to improve the air quality
by 40% in Beijing area, Shanghai, of course, Mission Impossible.
By the way, in October it was, October 8th,
we landed from Tokyo in Beijing,
and tried to guess what was the value of PM2.5 at that particular day.
Yes, 600.
You couldn't see, I couldn't see how much, like 600.
Yes, it was absolutely, absolutely incredible.
Now, then we were presented with the package,
and as I was asked, could you use gains models to guide us
in terms of the cost and benefit?
And then we look at it, and it was all around urbanized regions,
all around industrial emissions, and it forgot completely nitrogen.
And if you do a simple calculation about the role of nitrogen
in the secondary organic aerosol processes,
and if you put into the account the extent of the agricultural activities
and waste activities, then you do back of year old calculations
when you say without investing in parallel
into the reducing mainly the NH3 free availability
of you will be misinvesting billions in Beijing and Shanghai
because you will forget the interaction with NH3.
So we proposed to them, to the World Bank,
that the way to proceed would be not only to look
into the Beijing-Shanghai municipal air quality control measures,
which we are doing now, cars,
but to invest heavily into the studies
that the nitrate NH3 and NH3 unlimited aspects will be included.
World Bank, which is supporting China in this big thrive,
has decided based on this consultation to use NH3 nitrogen efficiency
as one of the main directions in their support of the program.
I think it's fantastic, because if you look at it,
the policies to improve the air quality in the urban environment
could have forgotten these more broader system aspects,
and I think we were right on time, right on target,
proposing to include it and to build it broader.
In India, the Indian government before Modi
was very reluctant in investing in the air pollution control
until this study came out where actually we calculated, again, the core benefits.
Core benefits in terms of life expectancy,
core benefits in the avoidance of the premature deaths,
core benefits in not losing the active working power
of the high skilled people in the mega cities.
As I mentioned already, the current government is strongly willing to invest
in measures which will reduce the PM10 and PM2.5 in some of these hotspots.
Example 3 is from a very different piece of work at YASA.
It is from the demography.
You may know, you may not know,
that the normal number which we were used to,
when we talk about how many people will be at this planet by 2100,
which was around 11-12 billion,
suddenly got reduced to 7-9 billion.
That came from YASA.
The United Nations and YASA put up a number of outlooks just last year.
The interesting thing is that the number from 12 down to 9 billion
was caused by adding two more parameters into the system about demography.
The demographic models, until about three years ago,
were based on two parameters, fertility and economic growth.
What we added on these economic models,
we added education of women.
Just education of women led to a drop of the global population number by 3 billion.
Let me show you how it works.
This is for India, for example.
We call it population 3.
This is the current 2010.
A female male, you see here at the basis, age.
This is the education level.
Red means no education at all.
Yellow means primary.
Light blue means lower secondary.
Dark blue means upper secondary.
Post-secondary university.
Currently 1.2 billion people in India.
You see a large part, no education at all.
This is India, 2030, where the SSP scenario,
this is the IPCC-based supporting base,
the investment will be heavy into the education.
You see, it takes quite some sick to convince Modi to invest in education
to save the demographic revolution, right?
It's a cross-sectoral thing, it's a different thing.
Now you see that in this investment,
in 20 years' time about 1.5 billion people and large blue area.
A lot of people are educated, but this is important, 1.5 billion.
This is India, 260, following the same policy.
Still 1.5 billion.
So investing education, mainly secondary and primary,
secondary and above secondary for female,
will lead to this controlled growth of population.
As opposite, this is the base year as I started.
This is the India without having a focused education investment policy in 2030.
This is India in 2060, 2.1 billion.
Half a billion people more without education policies on this one.
We have done this for every single county around the world.
And of course, this is a co-benefit study,
co-benefit of investing into one sector to the population.
We have done calculations how this, for example,
leads to better coping capacity with disasters and similar examples.
So for comparison, the investment into the secondary benefit from education
leads to the difference of half a billion people by 2060 in case of India.
Last example, water and energy environment nexus.
There was a couple of studies.
This my PhD's in nature, and Stefan knows those,
where we calculated what the energy sector would do
if the climate scenarios will happen.
We have calculated that, for example, for the thermal energy
and for the nuclear energy, up to 20% in the summer months
drop back because of the availability of cooling water,
warming of the cooling water, surface water, but also lower risk challenges.
This is the world water use by sector.
It's put together by us recently in the World Water Outlook Study.
You see here two things.
You see here this enormous growth, of course, here after 1960.
To me, the most striking thing is out of this 6,000 amount,
it could be a kilometre a year, water, 70% goes to agriculture.
That's now.
When you go to the next 2030, 2050,
in combination with the population scenario, food need scenario,
of course that will be more.
This is the regional breakdown of the same numbers.
Without many details, striking feature is here,
all the continents, North America, South America, even Africa,
kind of stabilising around big numbers.
This is Asia.
A combination of this first picture, second picture,
the little spot of the water will be Asia,
not Africa only, for the coming 2030 years.
We have looked into a couple of things,
how this could be projected.
This is one of the studies which came out recently.
Nature is showing the way how rivers discharge,
in major rivers, will change.
This is Mekong, this is Colombia, this is Orion here.
Different scenarios, different models behind this.
You see the features are the lower discharge in the summer
and the peak discharge in the winter.
This is important.
If you put here three different sectoral questions,
one is the tolerance of the biosystem,
of the biodiversity, salmon, in Colombia.
The other one is the cooling water, remember 2003,
Rhine, Netherlands, Germany, North Germany,
and the WHO limits for the sanitation standards.
You see that in many cases,
the thresholds will be exceeded for a long time.
In Colombia, the river was three months sustained,
so simply the tolerance of the summer population
will not be there.
The cooling water limit, very important.
This is the calculation which I mentioned,
basically disqualifying the thermal stations
and the power stations, nuclear power stations,
for the summer.
This is for the six months sustained,
the health water quality standards problem.
Currently, of course, these things are not looked at together.
There will be a competition.
Competition between energy sector and water for irrigation.
We need to keep discharge in Rhine at some level
to be able to have water of some temperature.
At the same time, we need to use this water to irrigate.
These cross-sectoral studies are almost non-existent.
You will believe it even, but they are almost non-existent.
We have done the special issue of the P&ES last year,
where only seven studies were published together
where we look into these core-benefited competing issues
across the sectors.
Can I just ask before you go on,
why is Saudi Arabia at least blue?
It means there's going to be a lot more water discharge,
so is that because they're getting a lot more?
Yes.
In this particular case, from the outcome 5A2,
this leads to more rainfall in those regions,
in this particular case.
I guess, Stefano, you should verify that
because it's outcome rate.
It's increased, so the rainforest is low.
If you have some increase, then it's a small number.
It's a small number, yes.
I was just surprised that...
No, it's not.
In areas like if you look in the U.S. Southwest,
the projections are, for instance, in baseball,
which are sort of counter to my intuition.
Yes.
The point here was here, not that much the quality
and the way how the multimodal precipitation
this chart would look like was more to illustrate
how the cross-sectoral issues are not being dealt with
when you focus on one single study,
for example, on Colombia, salmon,
or on the earth quality, there will be a cross-sectoral problem.
This is the rainfall variability in number of...
most of the African countries below Sahara.
You see huge inter-annual precipitation changes.
This is the way how, for example,
Zimbabwe system responds to when you put
a simple parametric model together
between the rainfall variability, which is the blue one,
and the GDP grows.
There is almost perfect correlation.
So we have put together a simple parametric model
for all these countries, which were subject,
by the way, of the marine development goals,
and then we said, well, to be able to sustain,
to cope with this variability,
of course, what you need, you need water storage, right?
Now, when you look at the numbers, you get quite a surprise.
The water storage in cubic meters per capita
in the Western world, we are part of Australia, America,
Europe, is somewhere around 5,000 cubic meters per capita,
meaning facilities to store water
when there is enough for dry and vice versa.
Not only dams, but also other storage,
underground storage, all of that.
That storage in the countries we talk about,
like Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, is set between 40 and 50.
Now, if you think about it,
we are now convincing governments to invest
in projects like pumps, like efficiency of irrigation,
and we have completely abandoned the storage discussion
because of the contested debate about dams.
We haven't even agreed about minimum infrastructure
which we need to build on.
We have agreed to invest billions, hundreds of billions
in the development goals to build schools and latrines in Africa,
very well meant, but we forgot that without this fundamental storage,
they simply will be washed out every second year.
Now, what we did, we look into this,
we looked at 80 countries, and we said,
okay, so let's suppose we correct our thinking.
We correct it back to the benefits of the infrastructure.
And let's suppose that our target will not be 5,000 cubic meters,
but it will be much more modest.
It will be like 1,000 cubic meters
because that's South African,
and South African water system is quite well organized.
So we calculated how much additional cubic meters
will be needed for these countries of storage to be built,
so for example, if you take Ethiopia,
we will need 555 cubic meters of capital to be built, to be up to 1,000.
Then we calculated how much will it cost in dollars of 2011, I think, altogether.
And then we make assumption these countries will grow 5% a year,
and the full GDP will go to this investment.
Ethiopia will have to wait 144 years,
and Tanzania, 60 years, Uganda, 58 years.
You see, I was, as a chief advisor of Prince of Orange of Netherlands in 2002
in Johannesburg, where the development goals were assigned,
building latrines, building schools,
and nobody mentioned climate or precipitation or rainfall variability.
This is what you get when you don't think in systems.
I'm going to conclude with some initiatives and new things,
which, of course, is an invitation to you to join us to collaborate.
One is this, which is very special.
We believe that this notion of integrality or system thinking
really is at a stage that we have numbers.
I've shown you some.
We have science behind,
but we don't have a means to actually communicate to the impact.
So we have established at Janssa a new generation of a think tank,
which is a combination of top academia, top governments,
formats of states, business, World Business Council, and civil society
to create a group which will communicate across the players, again,
across the divide, because divide is still there.
Davos is Davos, business,
United Nations, United Nations is our business,
to put together as an ambassador group.
Very powerful group.
These are some of the members of it,
chief scientists of the world, former presidents,
but also Peter Avin.
Peter Avin is the head of the Alpha Bank,
big Russian private bank, Janssa alumni.
He was minister twice in the Yeltsin government after he helped Janssa,
but also academics like Jeffrey Sachs.
And the idea behind this is that these people come twice to Janssa every year,
and they will be supported by all the calculations we can give
on the benefit of the system thinking,
go back to their United Nations assemblies, wherever they are,
and try to get this message from their perspective,
communicate it, and hopefully adopt it.
Another interesting project is this one,
which again puts you almost into the emotional state,
because at the moment where the whole world was discussing
Crimea invasion that weekend,
we have been hosting a meeting with 40 chief economists from Russia,
Ukraine, European Commission, World Bank, Kazakhstan, Belarus,
about possible scenarios for the EU economic integration.
If you ask me, what was your biggest eye-opener?
The biggest eye-opener since you joined Janssa was this.
I was always thinking that when there is something set at the level of conflict,
of diplomatic things, almost war, it is a war.
But believe me, they are always talking to each other.
They are always visiting each other.
All these people with the sanctions, they are travelling to Brussels every week.
This was eye-open. I didn't know this.
So I was almost emotional to see that this discussion was possible
during the same week.
We are calculating now the sanctions implications.
It is fantastic to see all these economies coming.
Russian scenarios, which of course show that the Ukraine joining Russian system,
is my better-off European Commission scenario, showing just the opposite.
So we just put together models, intercompared those,
using the climate type of philosophy.
It is all big fun, but also a very important platform
to build understanding based on this scientific progress.
You will find some of these results on the Janssa website.
You know what this is? The United States, of course.
These are all flaring sounds, like a Swiss cheese United States.
This is a shell gas.
This is the bacon field here.
This is the way how shell gas revolution happened.
When we published this report of energy assessment 2012,
nobody believed that shell gas revolution, as the US calls it, would happen,
meaning to become completely independent of the Arab oil by 2025.
Now it's happening.
And we were asked by US government,
this is the flaring of the gas,
US government to look into the study
how the shell gas revolution would imply on the world system,
energy system, renewable system, geopolitical stability.
If you think about it, right?
Many of the shell gas studies are about water quality,
about threats, about the pollution of water.
This is about what will happen
if the United States would become independent
of anybody else in the energy system.
First, the energy prices will go down like crazy,
and this is already happening.
Second, because of that,
the competitiveness of renewables will reach its limits.
It will lead to an enormous divergence
in the investment into the renewables.
Three, geopolitical.
The United States' interest in the Middle East will be different.
Stability of the Middle East.
Number four, the way how the transition of the technologies
which are already happening will be affected into the renewables.
If you look at the estimated shell gas resources we have done recently,
you can see that this can take us 300 years ahead,
basically with fossils.
Do we want that?
What does it mean for the climate convention?
Shell gas popped up two years ago, three years ago as a revolution,
and we are now facing a major global transition
based on something which is creeping somehow.
We are having this project, again,
not to look into the only one-dimensional question
of what shell gas means when energy supply,
but it can mean for all the systemic feedbacks and interruptions.
Last but not least, Arctic Future Project.
Last example I'm giving to you.
Arctic Council has been there since 1970.
A body which is meeting twice a year.
There is a building like this
filled with fantastic reports about Arctic issues
from climatology, glossology, all the way up to the indigenous community.
As they come to Yassa, Yassa has never done anything with Arctic.
It was my question when Secretary of State Kerry sent a letter to Yassa
to come to the Arctic Council meeting to address this.
Then I understood.
All this discussion with the Arctic Council became accelerated
because of suddenly opening up of the energy resources,
lots of gas, lots of energy opening up,
and they have no trust in each other.
They don't trust each other's study.
They need an independent international organization
which collects scientists from them
to produce basically the same with some of the more integration
to be able to be considered for the holistic Arctic possible management.
So we are now using all the information from the resources
all the way up to the sustainability issues,
fishery issues to put together a plausible scenario
for the joint exploitation of the Arctic
as one of the hot spots of the Earth system.
One thing which is coming up strongly now,
supported by Belmont Forum,
and Guy who has been in the room, I didn't say hello to him,
he came later, he's over there,
was one of the fathers of the Belmont Forum,
is to put together a new generation of systems thinkers
by so-called School of Excellence.
This is yet another attempt to attack this silo type
of the infrastructure in the academic world.
I have myself 33 PhDs when I was arguing, and I still have 20,
and I see what the postdocs are subjected to
when they are postdocs and when they go to tenure track.
The pressure on the tenure track is extremely, extremely disciplinary,
and you can have a fantastic PhD in the system science,
but you usually end up in a very disciplined environment
trying to take care of your own career.
It is extremely difficult for people who are 5-10 years up to PhD
to stick to this T model.
So we have devised a school which will take 5 years
across the awesome member countries.
Every county will have up to 5 universities in it,
and we will support the project for 5 years
by the Belmont Forum funding,
it's €50 million for 5 years,
where every university would receive either mathematical
or physical or sociological, economical disciplinary funding
for 2 tenure trackers, 50% of this salary,
so it will be not taken out of the system.
Every tenure tracker will receive 2 PhD students.
They will work together on this system project across each other
so Oxford can go to Wageningen, Wageningen to Stanford,
but every year, 4 months, together they are self.
That's the idea.
Hoping that this will nurture a new community
of mid-career scientists being interested
and willing to proceed in the system thinking.
We are at the moment to launch the first generation of the group,
of course it will be a little bit more modest
than how this set is being developed,
but we are going to launch the first generation very soon this year.
Everything I said to you, of course, is documented
at different various environments of the YASA,
printed and digital materials.
Please, if you have spare time, go there, visit us, look at it.
Some of the stuff is very exciting
because of the nature of the organisation,
and let me stop by hoping that many of you
will find opportunity to come and to see us visit the YASA.
Not only to see this fantastic place, which is fantastic
because Austrian government was very gracious to us
and gave this from Habsburg Summer Palais
and those who may be used to watch the Sisi movie around Christmas,
that's where she lived in Franz Josef, where Prince Riddle was born,
so we saw this historical flavour which we showed all these visitors.
But more seriously to come, to talk to our researchers
and to develop some of these subjects to a real collaboration.
Thank you very much.