Hello, everybody, a warm welcome to our ESG Investor Webinar, the next one in our series. We wanna talk about crop protection, topics today, about crop science topics, and we always wanna choose topics which are at your highest interest and, basically about topics that we collect from all the conversations we have with all of you. So today, it's all around crop protection, biodiversity, regenerative agriculture. But as you know, in every, in every of our webinars, in every session that we have to do, there's one slide always the same, which is the next slide, where we talk about the cautionary statements. So I'd like to draw your attention to the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement, as well as the materials that we have been distributing before. Thank you very much. Now let's just jump into the matter as of today. You can see in the agenda that we have three esteemed experts today in the call. We have Jessica Christiansen, we have Robyn Kneen, and we have Daniel Glass, and they will introduce you into a lot of topics around crop protection, pesticides. We always say crop protection. Many of you say pesticides. It's actually the same thing, biodiversity and regenerative agriculture. Why do we do these series of webinars? Because we have a deep interest in sharing information with you, in being more transparent, in enhancing our efforts on disclosure and transparency. This is basically a run through the last years, where we have started in 2017 to disclose all our safety studies of our crop protection products. That took quite a while, two years of very intense efforts to disclose all those studies. And I don't wanna name all the efforts that we have done around the last couple of years. We have published a number of reports around topics that are of specific interest to you. Maybe just to highlight one thing, because after we published our safety studies, we received some comments like: "Are your studies really true? Is it okay if you just show us the data? But we wanna see how is the data produced? Can we trust your data?" And that's why we have launched the OpenLabs in 2022, where you can not only see the studies, but also how we do these studies. The topics that we present today will be also part of reports being published a bit later in the year. So, for example, a topic around crop protection, R&D, and stewardship will be a matter of a separate report. We will also come with another report on our public affairs work, and you will see more publications coming down the line. If you have a specific interest in specific topics and you wanna know more, please let us know. The next slide is actually a little bit obsolete as of today. We do not need to talk about the existence of climate change and biodiversity loss, but I think it's still important to point to the fact that while in the past, we have talked a lot about the need to grow to feed a growing world population, and I think that's really still true, and our company has to make a contribution to produce enough safe and affordable food around the globe. We need to acknowledge that as of today, we, at the same time, need to reduce the pressure on the ecosystems. So the big challenge for us is how can we produce more and preserve better at the same time? And that's why we have selected the topics that you can see on the next slide, and I want to go into these topics without any further delay. You will hear an update on our biodiversity strategy. Many of you have been asking us questions around the biodiversity strategy in the last couple of years. Maybe very interesting for you is to see how we are doing R&D and stewardship today, how we develop a new crop protection product. It's a very complicated process. It's really, really a very detailed, so many studies, and we would like to make you aware of the complexity, but also about the accuracy of how we are dealing with that topic. Then last but not least, in the end of our run of the show today, our Lighthouse project, reducing environmental impact of crop protection, where we have made really substantial progress in the last couple of years. That's the agenda for today. In the end, we will have a Q&A session with all of you, which I will introduce after we have been going through the presentations. And with this, I'd like to present to you Jessica Christiansen. She's leading sustainability and stewardship in our Crop Science division, and she will present to you what we are doing on biodiversity, how we are making progress, and then a new term, which has been introduced very intensively this year by our crop science colleagues, what we are doing to move to regenerative agriculture. Jess, the floor is yours. Thank you, Klaus, and pleasure to be here today to talk about biodiversity and regenerative ag. We all know that biodiversity is critical to lots of aspects of our planet. Agriculture and food production is no exception. So what does it mean for ag? If you look at the average abundance of native species, it's down about 20%, major land-based habitats, right? Because of major land-based habitats. You got about 90% of all soils are expected to be degraded by 2050. That's a huge one when you think about agriculture, obviously. And then about 10% of insects are being threatened, so that's an average there. You think about the pollinators in particular, that's what we've been focusing on in agriculture quite a bit.... You know, many populations of pollinators are in decline, whether it be bees, wasps, butterflies, and that's a huge concern when it comes to food production. So a lot of the row crops, the staple crops, don't rely on pollinators, but many other crops do, and so that's, this is a balance that we have to have. I think there's an estimation, for example, that about 5% of food production would be at risk if pollinators were wiped out in high-income countries, and it, and it'd be higher than that in low and middle-income countries, say, around 8% or so. So it would be very impactful, obviously. And then you can see about nine out of 6,000 crop species account for 66% of total crop production. So this is around the reduction in diversity of cultivated crops. And so if we think about crop diversity, we know that's an important part, to balance biodiversity as well. So lots of key, key items. This is just a handful of them that we're monitoring and are very impactful for agriculture as well. So if you go to the next slide, let's talk about what the main drivers of biodiversity decline are. So pollution, you can see this is a couple of the big drivers here, but if you look at pollution, crop protection, these are some areas that we can actually control, as far as in our wheelhouse, if you will. But we're looking at crop protection application, with our crop protection environmental impact reduction goal. This is really around reducing the impact of our own crop protection portfolio. Even though crop protection is not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, typically, fertilizers, for example, and land use change are the bigger ones when it comes to agriculture. But our crop protection EIR goal definitely helps, and so this is something that we already have a commitment and are making really great progress towards. The impact of climate change might increase in the future. It can also contribute to habitat degradation, so that second bullet. This is all about sort of greenhouse gas, and as you think about the nexus of climate and biodiversity coming together. So we are not only working towards greenhouse gas neutrality by 2030 in our own operations and net zero by 2050 in our own operations, but as we've mentioned several times in other discussions with you guys, we're also committed to helping our farmers reduce their greenhouse gas emissions on the most emitting crops by 30% as well by 2030. So this one will help with the climate change aspect of habitat degradation. And here's a big one, the land use change. And so this is one where you think about habitat loss, degradation that we've mentioned before, intensification are major drivers. So this is an area we really acknowledge that agriculture has a big role to play, and one that we are working towards. How do we find the right balance of food production and land use and biodiversity? So that's really what we're working towards when you kind of think about regenerative ag: how do we not only produce more with less, but how do we start restoring? And the restoring factor would help with this land use change. So if you go to the next slide, let's talk about the regen ag, our regen ag position. There's not one definition of regenerative ag, and which is interesting, because it's not a new term either. So this has been around for a long time. But what we're really focused on is the outcome-based approach. And here's the six key outcomes that we want to focus on. And it needs to be crop agnostic, so that every system is different, every crop system, every region, every subregion within a region. So it needs to be very farmer-centric, and it needs to be outcome-driven. So if you look at the yield increase and improved productivity, if we can't make our farmers profitable, they will not adopt these changes and practices, and we will not have impact at scale that we're hoping to drive. So that's really driven towards our customer too, which is the farmer, so we need to make them profitable at this. But it also kind of leads to the social and economic well-being. And so if we can make the farmers profitable, it should lift the whole community up. The soil health aspect of regenerative ag is absolutely critical. It's foundational. So the soil health aspect really drives productivity, water retention, greenhouse gas sequestration potential, for example. So all of these things really are underpinned by soil health. Soil health also drives a lot of biodiversity health as well. Mitigate climate change, preserve or restore biodiversity, we'll talk about that in a little bit here, too, and then the water resources. So we have some key principles, but the basic premise of our regenerative ag position is that it needs to be flexible, it has to be customizable, and it's really based on practices, plus our products and portfolio, really, including crop rotation. It's a multi-year strategy. It's not just a season-by-season look. So let's talk about that in a little bit more detail if you go to the next slide. So I mentioned, for us, our sustainability focus has been producing more with less, and that's not going away. That still is going to drive, actually, and it's foundational to drive regenerative agriculture. So we're still gonna innovate, we're still gonna do what we're good at, which is innovation around inputs for agriculture. But what we've got to get to is how do you produce more while restoring more? So not only with less, but the restoration factor. And so increasing productivity while renewing nature, that's not an easy task. And so there is this nexus there, and we've talked about this before, too, and there's trade-offs sometimes. But with biodiversity, it's gonna be really critical that we understand this restoration and the restoring more in the nature-based aspects and the impacts agriculture has. If we go into some examples of how we're trying to approach this, if you go to the next slide, this is one system that we're very focused on, which is direct-seeded rice, and it's in our APAC region, starting in India. We just announced at the International Rice Congress, I was at last week in Manila, Philippines, we're also going to start testing in the Philippines in 2024 as well, so we're looking at expansion. Rice in itself is a huge staple crop. It's calorie security for millions of people globally. It also is one of the most environmentally draining products or commodities to produce. It uses about up to 40% of the world's irrigation water. It emits about 12% of methane globally. It's a huge, huge impact on smallholder farmers. There's over 150 million smallholder farmers that produce rice. This is a very logical one for us to focus on because we could touch many things all at once. What we're doing is looking at our system of solutions, and we're partnering with others to think about the full ecosystem around the farmer. It's everything from cash liquidity to inputs, ours and others, digital enablement, and then off-takers to make sure that the profitability is getting back to the farmer. The goal of this right now, this system, is to truly make it regenerative, and so one of the things we're working on at the moment, partnering with IRRI and some others, is: How do we think about the crop rotations in this system, starting to collect and analyze more soil health data to say, "Can we increase and improve productivity of an entire system and a multi-crop system that's centered around direct-seeded rice?" So we're excited about this one. It has a lot of potential to have huge impacts, not only for the planet, but for millions of people globally. So let's talk about our pillars around biodiversity. If you go to the next slide. So we're really focused on three main pillars when we think about our biodiversity strategy. So we've mentioned the soil health benefits. Soil health is really underpinning regenerative ag. It also drives a lot of biodiversity. Think about yield stability, drought resilience, water resources, carbon, disease, et cetera. What we're doing here is we have a handful of long-term sustainability trials in the U.S., Argentina, and India. India, I just spoke about. It's really centered around our rice program with several different crop rotations engaged. Argentina, we have some great example of that one as well, where it's row crops, so it's corn, soy, wheat rotations with several different inputs and digital tools. In the U.S., it's row crops as well, looking at our... pressing on our Smart Corn System, which is our short corn hybrids, as well as with rotations and practice improvements. So that data is really gonna help us not only understand what we need to be doing as far as how to mitigate biodiversity loss and get to this restorative goal in our systems, but it's also gonna be proof points for our growers to believe in adopting these practices. Then you look at habitat. That's our second pillar. This is all about land use optimization and thinking about ecosystem services, too, and such as natural pest control. So we have some programs and platforms launched already. So in Latin America, we have ProCarbono, which is really about protecting the natural ecosystem forest and incentivizing those lands to stay and not be cleared while producing low-carbon soybean and other commodities that we're working towards. So basically, we're trying to incentivize landowners to keep the forest, as well as incentivize soybean farmers to make more money on the existing land that we're producing on. So it's really working in partnership. We have lots of activities in North America around pollinators and habitat initiatives, so we work to make sure we have strips and buffers and we have a milkweed program where we've been working to make sure we're putting back some of that natural habitat in areas, and also working on some digital tools to help our farmers understand their return on investment. Maybe they are better off not planting certain aspects of their certain parts of their fields, for example, and we can keep those for native habitat. And then we have a Forward Farms, the Bayer Forward Farms, which is really a network of farmers globally that, that showcase these practices. So they're farmer-led, so it's not protocols that we design as Bayer farmers do what they do. But they're, they're progressive farmers that are actually showing other farmers and policymakers, for example, of how to do these things and how it could work. So we're excited about those, and, and we're gonna continue to work on the, the habitat pillar, too, when, when you think about ecosystem services.... genetic diversity. So this is a, a tough topic, too, that we get a lot of questions about typically. So when I think about genetic diversity, I think about resilience in our existing, crops that we breed for today. So we have row crops, we have a vegetable seed business. So it's really about how do you create and increase genetic diversity even within the crops that are grown, so that you're really targeting more resilient systems as climates, climate is changing? And then it's also about restoring and keeping diversity in general of crops. And so we work with a lot of genebanks. You can see a couple in the example bullets below. So we work with genebanks around the world to make sure that we're preserving crop diversity and genetic diversity within. We're also, of course, focused on cover crops. So cover crops is one that we've invested in and starting in North America, where it's a gene-edited pennycress weed, actually, that's edited to basically become a cash cover crop for growers. So it can help with the, you know, creating regenerative, more regenerative systems in our row cropping model systems in the U.S., for example, while enabling a new revenue stream for growers. So this one you can use as sustainable aviation fuel. That's the target. So it's coming. It's not launched yet, but that's a good example of how we're trying to make it more profitable for growers with our innovation too. And then some interesting work with intercropping. So in our veggies business, and we're testing this in row crop too, it's really around how do you intercrop so you have the the beans, it's a pole bean, basically, the Marolda, sorry, I can't pronounce that word. The Marolda bean, which is a pole bean, and so veggie farmers are actually intercropping that with tomatoes, et cetera. So instead of leaving interrows barren, so they're covering the soil with another cash crop, one that could be used for food and/or, an additional commodity to sell. So we're working more on intercropping technologies, too, and testing. And then in general, in biotech, our biotechnology organization, where we've been focused on how do you actually target more, resilient, climate-resilient, technologies as well. So the examples here are, you know, cold tolerance. We've been looking at heat tolerance, enabling no-till, and some of these cover cropping systems, you need shorter or longer, days in between, as well. So we have a lot of activities ongoing, in these main three pillars that we hope will drive, biodiversity, restoration or preservation, and ultimately, our regenerative ag systems. So if you go to the next one, the challenge to this is, you know, how—what are we measuring in it? We have a lot of these discussions in industry forums and with external parties, but the challenge in biodiversity is really this measurement piece, the KPIs. So here are some examples. We're really working across different platforms externally and with academics and NGOs, just to make sure we can hopefully align on some core principles. It needs to be somewhat flexible. As we said before, each system is a bit different, but I think, you know, we're getting closer to having some alignment on some global core principles, at least around metrics. So what we're looking at is, you know, if you think about pollution, I mentioned before, we... What we can measure is our crop protection environmental impact, and so that's what we're doing with our goal that we're reporting on. So that one is a treated area, weighted environmental impact by hectare. David Voss is on the call here today, too. He'll be speaking a bit more to this later. We're looking at greenhouse gas reduction, as I mentioned, so we have a carbon intensity score that we report on, we're starting to report on. And really, the last three are what we're working towards with these external forums, which is land degradation. So we're looking at different soil health metrics, like the Soil Health Index, for example, is one that we're starting to utilize more. But there's lots out there when you think about soil health. There's the microbiome, the abiotic pieces, so we're working with different universities, et cetera, to kind of understand that more. Land use change, the habitat protection and restoration, increased biodiversity in general, and with the nexus of food production, that last bullet. So that's what we're really working on, not only to test different technologies like environmental DNA and metabarcoding, remote sensing, for example, for habitat and species, but also with different forums like the WBCSD and TNFD on really the framework of what we're going to report. So we're looking at and working on the how with this, which is the different technologies, 'cause it needs to be scalable and affordable to do this, but it's also the what with some of these forums. So we're really thinking about how to, how to do this in a, in a pretty consistent, practical way. So the last slide I have is really about how the partnering. It's this is a complicated space, as I just walked through. So how to do this is we have to partner, and it does drive our business, so we have business strategy around it, which is fantastic. So you can see with the green dots, it's a link to commercial. There's absolutely some commercial programs and strategies around these efforts. But we have to partner in this, particularly the R&D space. So I just mentioned, you know, some of these forums that's working on the metrics and the technology. You can see in the EU, we have the BioMonitor4CAP, where we're looking at some of these technologies. We have different programs like the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation that we participate in, TELA Maize in Africa, modern breeding projects. So this just gives you a sense, and the point of this is that we have to work together. There's no way that one party can do this alone. And so this is an area that we have a ton of collaboration on and will continue to do so. So that was a fairly quick run through. I know we're gonna have some time at the end for Q&A, which is great, but for now I want to hand it over to my colleague, Robyn Kneen, who is now gonna go through our R&D and stewardship and crop protection. So Robyn is the head of our Global Regulatory Affairs in our Crop Science division. I'm gonna hand it over to you, Robyn. Great. Thanks very much, Jess, and a warm welcome to all of you. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about research and development, and especially as actually just this month, I just celebrated 35 years with Bayer. And I've actually spent my entire career in various roles in research and development. So, I'm really happy to share with you some of the experiences I've had as I've gone through that journey that's been my career. And, hopefully you've seen this slide before as it represents the 5 platforms of Bayer's research and development. And if you look in the middle there, chemistry, this is what we're going to be talking about today. As a chemist myself, I've developed a deep appreciation and understanding of the importance of chemistry, crop protection chemistry to agriculture, as well as a passion for ensuring the safety and sustainability of those chemical products that we used. So let's walk through the journey, and on the next slide, we're gonna start with a kind of overview of the research and development process. There's a lot on this slide, so I'm just gonna walk you through it. If you look along the bottom here, you'll see a time span of approximately 12 years. And yes, this is how long it takes from discovery to market, and with an average investment of about EUR 250 million. So for every product that makes it, and of course, there's many, many products that don't make it for one reason or another, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about why today. As you look on the left-hand side, you'll see there are four areas of focus for research and development, so chemistry, biology, toxicology, and environment. And I'm gonna focus on the toxicology and the environmental safety, a little bit more today. And then finally, just below the years, you'll see that there's three main phases. It's actually shown as two here, but really there's three. The first one is discovery. The second one actually is part of realization, it's development, and then the third part is regulatory. And so that's what I'm gonna walk you through today, the discovery, the development, and then the regulatory. Let's start at the beginning on the next slide, which is actually where I began my career, and that is in discovery. I have to tell you that discovery today looks very, very different to what it did when I began in discovery, and partially due to a lot of the tools and technologies and capabilities that are available to us today. Bayer's named its new approach to discovery, CropKey. Why is that? Well, this represents the approach to finding a key, so that particular chemistry that unlocks a biological target. If we think about the desired activity that we want against pests, weeds, or diseases, we can use today's modern computational tools to find exactly those active substances which impact that specific biological target without impacting non-target organisms, so highly selective. And this approach is then complemented through a series of predictive early safety evaluations using, again, different, in vitro tests and in silico predictive models. So as we start to discover these new chemicals, if you go to the next slide, please, it's important to remember that there's no one factor which defines whether an active substance advances from discovery into development. And what this spider chart shows here is the different factors that we have to take into consideration. So we're looking not only at the efficacy against the desired pest, but we're also looking at all these other factors here that you can see in this spider matrix. And it's a balancing option to try and find that best key to solve the grower's challenges. As you can see by the matrix here, it's like we're balancing these different aspects and making a decision. So let's go to the next slide, and we'll move into the second area, which is the development phase of research and development process, and talk a little bit about our safety evaluation. The fundamental basis for assessing safety is to determine the risk. So I'm gonna pause here a moment, and so that we can really understand what is risk. On the left-hand side here, you can see a silly little graphic of a person standing on the beach watching a shark swim in the water. So where if you're on the beach and the shark's in the water, you're having no exposure to that shark. So while the shark represents a hazard, something which can be harmful, having no exposure means that you end up with no risk. Now, of course, if you're to jump in the water with the shark, you're now exposed to the shark, and so this changes our level of risk totally. And so this is how the same approach that we take for evaluating crop protection chemicals. So we look at the hazard, we look at the exposure, we evaluate the risk, and we do this in two main areas. So one is the environmental risk assessment, and the other one is a human health risk assessment. And I'm gonna go in a little bit more into both of these now on the next slide. And maybe just before I talk about this slide, and again, we'll walk through this one. I know there's a lot on here. But many of you may have heard the saying that dose makes the poison, and I think that's also true when we talk about risks, right? When we... It's around the level of exposure. I mean, even water and oxygen can be toxic if too much is ingested or absorbed. And so again, it's really important to consider the potential harm and then the exposure to determine the risk. And so this is how we do it. So we begin off by doing the hazard assessment, and I've shown an example here in the area of toxicology. And this is a list of the studies that we'll do in the areas of toxicology. And these studies, some of these studies are short-term studies. They can take a few weeks, and others of these studies are long-term, chronic studies that can take two years or more. The important thing to remember about these studies is that there's a defined way in which they must be done. So it's - we don't choose how to do the studies, it's, it's directed and in great detail, outlined in methods that come from regulatory agencies or international organizations. There's also a set of guidelines under which studies must be conducted, and a set of rules which are called Good Laboratory Practice. And I'll talk more about those on the next slide. So I've listed on the left-hand side here, just the studies that we do in the area of toxicology. But I also want to... I've not listed them here for space, but I also want to highlight that in the areas of ecotoxicology, environmental fate, efficacy, product chemistry, metabolism, and residues, there are studies conducted in all of these areas. So these studies are used to address the potential harm or the hazard that a substance can cause. And so now we know the hazard, we go to the right-hand side of the slide here, and we measure the exposure. And when we're considering exposure, we consider all the different ways in which a person could possibly become exposed to a crop protection chemical. It could be the applicator, or a bystander, or a worker in the field, or a passerby, or it could be people eating the food that's been treated. And so all of these aspects are evaluated through these exposure studies. And then once we have the data from these exposure studies, we take that along with the data from the tox hazard studies, and we're able to perform a risk assessment. You can see at the bottom here, for example, as we're looking at the worker exposure, you can see all of the different aspects which are also taken into consideration. This is just one example, again, for worker, for risk assessment, and of course, we do risk assessments for environment, many, many environmental species, as well as other ways in which humans, so both human and environmental risk assessments, all the different ways that they can become exposed. Now we can jump to our GLP slide. GLP, as I mentioned, stands for Good Laboratory Practice. And basically, they are a set of principles that outline how safety studies must be performed. Even though I've just shown you all of the studies that we do, very often, we still get criticism regarding the transparency and quality of the data that we produce. Studies are conducted by industry. This can be criticized also. However, it really doesn't matter who does the studies because the rules govern exactly how the studies must be done, and so anyone who follows the guidelines can do these studies. You have to follow the Good Laboratory Practice guidelines, as well as the methodology, the detailed methodology outlined by regulatory authorities. I wanna pause here for a moment because we have a new initiative called OpenLabs, which actually gives anybody who wants to the opportunity to come and see a study being performed. So you can see how we use a residue study as an example, and you can see how both the field and the laboratory part of the study is conducted, and how everything is governed, including the audits that happen as you go along. All right, so let's move on. You know, now that we have the data, we've generated all of the data to show that the product is safe, what do we do with it? Well, the data goes to regulatory authorities for evaluation. This evaluation can also take multiple years. Our studies are also posted to our, made available on our transparency website. So all of the studies that we've conducted for all of our crop protection chemicals are available, upon request through our transparency website. So one of the things you can see here is that not every regulatory authority, has exactly the same requirements. They're not totally harmonized around the world, and, you know, different countries have different approaches. So one obvious one you can probably see here that North America is much more focused on the risk, evaluation, as we described earlier, whereas Europe focuses a lot more on a hazard-based approach. We also see that, in many low and middle-income countries, they're still developing regulations, and so in the absence of having own regulations, they utilize guidelines which have been put out by international organizations such as FAO or OECD. Now, to conclude on this section, and because the regions have very different requirements, as I just explained, whereas we in Bayer, we have the global view, we take a holistic, standardized approach to safety and actually have gone one step further, and raised the bar by implementing our own safety standards. So irrespective of the regulatory requirements, we have defined a minimum that must be met. And, this may be akin to what is done in other industries, for example, also in the finance world. And so how have we approached and created our safety standards? Well, on the left here, you see we've taken the standards and guidelines of the international organizations. We then consider the latest scientific developments in risk assessment and take the standards of reference regulatory authorities, so those most sophisticated science-based regulatory systems that exist. And we pulled all those together to create Bayer's safety standards, which have then also been validated by an independent panel of experts in this area, and from this, we've created our safety standards. And you can see at the bottom, left and right corners, just an image of a document, and this is actually our operator safety standard, which has been published and is available if you're interested. So with that, I'm going to step aside from the process and just talk briefly about governance. And, how do we governance and governance for us is really how do we internally oversee all of the activities? And there's just two aspects of governance that I've shown here. The top diagram, as we go through research and development process, actually represents the governance and the committees and the sounding boards that define when a product is eligible for moving through the pipeline, so what we call phase advancements. And then in the lower part of the slide, we also have more of a, what we call LTO, License to Operate, set of governance. And this oversees the specific decisions around our approach to issues, incidents, regulatory policy changes, and also stewardship. And this leads me to our final topic, which is stewardship. On this slide, on the lower part of this slide, you can see the scope of which product stewardship, which we apply product stewardship. As you can see, it goes directly from research development through all of our operations, production, packaging, marketing, responsible use, and right up until discontinuation. The international code of conduct, which you can see in the upper left here, FAO, defined by FAO. This is a voluntary standard to which we subscribe and actually have gone one step further here as well and detailed out our product stewardship, commitments, principles, and requirements. On the next slide, you can see just an outline of some of the examples. So we help farmers with the safe use of our products through personal training, support, guidance, on the use, proper use of, protective equipment, and also, container management, and provide and support in case of incidents. So if you are interested to learn more about these and many other stewardship initiatives we have, then please follow up with us. And that brings my section to a close. And so thank you for walking through, discovery, development, and regulatory, and stewardship with me today. And there are—if you're interested to learn any more on any of these elements, these can actually be found in an upcoming report on our product development process, which, well, is due for publication soon. And with that, I'd like to hand over to Daniel Glas. Daniel is part of our sustainability team and is the venture lead here for our environmental impact tool. Daniel, over to you. Thank you, Robyn. It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for joining. I first would like to talk about why crop protection is needed from our perspective. Crop protection helps farmers to secure or increase yields, and thereby helping to feed a growing population and reducing pressure to bring additional biodiverse land into production. You can see this here on the example of corn on the chart here from Our World in Data, where corn production has gone up quite significantly in the United States by almost 2,000% in the last 150 years, whereas the area used for corn production in the United States has stayed more or less steady in the last 100 years. That does, of course, not mean that there has not been any land use change for agriculture. There has been. But land use of agriculture is always inevitably related to loss of biodiversity. That statement is true for organic farming, for conventional farming, really for any kind of farming. But the loss is by far surpassed by the higher land use in extensive production systems. And as you heard as well from my previous speakers, of course, there is still a need to make agriculture more sustainable, to work towards regenerative agriculture, as you heard from Jessica earlier today. And here in this specific case, we're talking about our sustainability commitment to reduce our global crop protection environmental impact by 30%. Next slide, please. We have committed to a global commitment covering all the crop protection products applied on a field throughout the globe. The KPI itself is crop protection environmental impact per hectare, treated area weighted. I will explain that with an analogy later in more detail. Think about this commitment as a relative commitment. It's a relative commitment on our global portfolio against the baseline in the past. The baseline here is set in 2014 to 2018. We're using a five-year average to account for variance in CP application. Next slide, please. Quantifying the impact has been, in the last years, we've been working on this, really the most daunting task, and we've only been able to do that by partnering with leading universities around the globe. We have partnered here with universities developing the models called PestLCI and USEtox. They are being developed since years, actually decades, by an academic consortium orchestrated by the United Nations Environment Programme. The models are as well used by the European Commission, to mention one example, or some, even some of our industry peers. The point, the most important point is that we're using an external method to quantify the environmental impact of crop protection. So the, when I say method, I mean the calculations themselves, but of course, as well, the data we use to quantify our, our global baseline. The models themselves, the data we use, is freely available, and in everything we do in terms of quantifying the impact, we, rely on the academic consortium, but as well on an external panel of experts and a third-party panel, which reviews the way we, we quantify our environmental impact. On a very high level, it's very simple how these calculations run. So first and foremost, everyone thinks about volume. If you think about crop protection or pesticides, and you think about environment, volume, of course, matters, and that's being taken into account. But equally important is how the product is applied, in what crop it is applied, where is it applied, when, and things like this. And based on all of these factors and many more, the models then quantify emission in the environment, emission of crop protection, in this case, and then ultimately, as well, an environmental impact. On the next slide, I would like to put this in context to what you have heard from Robyn, the previous speaker here. You heard Robyn talk about extensive safety testing, and this statement, of course, applies here to everything we do, as Robyn outlined. And to put this in context with the sustainability commitment, the easiest way to think about it is that we are going the extra mile for sustainability as a company. And what Robyn talked about and what those models do on the previous slide is basically those blue bars here in a very simplified manner on the bottom, yeah? We quantify impact of products, and then we know what to focus on to reach our commitment. I will explain that in more detail moving forward. But it's important to keep in mind that this does not contradict what Robyn outlined. It is the same thing, just that everything we do is safe and therefore safe as well for the environment, and what we talk about here is going the extra mile for sustainability. On the next slide, we would want to give you an overview of what we have achieved so far. Recently, roughly a year ago, in the Bayer Sustainability Report 2022, we have communicated for the first time quantitatively against our commitment. So far, we have achieved a 14% reduction of our global crop protection environmental impact. We're using a five-year rolling average, 2017-2021 is the performance tracking period. The 14% refer, of course, against our baseline in 2014-2018. Together with our academic partners, we have as well been able to quantify not only our own crop protection impact, but as well everyone else's in the industry. Peers, industry peers, but as well, generics. Based on this analysis, we've been able to estimate that, while we're leading, on the crop protection side in terms of market share, we have only a 2% contribution to the global environmental impact of the crop protection industry, the whole crop protection industry. You probably wonder how this is possible and how does this relate to what you have been hearing from the previous speaker. On the next slide, it's the easiest way to talk about this with an analogy, in this case here, the seesaw. Each product in our portfolio, and we have a lot of products in our crop protection portfolio, is a ball here in this simple example. The position of the ball or the product, left, right, is mainly determined by things like how much is applied, the volume, but as well, what we call environmental profile. This is what Robyn has been talking about. So for example, things like how fast does it degrade? What's the effect on the environment? Yeah. But let's call it environmental profile and volume. Those are the main two drivers for the position of the ball. Everything on the left-hand side in this very simple example helps us with our commitment. Everything on the right-hand side doesn't. The size of the ball is as well important. I mentioned earlier that we have a KPI called Global Treated Area Weighted Environmental Impact per hectare, and we want to reduce per hectare. But the size of the ball is the treated area, so we factor in whether we sell or a product has been applied on 1,000 hectares or 100 million hectares around the globe. That is factored in. That's the size of the ball. And what we have been completing last year is a full assessment of our global portfolio and as well, an assessment how our R&D criteria for product development relates to this commitment, what Robyn has been talking about. In very simple words, everything on the left-hand side, that is, innovation. So if we manage to bring more sustainable crop protection to the market with the standards Robyn has been talking about, we're adding to the left-hand side, and this will help our commitment. In this case, there is as well then no conflict between a sales objective and a sustainability commitment because it goes hand in hand. Having said that, it is not enough for our sustainability commitment. We have as well identified a few products on the right-hand side, which we're working on currently to mitigate. On the next one, this next slide. I would want to talk about the main contributors so far to 40%, and as well, moving forward, what will help us. The main contributors can be broken down really in four main categories. It's the criteria we use internally to governing how we develop new crop protection products, as just outlined. That's really critical. But of course, as well, what products and active ingredients we in-license or acquire through acquisitions and vice versa. We have as well an ongoing portfolio governance process where we decide as well to phase out or divest certain products. That is all important. That would be here number three. And last but not least, of course, it matters how our products are applied by our customers, by the farmer. And you see here a few examples on the crop protection side. You heard me talking a lot about crop protection so far, and of course, that's critical, as already mentioned. Having said that, as well, seed and trait helps with our sustainability commitment or, as well, digital efforts. So you see here examples on the trait side. Those are insecticide-tolerant traits. That helps to reduce the amount needed of insecticides, for instance, a very simple example. Of course, that helps. And on the digital side, you probably heard as well about efforts to apply crop protection ever more precisely with digital technology, so in other words, reducing the volume needed. Of course, that helps as well with this commitment. So the point being is, crop protection innovation is essential, and bringing more sustainable chemistry to the market is essential, but as well, efforts on the seed and trait and digital side are equally important. On the next slide, I would want to conclude with what have we done this year and what can you expect moving forward? This year, in 2023, we have launched, and these are just a few examples, a few highlights, a new research partnership, adding additional universities to the work. And this specific work focuses on expanding the models I outlined earlier to cover pollinators. I think a very important topic we started working on. Secondly, later in this year, we—you can expect a submission of the first publication of this ongoing academic collaboration we had over the last 2.5 years. In this case, this is a publication making the crop protection application pattern dataset public, which then leads in a second step as well to our knowledge, and the university's knowledge, first ever global impact assessment paper in academic journals, making this data available to the public. 2024 and, moving on, we would want to continue and, intensify our efforts to work with industry partners. In this case, specifically linking back to regenerative agriculture and Jessica's comment that there is no one set of definition. We are working with cross-industry platforms in an attempt to standardize the definition around regenerative agriculture. In this specific context here, for this commitment, we are working towards bringing this academic work in terms of a CP sustainability metric into these regenerative agriculture metric set. In addition, we aim to contribute to a public calculator. So having a publication with a lot of data is nice, but, having a easy public calculator to quantify your own data set of crop protection is maybe even better. The academic consortium plans to do that, and we would want to contribute to that development as well. In 2025 and later on, we expect, based on current estimates, the publication of the pollinator impact assessment methodology and as well the soil impact assessment methodology, which we already committed to integrating in our ongoing calculation and efforts in our sustainability report. Thank you very much for your attention, and with that, I would want to hand over to Klaus Kunz for the Q&A. Thank you. And a very big thank you to Jess, Robyn, and Daniel. I think you may have noted that we tried to bring a lot of complex topics across within only 60 minutes. And for me, it's really, really important that you can see that as of today, in our company, if we try to find a new crop protection agent, a new active ingredient, a new active substance, a new molecule, it's not just a matter of finding the most active molecule to control aphids or whiteflies or bugs. It is really the matter to find a molecule which is on the one hand, serving farmers' needs. So there must be of course, there must be efficacy to control, but there must also be a safety profile of these compounds. I think the intensity that we put into identifying molecules already in the very early screening phase, when it's already part of a selection process of many, many compounds, that we do not only look into the efficacy against aphids, but also against the selectivity, for example, for pollinators. This has really been growing and growing and growing and growing over the last years. And also that we have been trying to set standards for ourselves, that we do not only need to just go and try to register what's possible in a given country, but that we want to have higher standards for us. And that, for example, and you, you may know that we do not commercialize any, any product anymore around the world, which is classified as WHO Toxicity Class I and many other standards that we have been introducing in the recent years. So this is very important information that we wanted to bring across, and also the incredible complexity of the regulatory process, if people say, "Can you not register or come, come with a replacement of, a given product, a bit faster?" No, we can't, because there are some studies which take more than two years, and there's no shortcut to the process, and we will never go for the shortcut of any of those processes. So once again, a big thank you, to Jess, Robyn, and Daniel. I would like now to go into the Q&A. All investors who joined today's webinar via Zoom can actively participate in the Q&A session, session. It's essential that you specify your first name, last name, and company in the name field in Zoom in order to allow for correct identification. To ask for a question, please click on the Raise Your Hand fields. And we will then ask you to put up your question. And there's already one question out there. By the way, everybody else who's on YouTube who's not an investor, of course, can also follow the Q&A session in the next couple of minutes. There's the first question is already out, and we have it from Gunther Zechmann from AB Bernstein. I would like to ask you, Gunther, to quickly ask a question. Gunther, I hope you are still with us. If not, I can ask it for you. It's a question which I will direct to Jess. The question is, Jess, can you please elaborate a bit more on how farmers are going to be incentivized to switch to new farming practices, and also a little bit about the economics of carbon farming? That's a question from Gunther Zechmann from AB Bernstein. Yeah, thanks. But great question. So changing is not easy, and we know that, particularly as you think about switching to more regenerative systems, 'cause it can take a few years for soil health to build up and for the productivity increases to be seen by the farmers. So there's a few things we do. In our carbon programs in particular, it varies by country, but in the U.S., for example, our farmers are paid per acre based on the practices that they do, whether they generate a carbon credit or not. So if they have no-till, limited-till, cover cropping, they get a certain $ per acre payment. So that's sort of a base. The other thing we're looking at is how do we really enable our farmers to participate in low carbon labels or incentives from the value chain players? So all the big value chain players are working to reduce their Scope 3 emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, and that's really their ingredients, right, that they use and they purchase. So that's another opportunity that's not the voluntary carbon market, but it is an opportunity for growers to get a premium if they grow their commodities in a certain way and can prove that. So we're really focused on how do we enable the data collection, the measuring, reporting, validating services? How do we enable the farmers to actually participate in programs, whether it's a voluntary market or involuntary? And then in general, when we launch new systems and products, we typically have some marketing campaigns, other things, as far as helping the farmers financially in these programs while they're learning the new technology, and so we help sort of bridge until they can get up to speed. But in general, going back to my first comment, we are needing to work and partner with financing institutions, 'cause what I like to say, it's like a bridge financing. I think we need to get the farmers kind of up to par as they switch to more regenerative systems. And to do that, we need to help cover some of their costs in the initial years. Not forever, but in the initial years. Every market in the carbon farming, the economics, to end with this one, is different. So there's a lot of countries don't have a voluntary market established. Some countries are in the progress of or process of doing that and writing policies and rules around it. So we're watching that very closely and trying to customize market by market to ensure that farmers can be more profitable, either as an additional revenue stream or getting premiums direct from value chain players for insetting or offsetting. Hopefully, that answers the question, Klaus. Thank you. Can you hear me now, Jess? Yes, we can hear you now. Oh, great. Sorry, I had a technical issue. It's called a mute button. If I could just follow up on that, please. Could you just quantitatively, as much as you can, talk about what carbon prices, whether in the voluntary market or in some regulated market, would be required for this to be profitable for the farmer or anyone along the value chain, please? Yeah. From a voluntary market, I don't, I don't know. I don't have the exact numbers right now, so I don't know, Klaus, if, if, if you or anybody does that's on the call, but we can follow up on that. It... If, if you're asking about what the, the per CO2 ton, equivalent ton is, is that what you're asking, Gunther? Yes, that would be helpful. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, I just got a... So it's like somebody just popped it in the chat for us here on our side. So that one- I think we were around $25 per ton. Yeah, $25 per ton, that's USD. So it is- That's very helpful. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Charlie. Just put that in the chat for us. ... Thank you. Thank you, Jess. I think it's a very dynamic field. The carbon markets and soil carbon still is a very complicated topic. We are still in the early phase, and there will be still a couple of more questions to be answered as we move forward to solidify that space. The second question comes from Angela Flaemrich from Sustainalytics Engagement. Angela, can you please answer or put up your question? Yes. Do you want me to put it in the chat or just read it out? Just read it, please. Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for this insightful pre-presentation. I really appreciate Bayer bringing all their experts to speak to us about this. I have three questions. The first one is I want to double-check regarding the independent third party that validates Bayer's safety standards. Who is that third party, and when do they or how frequently do they validate? Robyn? Yes, I can answer that. So, we actually pulled together a panel. I believe we had three or four experts from around the globe who were renowned experts in the field of operator safety. Different geographies, different backgrounds, but really known and have published in the area of operator safety. So, really, this was a one-time look at the standard as it was being developed. So I think if we do an update to it, we would obviously get it reevaluated at that time. Okay. Great. Thank you. The next question is regarding Bayer's decision to comply with the WHO International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management. That, can you... When was that decision made? Is it a recent development or otherwise? Maybe again, Robyn? Yeah. I'm not sure. I do. It's not recent. Jess, you know, we don't have Cara with us today. She's our stewardship expert. No, we can find the exact year for you, but it's not recent, to answer your question. This has been something we've committed to for many years now. Okay. I mean, to comply with the code of conduct, it goes a long way back. The additional commitment to not commercialize products classified as WHO Tox Class I, it goes around a decade back already, and there's additional commitments which have come along the way. For example, the commitment is along the SURPASS project that we have these operator safety standards. This is much younger. This is only 2 years old, so it's basically an evolution, but the WHO Tox Class I, that dates around 10 years back already. Oh, okay, I see. Okay, then, I didn't quite realize it was linked to that one. That makes sense then. And the last question is regarding the License to Operate Committee. Can you tell us a bit more around the functioning and structure and timing, all of that with it? Yes. So this is actually a subcommittee of our ELT, so our executive leadership team. So, members of the executive leadership team sit on that committee. It is held on average about three times a year, but as topics dictate. And they are really, you know, giving the final sign-off, as I said, when we have challenges or questions or decisions that need to be taken, whether it's around issues, incidents, regulatory policy changes, or stewardship approaches. And as you saw on the slide, there's other subcommittees of that committee, where depending on the impact to the business and the serious, and also the potential impact also to, from a safety perspective or from a stewardship perspective, or, then things will get elevated up through those committees. Okay. I mean, it's just the name that- ... Pardon? Sorry. What did you say? No, I just wanted to ask if you are, if you are okay with the answers. I think that helps me to get a picture. I mean, the name License to Operate is intriguing for me, and that it's kind of implies like a social license to operate. Is that generally what your, its function and purpose is for? Uh, yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the question, because I think, the—it's a term that we use a lot internally within Bayer, and, probably warrants, a little more explanation. So, for us, the license to operate is everything we need in order to commercialize. So it would consist of the, regulatory license, in addition to that social license as well. So all, all of the pieces that, that encompass that. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Robyn. Yes. We need, we need to move on. I'm, I'm very sorry, but we have a couple of other questions in the line, Angela, but thank you for your great questions. I think really, really helpful, and already covering quite a broad range of space. The next one is Zoë, and now, Zoë, you—I ask you for forgiveness. Zoë de Spoelberch from Hermes. Please correct me if this was really a dramatic misspelling. Thanks, Klaus. Good to see you again, and nice to meet your team. Yes. You weren't too far off, it's Zoë de Spoelberch. And- Spoelberch. Spilwerck, exactly. Well, thank you very much for this insightful session. It's great to hear a bit more about all these important topics and see all the work done at Bayer on this. I was wondering if Bayer was considering reporting against the TNFD, and when you might expect to have a report on this? From what I've heard today, it seems like you've done quite a good job at measuring impacts already. A lot of work done on soil health and measuring that, on habitats, and just on the impact of your crop protection products on the environment. So it sounds like a lot of the data is available. Will this be put into a TNFD framework or another biodiversity disclosure? That- Yeah. That question goes straight to Jess. Yeah, I can take that one. So thank you, Zoë, for the question. So, the TNFD, we've been a part of that, that framework and that platform for a while now, for about the past year and a half or so. And we are gonna pilot the framework, so they've just published sort of a draft, beta framework, again, their second iteration, the TNFD. So we are looking at piloting it, Zoë. So it's voluntary, but we think it's important to, to, again, as I mentioned, have some core principles aligned that we can, we can start using, and testing out. So more to come on that, but yes, we're, we're actively looking at how can we start taking that framework now, and let's test it out, internally, and then, and then go from there. Okay. Absolutely. Thank you, Jess. Thanks. Maybe just to add, you will see us also report next year under the new CSRD, and that's not the same, but there are certainly a number of overlaps. So there will be a lot of biodiversity reporting coming from Bayer very soon. Thank you. The next question comes from Francis Effiong. I don't know the company name, but Francis, maybe you can- Yeah, thank you. You, you can put up your question. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm with PIMCO. So, we know that EU member states have failed to agree on glyphosate renewal, while the current usage approval expires in December. And so we'd like to understand what your revenue from glyphosate, glyphosate revenue in markets where restrictions are likely to be imposed post-December 2023. Francis, I'm sorry, in this call, we are not answering questions on sales and revenues. That's really not in scope, and we are not the experts on this. I see. I mean, but we can direct you to the experts in that space. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Because we get that question. I mean, it's very important. Mm. absolutely clear, but it's not exactly in scope of what we talk. Yeah. We will direct you, we will put the question out. If you send us your contact address- Okay. -We will put you in contact with the specialist on Glyphosate, if that's okay? Yeah, no, that's fine. Okay. That's definitely fine. Thank you. Yeah. We have a question- Klaus, if you'd like me to, I can just make a quick mention on the process. So, despite the fact that the first vote on Glyphosate did not reach a qualified majority, there will be a second vote, which will be exactly four weeks after the first vote. So there'll be another opportunity for a decision to be taken, regarding Glyphosate, before the end of the year. Thank you, Robyn. Yes. Yeah, thanks for the additional explanation. The next question comes from Caroline Bolton from Mercy Investment Services. Hi, good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be with you today, and thank you for this really helpful presentation. Just had a quick question, I guess, really, is it in regards to Bayer's approach to reducing the environmental impact of its crop protection portfolio? Wanted to maybe better understand the extent to which Bayer is utilizing principles of green or sustainable chemistry, and then also, I guess, efforts within the R&D program to specifically invest in least toxic by design solutions within the crop protection portfolio. Thank you. Very good question, and obviously goes to Daniel. Yeah, thank you for the question. So, if you refer to some of the definitions of the concepts you mentioned floating around, for instance, in the EU, then maybe first my response would be we're not strictly following some of these definitions. Having said that, I mentioned as well that the most important building block for commitment delivery, by far, is to bring more sustainable crop protection, and we mean chemical crop protection, to the market, so with all the technologies Robyn talked about. And then, if you continue kind of in that order, that line of other technologies helping us to deliver, if you have the more sustainable crop protection, in terms of chemical crop protection, you need to think about complementing it with biologicals, very important. Followed then by applying it more precisely. That goes to the volume, less volume, or for instance, as well, less emissions is as well achieved with applying it more precisely. And last but not least, comes in, for instance, complementing crop protection with a insect- resistant trait technology, to then as well be able to apply even less. So that would be, I think, in that order, the line of technologies you have to think about for commitment delivery. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. So I think it's important because if you hear green chemistry often in public conversations, it's more about how our production processes of different materials.... what we talk here is not about the production process, what we talk about here is really the impact on the environment, which is significantly higher than, than the sheer production process. So I think that that was a very good answer from, from Daniel. I'm very happy that Christine Chow has a question also from Credit Suisse, formerly Credit Suisse, Christine, sorry, now UBS. I'm happy to have you on the call. What's the question? Correct. Thank you. Good to see you again. We've been engaging with different companies on the topic of the use of machine learning and AI, and we seem to get very similar overall comments about how algorithms can help a drug can help with discovery and also precision. Can you give me a bit more color on how the outcome of the initial success of those discovery is fed back into the system? Like, who's responsible for it? How do you continue to improve that, and how do you measure the success of these algorithms and how you improve them over time to get to where you need to be? Thank you. I think I would put it first to Robyn, because we talk about the discovery process here. Yeah, Klaus, I'm not gonna be very helpful on this one, I'm afraid, as I'm not a computational chemistry expert. So I think we might need to contact our discovery colleagues here and come back with the answer there. But, so certainly it lies within that chemistry discovery function. I mean, I'm actually the chemist in the call, at least the chemist who has been doing type discovery in the past. My past is a bit outdated, so I'm not on the very recent status quo, but I can tell that computational chemistry is taking a larger and larger part in modeling. I think it's still complementing the experimental piece, so it's a combination of computational analytics today, which is helping to push many products much faster into the space. And we have been just recently launching, I think it's called CropKey, an initiative which is making much better use of computational chemistry in the discovery phase, targeting new modes of action in a more efficient way. So yes, it's catching up. It's getting a lot more than it used to be in the past, and it's much more effective today than it used to be 20 years ago. There was a first wave of computational chemistry, which did not lead to a large number of new drugs, but I think now we are getting much more effective in that space, and we have a bigger trust that we will see more outcomes. Yeah, I can, I can add a little bit to that too, Klaus. So we're using AI and machine learning in several areas of our business today. So the R&D engine, so CropKey that Robyn talked about and Klaus just mentioned, is really a multidimensional modeling system to be super specific and target certain proteins, and we're actually looking at can we look at that technology to help us with our sustainability or regenerative targets as well? Then you have. And so, you know, that should create this huge funnel, so you can, you can actually do mode of action discovery and much faster, but also much wider range, so that we get more targets to look at, to experiment with, to Klaus's point. It won't replace the, the actual, you know, efficacy work you have to do once you, you get some targets. We're also doing product design with AI and modeling our breeding organization as well, so precision breeding. Same concept. You can actually reduce the cycle, et cetera, and widen the reach. And then we're using AI and machine learning in our Digital Farming Solutions group as well when we think about our Climate FieldView platform and others. So we're looking how do you actually have these very specific learning scripts over time too. So if that helps, so it goes through the process, our phase advancement on R&D, so it's integrated into the process too, to answer your other question, I think, Christine. Thank you very much. We come to the end of our webinar. I'm very grateful for, once again, for our experts, and the effort to try really to condense all this information in a most accurate way into information that is hopefully digestible for you. We hope we have created some sparkles and some interest on your side. Maybe there's a lot of follow-ups you are interested in. We are always open and happy about follow-up questions from your end. For the time being, I want to say also thank you for everybody who has been dialing in, who has been listening to us, for the questions, for the great questions that we have received. And I'm already looking forward to our next webinar and the next initiative in our transparency track. Thank you very much, and have a nice week, everybody. Bye-bye.