Well, first of all I would like to welcome all of you. It is really an honor to have such a representative conference in our capital after so many years. Naturally of course, I would like to first extend my thanks to UNESCO, UNEP for helping to organize it. It bears immense significance that we have gathered here 35 years later to celebrate a significant achievement. I think that Tbilisi has proved itself as an international city. We are hosting more than 300 delegates from over 100 countries, but it is a different city today. In 1977 you came to a capital of one of the soviet republics that had no freedom, no independence, and no vision of its own. Now it’s a different city, once again the proud capital of independent Georgia that is thousands of years old, has new messages, new goals for the world. It is a prudent and proud inheritor of its rich history. Of course the world is a very different place today. I can imagine where we were in 1977. Some of the delegates, of course, where not even born. I was 9 years old and at that time. As a  9 year old back then, the environment was not the first thing that naturally came to your mind; neither in your daily life or your educational aspirations.

In fact now nature itself, the environment itself has invaded our lives and it’s teaching us lessons. It is teaching lessons to the inhabitants of island states, which are under daily threat of disappearance. And I remember meeting one of my colleagues, a President…he said that at least you have some hills up there and we don’t even have single one. I do understand it; it is a tragedy when country might disappear with its identity because of the environment. It is teaching a lesson to people, those who are deprived of water for their whole lifetime, not just for one season. It is teaching lessons to the people who are deprived of food. So, we really need to adjust so that we can achieve sustainable development through learning and coordinated educational interventions at all levels - national, regional and international. So the goal of environmental education is to promote changes in lifestyle attitudes and the behavior needed to foster sustainable development and to address modern-day challenges. It requires action from a multiplicity of stakeholders and actors, as well as long-term and sector-specific strategies. So we should be encouraged and inspired by some success stories that exist out there in the world, create new ones, share them, talk to each other and figure out what we can do. Here in Georgia, we are becoming a 100 % green clean energy country. We are becoming the largest regional exporter of clean hydro electricity and we are using solar energies, other clean sources energy. We are trying to solve the emission problem. We are trying to become a zero emission country. We have a plan to move the whole government to electric cars; we are going to implement this in a few years time. When I drive, I mostly only drive an electric car and we are trying to produce some here. We are working a lot on providing clean water, providing other environmental facilities to people and generally changing the system.

You know we have a one laptop per child program for educational purposes. Every child in Georgia gets a laptop from the government. We have invited 10,000 native English speakers to teach English in our schools. Every primary high school in Georgia has an Australian, American, British or any other country representative as an English teacher. Of course we are coming from post-soviet transition of being a backward country; stagnant and deeply inequitable because of omnipresent corruption and cronyism.

According to the European Union’s last surveys, Georgia is the least corrupted country in Europe. We were one of the most criminalized countries in the world, but now we are the safest country in Europe. Our capital city, Tbilisi, is the second safest capital in the world, according to the UN. We have some of the fastest procedures, we have one of the fastest customs procedure, we have the fastest ID issuance procedures, we have the world’s fastest company registration procedure, world fastest paper transactions; we are the easiest place to do business in central and eastern Europe, according to the World Bank. And all of this serves to make life easy, but life cannot be easy unless the whole thing becomes sustainable long term, and it remains a nice place to be for the whole world.

Georgia also is a big tourist hub. When I became President we had 120,000 tourists, two years ago we had 2 million, last year we had 3 million, this year 4.2 million and next year we will have 5.5 million and it will go all the way to 10 million in next, maximum 3 years. Again, this is an important challenge, because we also want to have environmental tourism. This is not an easy task to handle, on one hand it is important for the economy, it happens because Georgia is safe, because Georgia is nice, because Georgia is hospitable, but there are also some challenges which we have to handle. These are challenges which are connected with agriculture; again we have to handle it. So we are also working on other educational facilities, you know we created a network of community colleges where we are also teaching environmental subjects; where we also have vocational training at the same time. For the first time in the region, we are creating together with a consortium of American universities including MIT, Minnesota and others. There is a new American technology university in Batumi, Georgia on our sea coast, which starts to look more and more like Singapore, and it will be the tallest building in the Caucasus and in Eastern Europe.  I encourage you to visit it in terms of skyscrapers, but again, the sustainability of it is a big challenge.

So we are completely restructuring our education system. You know that we had one of the biggest challenges in our educational system. We had one of the biggest corruption rates not just in the police. We fired the entire police force when we started reforms; we also fired the entire tax service when we started reforms. But we couldn’t fire the entire education service. Education was the most corrupted in Georgia. To get into the university you had to pay a bribe, to transfer from one to another university you had to pay a bribe, to get into a good school you had to pay a bribe. This is gone now, of course. We have universal exams, but it’s another challenge to bring up the level from this kind of corrupt system to a high educational standard. We should be quick to capitalize on it and seize opportunities, learn and share from each other’s progress, and unify our efforts to foster environmentally responsible challenges to our national and international situations. The recent international forums including Rio +20, as well as in the future, we want to build a global momentum that has to be captured, and I believe this is the goal of the Tbilisi+35 conference, which will mark a new beginning  by taking concrete actions for our long-term good for the benefit of the generations to come.

Thank you again, all of you, for coming here, especially those of you who came from very long distances, for making this effort and I wish you the most enjoyable stay in Georgia.