Science Day 2026 (HLPF 2026 Special Event)

Okay, thank you, thank you. My name is Flora Lichtman. I'm the host of a public radio show called Science Friday. Has anyone heard of that show? A couple people.

I love it.

Thank you. I'm emceeing today. I'm thrilled to be here. It's my first time in the UN. I've passed these flags so many times, and I hope that World— that Science Day 2026 will live up to this storied room. I feel like it will. I was thrilled to be asked to do this because I love talking about science, and I love talking about discoveries, but some of the most profound stories that I have reported on in my career have been about how science has been translated into world-changing impact. And I just want to take 1 or 2 minutes for an anecdote. Who here knows who Katalin Karikó is? Okay, I'm so— this is awesome because her story is so good. So she's a biochemist. And she worked for many, many decades promoting this idea that mRNA could be used therapeutically. And she was by herself. And people say this, this can be an overstatement, but really very few people believed her. She was shunned. She was demoted. She never had a professorship. She was never invited to give a lecture. She was fired from from Penn where she worked as a staff scientist. And when she was fired, she found her stuff in the halls, very unceremonious, and she said to the person who fired her, this is going to be in a museum someday.

Which is—

that's a pretty bold thing to say when you're getting fired. But here's the amazing thing about her story is she was right. She won the Nobel Prize a decade later.

Wow.

And she won the Nobel Prize for doing the basic research that led to the COVID vaccine. But here's the wrinkle I want to call out. The discovery that was cited in the Nobel Prize citation was made well before she was fired. It was published in a small journal, and she expected with her co-author Drew Weissman, who also shared the Nobel Prize with her, that the phones would be ringing off the hook when they made this discovery, because that was the crucial discovery that would allow you to use this finicky molecule for therapies. And guess what? No one called. And the point of this story, this anecdote, is that we know that scientific discovery is not enough. It doesn't always lead to action. And those are the questions we're interrogating today. We're trying to diagnose Why does that happen? What does it take? What are the barriers between knowledge and impact? And crucially, what are the ways around it? One other note on formatics before I turn it over. Like I said, this is going to be very interactive. I'm so thrilled for you to hear from these esteemed panelists, but I'm also very excited to hear from you. So we will be turning to you throughout the day. I will not Socratic method you, probably, but I really, really would like to hear from you. I will remind you to keep it short. I've been instructed to take out the cane if you're not. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Professor Robert Dijkgraaf to give you a sense of this day, what this day is for, and what we hope you'll get out of it.

Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everybody. It's wonderful to be here, and I'm the President-Elect of the International Science Council. It is the oldest and most comprehensive organization representing the global scientific community. We even have more members than the United Nations. And it's wonderful to be here and welcome you also on behalf of our co-convening partners, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UNDESA, the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And we are proud to convene Science Day again together with those partners as a dedicated space of dialogue during the High-Level Political Forum. Now, Science Day was created to make that space where scientists, governments, UN entities and practitioners can step back from reporting on progress and— or lack of progress, and instead ask some more fundamental questions. It's what I would like to call the moment where you empty the blackboard and have a more comprehensive view. And since 2023, Science Day has become a place for these kind of open, honest conversations about where science is and can make a difference, and I think today we continue that tradition. And what do we mean with the science policy imperative? Well, we are entering the final stretch towards 2030 and in some sense, you know, we should be very optimistic. Scientific understanding has never been at this level. Never ever did we know so much, have so many people from around the world, also from regions that weren't able to participate, of social strata that were ignored, part of the scientific enterprise, the tools, the technologies we have. I think science is in some sense the most reliable source of optimism because every day we know more, we discover more. But as already said, we are lacking the implementation across the Sustainable Development Agenda. And at the same time, the world is getting more complicated. We see the context in which science and policy are operating is a more difficult environment with geopolitical fragmentation, constrained public finances, declining trust in institutions, and growing expectations for multilateral cooperation to deliver these tangible results. It's very good that we ask the question today, is there truth in advertising if I actually say science is this source of optimism. So the question, therefore, is no longer so much what does science know, but increasingly how can we actually be an effective partner for implementation. Now, we are of course here at the United Nations, and I must say the scientific community is feeling very much at home. I think both in the multilateral context and in science, we believe in win-win. We know our strength is in the strength of the links connecting us, and we firmly believe that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Science depends on international collaboration as no other enterprise. Open collaboration, mobility of researchers, of knowledge, shared infrastructure, trusted institutions, and a free exchange of ideas. And these are not ideological goals, These are operational goals for science to flourish. And increasingly multilateralism depends on science, the natural sciences, the social sciences, but other sources of knowledge too, indigenous and local and traditional knowledge, and in order for the world to navigate these great challenges. And one cannot do with the other, and I think, you know, I'm very optimistic that we can strengthen this connection between everything the United Nations is doing and what's happening in the world of science. So I think throughout today's program we'll hear important examples from governments, from cities, from communities, from researchers, from international organizations, and together I think they make an important point that the challenge is rarely the absence of knowledge, it is the difficulty of connecting that knowledge with our institutions, with our finances, with the governments, with the political realm. Now, it's wonderful to be here for one day, but of course I think most of us here believe that every day should be Science Day, and that's certainly true for the working scientists, but I think this should be also an inspiration that we strengthen those links between the policy domain and the scientific domain, and I think if there are any place where this really has to be shaped and formed, it's here in New York at the United Nations. So thank you so much for being here, and I look forward together with you in a very interesting Science Day. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Professor Dijkgraaf. Up next we have Mr. Navid Hanif, the Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Thank you so much. Good morning and welcome to the United Nations. Robert just said it's your home, so feel at home. And I also want to share my personal story. At heart, I am a scientist. I started my career as a genetic engineer a long time ago, but switched to literature and then to economics. I won't go into the reasons why I did that, but I still have deep love for science. It— my heart beats with every question that you answer. So esteemed scientists, solution finders, and I have questions for you towards the end, that's why I'm calling you solution finders. Excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it's indeed a pleasure to join you at Science Day 2026. Thank you. With our esteemed partners, International Science Council, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and UNDP, we meet at a pivotal moment. Less than four years until 2030. Sobering picture. Only one-third of the Sustainable Development Goals are on track. Nearly one in five targets has gone backwards. Climate change, geopolitical fragmentation, conflict, and inequality are feeding one another. The cost of inaction. Is rising. Let me also take a pause. I don't just don't want to give you the negative trends. There are positive developments as well. We have doubled the number of people having access to internet. Access to services are improving in many parts of the world, but we need to focus. On areas where we're not progressing, and we need to act with speed and scale. I think in most cases we have the solutions, but we are not moving forward at the speed needed, and that's where science holds key. Science is not a luxury. It's our best investment in better decisions. Science helps us see the whole system. It reveals what works. It exposes what does not. It drives innovation. It builds resilience. Above all, it gives us choices based on evidence and not assumptions. But evidence alone does not change the world. Knowledge does not change policy. People do. Institutions do. Leadership does. That problem is not a lack of science. We do not have an evidence gap. We have an action gap. Too often, evidence arrives too late, or it is too technical. Or it never reaches those making decisions. Good science that sits on a shelf changes nothing. There's another challenge. The science gap is becoming a development gap. Most sustainability research is produced in a handful of countries. Many developing countries lack the resources to produce it, apply it, or even access it. Knowledge is still too concentrated. Opportunity is too uneven. That must change. We need stronger science-policy partnerships. We need to invest in research capacity. Especially in developing countries. We need open access to knowledge, better data, stronger statistical systems, and institutions that turn evidence into policy. Knowledge creates opportunity, but action creates impact. That's why the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs is working to close this gap through the Global Sustainable Development Report, which is produced by a group of independent scientists, the Technology Facilitation Mechanism, and the SDI Forum. I encourage you to engage with these activities to help us advance action. Their purpose is simple: connect science with policy and policy with results. As we look to 2030 and beyond, I leave you with 4 questions, and we would be grateful if you attempt to answer those during this conversation today. Where is the science-policy link breaking down? Tell us the gap, the barriers, the bottlenecks. What is preventing evidence from becoming action? It's nowhere more evident than climate action. Evidence abounds, but action is not taking place. And how do we make sure every country can contribute and benefit from scientific progress. How do we solve connected problems with connected solutions? That is one of the key diagnoses we have on lack of progress in 2030 Agenda. The systems did not move to pursue connected goals. Systems are still acting like stovepipes. The race to 2030 will not be won by better diagnosis alone. It will be won by faster delivery, and help us to do that. Let Science Day 2026 be remembered not just for the ideas that you will share, but also for the actions that you will inspire. Thank you again, and I wish you a very productive day today.

Thank you. We're going to now turn to hear representatives of member state and intergovernmental organizations. And here's the question that we're asking: what do governments and UN processes need from scientists, from institutions, from the wider science ecosystem to implement science more effectively? I'm going to introduce all of our speakers at once, and then we'll hear from each of them one by one. Dr. Ilke Hurt, Deputy Director for International Policy at the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety. It's a long— that's a long title. Just say Minister for Environment. Thank you. His Excellency Ambassador Gregor Kussler, Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations. His Excellency Ambassador Chola Milambo, Permanent Representative of Zambia to the United Nations. and His Excellency Raul Sanchez, Deputy Permanent Representative of Colombia to the United Nations. Dr. Hurt, let's start with you.

Thank you. Is it okay like that? Can you hear me? I feel like I'm not loud enough.

Here, why don't you use mine?

Ah, okay, I can do that. Thank you. So I also want to start with an anecdote, actually. Because I work for the Federal Ministry of Environment. I'm not a scientist, and I'm a lawyer by formation. And I started working for the ministry, I think, 18 years ago, so a very long time ago, in the unit for European chemical policy. And that was the time when REACH, the REACH regulation, which some of you might know, entered into force. And I was supposed to be the policy expert on chemical law. And that's— and chemistry was always my worst topic in school, I must admit. And that is when I learned how important and how valuable the interdisciplinary work also inside of a ministry is. Because we have a lot of chemists working there. We have political scientists and lawyers. And we all work together. And it's a big task of understanding each other. Understanding the chemists is not always so easy. But to translate this, as Navid just said, into laws and into political action is key. And that was really, for me, a key experience when I started working there. And it's, of course, in all the other areas just the same. And this is— it's the basis of our work in the ministry. That's what I learned there. And this is why it's so valuable for us. So, let's now come to the SDGs. Approaching 2030, the SDGs serve as our shared vision and a powerful roadmap that inspires collective action toward a sustainable future. But we just heard from Navid that where we stand in implementing the SDGs, so 36% of the goals are improving, 49% are stagnating, though, and 15% are even deteriorating. The world faces increasingly complex, interconnected challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and geopolitical tensions. We've heard that a lot the last days, but those challenges require informed and integrated policymaking. Science enables us to anticipate trends, to explore future scenarios, and identify transformative pathways towards sustainability. German has actually a well-established system of scientific policy advice that supports evidence-based decision-making across government. At the German Environment Ministry— and I am never saying this long name that you said, it always takes too much time, and I'm sorry— Our ministry and our German Environment Agency, the UBA, provides scientific assessments, evaluates environmental risks, and develops recommendations to inform environmental policy. And we always have— it's a very interesting cooperation we have with them, because at one hand, they are a depending body of our ministry, but on the other hand, they give scientific advice. So, under the German Constitution, they are independent. So, we cannot tell them what to do. In every— so, we can tell them maybe not to do this press statement, but we cannot tell them how to, like, publish their scientific evidence. That's really a constitutional principle that we have, and it's always, of course, a balance we have to find. But it's what makes our work, I think, scientifically sound. Close cooperation with scientists is also key part of Germany's sustainability planning. The German Sustainable Development Strategy, our DNS, shows how this works in practice. Our one concrete example is the advisory board dialogue set up by the German Science Platform for Sustainability, WPN 2030, and SDSN Germany. It gathers members of German government advisory boards and decision makers to discuss cross-cutting issues and emerging trends. The Global Sustainable Development Reports of 2019 and 2023 provide clear guidance. The reports offer an integrative framework which Germany has applied with intergovernmental working teams. Also, Germany's VNR of last year explicitly applied this integrated reporting framework. The forthcoming GSDR 2027 comes at a crucial point in time to showcase good practice for integrated SDG delivery and give guidance on the Beyond 2030 progress. I just talked to Marianne, who came from a meeting on the Beyond 2030 progress. So, Yes, I think the discussions are starting now, and it's very important to follow them and to listen closely what everybody wants, I guess. Scientific research helps policymakers understand the underlying drivers of these challenges, assess risks, anticipate future developments, and identify effective and sustainable solutions. This can be achieved through 3 key elements, and I'm almost finished with my long speech. First, by ensuring access to robust, independent, and policy-relevant scientific evidence that provides governments with a reliable basis for understanding challenges, assessing risks, and designing effective responses. Second, by strengthening interdisciplinary and timely scientific advice that brings together different fields of expertise and translates complex research findings into clear, actionable options for policymakers. One of the examples was the chemical policy I just mentioned in the beginning. Third, through regular science-policy interface processes that foster continuous dialogue between scientists and decision-makers. This enables both groups to perform their roles with a shared understanding of each other's questions, knowledge, and needs as well. The debate on the post-2030 agenda must be evidence-based, inclusive, and participatory, but it must not divert attention, attention from the priority of implementing the existing SDGs until 2030. As we look beyond 2030, reinforcing the science policy interface will remain indispensable. We know that science is under pressure, and I think this is like one principle we really have to stick to. Together, by uniting robust and rigorous science with bold policy, we can turn today's challenges into tomorrow's opportunities and secure a thriving, sustainable future for all of us. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Up next is Ambassador Kustler talking about key reflections emerging from the STI Forum process. And if your mic doesn't work, you can have this one.

Okay.

Let's try. Can you hear me? All right. Good morning, everyone. Of course, I'm not a scientist as well, but I'm not starting with confessions. Also, I'm not afraid of the cane. Usually we have some scientific progress here. We do actually mic But I'm here today as one of the 2 co-chairs, together with my friend and ambassadorial colleague, Trollo Milambo of Zambia. The president of ECOSOC appointed us as co-chairs for the STI Forum, which was taking place in May, and we will tell you a few findings from that forum. Of course, there are many, so we'll try to share some relevant ones. First key message is that, you know, we were focusing very much on how science can help achieve SDGs, and that's, you know, it's clear we need scientific progress, especially in times of financial constraints. So what we need is not only political ambition to implement the SDGs or financial resources to do so, but especially our collective ability to translate the best available science into effective technologies and, more importantly for us member states, into public policy. So I think this is one of the key messages we found. It's not just about money, it's not just about breakthroughs, it's really how to translate it into public policy. A second issue I want to mention is So we were also focusing or making clear that science alone is not sufficient, and we need— these breakthroughs can only create public value when they're accompanied by effective institutions, which is of course why the UN, with its convening power, is so relevant in this context, and why the STI Forum is a multi-stakeholder forum, so bringing together not only us governments, with all the stakeholders, including, of course, from the science community, but also financial institutions and so many others. And the most important component, I thought, was we had a lot of innovators coming from, you know, all strands of innovation, and they really encouraged us. What else do I want to share? United Nations, I already mentioned, plays an irreplaceable role in this convening power. There is not only this bridge between governments and science communities, economics, business community, and so on, but there is of course also the big issue of how we can be inclusive on a global scale, because science is very often still developed mostly in, let's say, the developed world, and we need to make sure that there is no increasing gap in how it's developed because it matters how science is developed. So, when we look at, for example, AI models or new tools— I was just at a forum on counterterrorism— so how do you build in certain requirements, let's say, for developing countries or for communities that don't have naturally so much access. It really matters how you build these systems or this logic of the system from scratch to make it available and usable in all kinds of communities and all across the globe, and I think this is a very important role for the UN. There is another aspect, of course, and it's a very Austrian thing to say, we believe in informal exchange rather than just this, let's say, formal interchange. And so the two of us, we held together also a networking reception, so to really, you know, bring about the real, let's say, the real communications among everybody. So if it's multi-stakeholder, it should also have all kinds of interconnections. And last point, I want to appreciate very much what the UN Technology Facilitation Mechanism has done in the context. Of providing the STI Forum with substance, but also to mobilize, of course, experts, and in particular the 10-member group. So they serve as this bridge between governments and the global scientific and engineering communities. There's a wonderful sentence in here which I will not spare you to hear, because the 10-member group can help us distinguish evidence from opinion. I think that's a really good one to remember. And, of course, there was also one incredibly important finding that, you know, contrary to what I said before as a general remark, there is an increasingly scientific capacity development from developing countries. So the research we heard in some of the presentations that Practically spoken, the quantity of research input from all across the globe is increasing, and that's including— excluding, let's say, countries that see themselves as developing countries but are actually scientifically very advanced. It's really from across the globe. So that's a very, very, very important aspect. And last point, you know, they say that hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly a mobilizer, and I hope this day can also contribute to that. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ambassador. That's a lovely, a lovely way to end that sentiment. Ambassador Malambo, we're turning it over to you.

Thank you very much. I hope I'm audible. Yeah, but thank you very much, Flora. Really appreciate this very important Science Day and recognize the effort that has been put forward to put this together through the various organizers. I'm an avid listener to NPR, so such a pleasure to share the platform with you.

Stop.

For Science Friday.

Yeah.

All right.

So really, I'll just add to what was put forward by Ambassador Coorsler here. I mean, the messages were quite clear. There's several messages that came through, but Some messages were really crisp. One of them was that we have to go beyond just accelerating the SDGs. The key question and challenge we have here is whether every country has a genuine opportunity to contribute and benefit from the progress from science. That's the key issue, and you heard from Ambassador Köstler here that it is a truly multistakeholder process. We had views coming from various corners of the world, but also in terms of the various classes of persons. We had academia, we had engineering communities, governments, youth, civil society, private sector, and they all really demonstrated that science has an extraordinary potential to accelerate the SDGs. They also reminded us that the opportunity remains you know, profoundly unequal. Too many countries, especially those in the Global South, still lack reliable electricity, affordable connectivity, research infrastructure, computing capacity, and digital skills. I mean, the numbers say that over 2 billion people remain offline, while advancing— advanced computing and AI capabilities are really just concentrated in a handful of countries. So, there's this uneven issue that we must deal with. And, you know, closing the gaps now becomes a developmental imperative. I think Navid put it very succinctly. One conclusion emerged, which was repeatedly, was that developing countries must remain active. They should not just be passive users of technology, but they should be involved everywhere. Also, though, it was pointed out that Achieving the sustained investments, we need to undertake sustained investments not only in digital infrastructure but also in universities, research institutions, engineering capacity, education, innovation ecosystems, and human capacity. Also, there was concern around barriers that we must be able to remove barriers to continue to that continue to limit participation from various quarters, including women, young. People and underrepresented communities. We had presentations from some 10 young innovators who showed us practical solutions around addressing the challenges in water, energy, agriculture, health, recycling, and climate resilience. Their work really reminded us that innovation is not concentrated in a few laboratories or technology hubs; it exists everywhere, where human beings are, basically. The Forum's key— I think a key lesson was that technology alone will not deliver the SDGs. It's a profound message that we had, that progress also requires that we have effective institutions, sound governance, sufficient financing, and partnerships, good partnerships, and capacity to implement, but not just implement, but to implement at scale, and that's the key issue. Science generates possibilities; institutions translate these possibilities into development outcomes. The financing provides the fuel to deliver these outcomes. International cooperation now becomes a very important issue, and I think you had asked the question, what does the UN process need? The North-South, South-South, and Triangular Cooperation each have an essential role in expanding scientific collaboration, facilitating technological transfer and capacity building, and this is where the UN really becomes essential, and the President put it clearly. The UN provides a platform where all member states can participate in shaping the governance of emerging technologies, and ensuring that innovation advances equity, inclusion, and sustainable development. Through the technology facilitation mechanism, which was mentioned earlier, the UN has helped connect knowledge with implementation by strengthening partnerships, promoting learning, and supporting countries in building their own innovation ecosystems. The forum also reminded us— that's the STI Forum— also reminded us that trust remains fundamental. It's a key issue— trust in science, trust in institutions, trust in innovation— and that we must deliver for all people, including the underprivileged. Building that trust requires scientific integrity, transparency, openness, and meaningful participation from every region of the world. As we work towards 2030, and we're not— We do not have much time left. We should remember that people may not always speak about science policy, but they understand the value of clean water, reliable energy, resilient cities, quality education, and healthy ecosystems. Science and technology matter, but they improve these everyday realities that people face. Indeed, the world does not suffer from shortage of ideas. Or knowledge, Mr. President, I think that's what you said, really it suffers from unequal opportunities to generate and apply them at scale. Just to conclude, our collective responsibility is therefore very clear: we must build an innovative— innovation ecosystem in which every country can contribute, every society can benefit, and science continues to strengthen multilateral cooperation in in the service to all humanity. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador. I just want to underline that innovation is everywhere. It's not sequestered to the lab. I think that's such a powerful idea, and I know that we will get back to it later in the day, so just bookmarking it here. And finally, we have Ambassador Sanchez. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Moderator, and Yes, that disclaimer, I'm a career diplomat and not a scientist. When they asked us to be here with you as a panelist, they gave us the challenge to represent what the Global South is thinking about science and cooperation. I think it's a bit pretentious that Colombia can represent the Global South, but I I want to convey key messages and give you 2 experiences from Colombia's perspective. Let me start with one experience. Back in 2011, the persons that came up with the idea of the SDGs were 2 women, Colombian diplomats, that were in the middle of environmental negotiations and said, We need to be proactive with the Millennium Goals and think about a different perspective. And they came out with this idea of the SDGs in the Environment Caucus, then all the way to Bonn, and then all the way to New York, and it happened to be a resolution in 2015. My point here is ideas are very important no matter where they came— they come from, and ideas have to be defended if they are transformational. Colombia is a 52 million people country, mega biodiverse, middle-income country that has many realities due to our history. Perhaps due to our lack of well-being in some areas, prosperity in others, and wealth in other regions. By combining together these 3 messages that I want to give to you— well-being, prosperity, and wealth— how do you combine those 3 using science to achieve those 3 in an equal balanced way. Because well-being for a person 1,000 kilometres from Bogotá is to turn a Coca-Cola plastic bottle upside down and put it in his ceiling, and that's natural light. That's science, and that's well-being. Prosperity for someone in Colombia is that they can access to university. And they can strive to change their socioeconomic level, being Colombia the 2nd most unequal country in the world. And wealth in Colombia, it's for oil companies to find another exploration site, find oil, and support our economy, being oil the number one export in Colombia right now.

Thank you.

But in the meantime, where is the combination of those 3? That is a challenge for a country like Colombia. And one of the cornerstones and transversal points is science. We need to empower science in every level of society. We need to give that person in Quibdó or in the middle of the Amazon in Colombia, the knowledge to survive, to have well-being, and to count on either the public sector to give things, to give prosperity, or either the private sector to come and share prosperity, wealth, in a responsible way. So that is perhaps My message this morning is that there is no prosperity, wealth, well-being, any way you want to combine them, if science is not in the middle of things trying to get all society together. Perhaps from a New York standpoint, and it's very accommodating to say this, And reading a statement from our capitals will take us so much, but I am here trying to spur a conversation because one other key point is how can this be achieved in a country like Colombia if we don't have the patents of science or there are not in the capacity of sharing those patents. That is a challenge, a real pragmatical challenge about science. But at the same time, we are contributing because Ambassador said it very clearly, there are niche of science, very avant-garde science being done in middle-income countries. The cassava that you eat or the beans that you eat, maybe most of them were first studied in a tropical science center in Colombia, near Cali, Colombia. And that is very interesting, and nobody knows about it, that that is one of the strongholds of the world of understanding what scientifically we are capable of eating. In a nutritious way. All this to say today that how can we achieve this progress now that we are roughly 4 years away from the SDGs transforming into something new? Perhaps we can take a serious commitment beyond political assertions and legal documents, but also more importantly in appropriate funding to ensure that everybody, especially the youth that is here, have equal opportunities to flourish. Maybe science cannot advance where there is not freedom, where there is no respect for independent thought. Also, we must hold accountable the private sector that produce and create wealth, as well as educational institutions, universities in particular, and entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, skillful and talented people to come to a collective effort. We need to have academic excellence also in our radar. There are a lot of knowledge streams from middle-income countries to first world, so-called first world, and perhaps it's the responsibility of both to create the appropriate science networks to have those networks not work in silos and create the appropriate tools. So we are responsible as states, as scientists, as stakeholders to have that well-being, that prosperity, and that wealth be shared by all. I thank you, ma'am.

Thank you.

I'll just call out one line that's reverberating through my head, which is that ideas are important and must be shared. be defended. That's so powerful. Let's give it up for our speakers one more time.

Thank you.

Zhenya, Soy, I'm going to call you up too, because now, as our speakers are moseying off the stage to get ready for our— for more speakers, we're going to do an audience poll. And Zhenya, yes, come tell us how to do it. So the question we're asking is about the biggest barriers to sustainable development outcomes. Did I get that right?

Right.

Thank you. Thank you, Flora. Thank you, distinguished speakers. It's so great to have all of you share your valuable perspectives, but I really would like to switch from the podium to the audience and tap on the collective hive mind and hear from you on the biggest barriers preventing science from effectively influencing sustainable development. For those listening intently, you had more time to prepare because Assistant Secretary General Hanif helpfully hinted at this question early on. I see people pulling up their phones. Yes, please scan the QR code with your smartphone, or if you're on laptops, go to slido.com and use the meeting ID to enter your answers. And I see a lot of Responses already popping up. Keep them coming. We'll give them a couple of minutes.

Sure.

Yeah, there's a big one right at the center. Can anyone guess what it is? Just call it out. Just funding. Yes. Ding, ding, ding.

Daniel, why don't we show it on the screen? Thank you. We'll give it a bit more time.

What else are we seeing up there?

So there are different forms of funding and resourcing, lack of financial support, lack of sustainable and long-term funding, lack of political will or institutions, term limits, just talking about the differences in how science operates and how political cycles operate. That's great. Maybe it's also a good moment to let everyone know that we will be producing a synthesis report based on this event, trying to act on Robert's vision of making every day a science day, so we can pack these ideas, conversations, and discussions and give them a bit more of a lifespan so anybody, a much bigger audience, can come back to it at any point in time.

We also— I will— I'm going to warn you, we are— we have a panel next, but we will be taking questions. So as you're listening, if you're thinking, oh, I'd like to follow up on that, or I'm not so sure about that, please keep it in mind and we will come back to you. So we're seeing funding, we're seeing lack of political will, politics, accessibility and access.

Communication, inequality.

I'm seeing a lot of barriers. I'm seeing a lot of hurdles.

Sorry to start on this note, but at the same time, you will hear a lot of interventions, especially during the focus talk session, where we pull voices from very different parts of the system addressing these barriers. So hold on to your answer. It's very likely that you will hear a response, a recommendation, and some helpful experience from somebody who has been on the other side of this gap, either producing knowledge or trying to get it heard. So—

That's great. And I think we're going to turn it over to Anna, who's going to introduce our panel. The basic idea of our next panel is asking this question: despite these challenges that we all see on the board— on the screen here, how can scientific institutions and organizations still deliver? What change needs to happen? And we're going to try to get into the nitty-gritty concrete details. And just as a reminder to the panel, please don't wait to be called on. I would love for this to run like a conversation. Okay, Anna, turning it over to you.

Thank you, Flora. All right, can everyone hear me back there? It's wonderful to be able to ask if you can hear me in the back because we have a really full room today. So thank you so much for being here. Before we kick off this next discussion, just out of curiosity, how many of you have joined us for Science Day before? A show of hands. Okay, fantastic. Because before I introduce this next panel, you may recognize a few faces that you've seen at previous Science Days, because for our next discussion, we're going to have a discussion amongst the co-hosts and partners that we've worked with now for a few years to develop Science Day as, as what is becoming more of a standing part of the HLPF. So thank you for your continued support of this event. Now, my name is Anna Marath. I'm with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions. Solutions Network. I'm the director and head of our New York Secretariat, although we are a very global organization, much like many of the other organizations that you see up here today. For this next section, as Flora mentioned, we're going to pivot from the bigger framing that we just heard, and we will be challenging our panelists a little bit today to really help us dive deeper into some of the questions that we raised in the first part. So first, I would just like to welcome to the stage again, starting on my right here, Astro Bonini, Chief of Integrated Policy Analysis Branch from UN DESA. Then to her right, we have again Robert Dijkgraaf, the President-elect of the International Science Council. And then to his right, my colleague Emma Torres, who is also with the SDSN, our Vice President of the Americas and Strategic Partnerships. And then we have Ed Carr, who's wearing a couple of hats today, first as the U.S. Center Director and Senior Scientist for for the Stockholm Environment Institute, and also as newly appointed interim chief of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environmental Facility. So thank you very much all for joining us and coming back again. Okay, so we heard from our opening speakers that science and multilateral collaboration obviously really matter, and they thrive when they work in tandem together. And what we've seen now from all of you and your comments here are some of the key barriers. And actually, I think it's quite telling that despite the very diverse backgrounds that all of you are bringing today— we have practitioners, we have scientific experts, we have students— all of you have pointed out a couple of very core things that have overlapped, right? So we have a clear sense of what are some of the key barriers. But it was also a very diverse response, and we saw a lot of different things popping up there. So we're seeing that there are politics, Financing, trust, institutional challenges, capacity challenges is something that we've heard a lot. What we want to do is take all of that as kind of the context and now focus on what does that mean when we talk about that chain from evidence to policy to action. And we're going to focus on the strains that it creates in that process and where we can highlight some of those biggest strains. So, for our panel now, we're going to do first a round where I will give the floor to each of you and kind of a reflection on that first questions. So, where do you see that greatest strain? If there's a particular point, can you pinpoint it? I'm going to ask you to help us prioritize a little bit, because, of course, one of the challenges with competing pressures is that we also have limited time, we have limited political will, we have limited funding. So, we have to make choices, especially when we're talking about policy. So, that will be the first round, a quick reflection on that from each of you, and then we'll go to a conversation, and then we will really try to leave a few few moments for questions from the audience. So take some notes, and then we will turn to all of you for the last piece. Okay, so first, for our diagnostic question to get us started, Robert, I will start with you as a carry-on from your opening today. The International Science Council, of course, works across the global scientific community, and you yourself have spent a lot of your career at the intersection of science and policy. So if you had to identify, if possible, one point where science consistently loses influence on that path from evidence to action, what would you say that it is?

Well, thank you so much for that question. Perhaps I'll do one or one and a half or perhaps two. The first is actually— I like to cite a quotation by a Nobel laureate who said, you know, in science we often learn about nature, about the world, But sometimes in science we learn about science, and I think actually this is one moment. I think science itself is in transition.

Many—

nobody, I think, knows exactly where it's going to, but we do identify, I think, some of the ingredients, which are all horizontal. They cross across the various kind of silos that are still within science, so it's about working across disciplines, transdisciplinary, with other other sources of knowledge, public engagement, being open sharing of ideas and techniques, being transparent. So I think actually science itself will have to change in order to make those impacts. So it's actually inviting others to the scientific enterprise, and I think that's, again, I think an exciting moment, because I think this is something where science is really coming— being positioned to kind of deliver more powerfully on those issues. And the second thing is that, you know, I think again, you know, scientists, and particularly those from the social science, from the humanities, those who study policy, I think have a better idea of what is the problem that we're trying to solve. So my experience also in government has been that Now, many problems are what I would call as a physicist overdetermined, so you have many more equations than you have variables. Often if you are in politics or policies, you have a few dials to turn, yet we have 17 SDGs, 169 targets, 231 indicators. I will tell you they are not all independent, and I think we have much more understanding now about the interdependencies, about the trade-offs, and I think, particularly I think if we move towards discussion of the post-2030 world, there has been so tremendous growth of knowledge about how these systems work, what could be right policy interventions, and I think actually, again, that is a part where science can play an important role, not only to present the facts, but also to make us understand how this very complicated policy world works. What are the kind of— the right kind of interventions? But this, coming back to my first point, needs a transformation in science, and one thing I'm very optimistic about is that many active scientists, particularly the early career scientists, they want to do this. They feel that science is expanding. It's not only about knowledge, but also producing insights how to put that knowledge into action.

Thank you, Robert. So, at the risk of oversimplifying what you're saying, would it be fair to say that if you had to point out to one thing, it's a challenge of thinking horizontally and bringing those pieces together? I think interdependencies is a really great transition to you, Astra, because with UNDESA, of course, you work closely with member states, but it is about integrated policymaking, right? And then bringing those things together and, of course, charting progress on the SDGs. So, how do you see that from your perspective, if we look at that implementation chain and where it comes under the greatest strain?

Thank you so much, and for the excellent questions as well. And this may, I think, feed directly from what Robert has presented on the science community coming together to support this integrated framework. And one of the huge advances with the 2030 Agenda was that it brought the 3 pillars of sustainability together. So, the environmental, the social, the economic. And it's presented in a way that the SDGs are integrated and need to be approached in an interlinked way. So, this was kind of the premise behind the 2030 Agenda from the beginning, that integrated action was going to be crucial to actually deliver on the goals. The other thing that the 2030 Agenda brought was a deep connection to science. So, the member states requested a Global Sustainable Development Report written by an independent group of scientists. They put the technology facilitation mechanism forward, requesting an STI forum annually to convene the science community and policymakers to have these tough decisions. And this has advanced through the, you know, over a decade of time that we've had to work on the 2030 Agenda. So, working with the science community, we've seen great strides in terms of identifying the areas where there are synergies, tradeoffs, bringing science behind the SDGs to show how these tradeoffs and synergies work in practice. The key thing that has not quite happened to keep up with this systemic perspective that science is bringing is the institutions that are there that policymakers are using to implement the SDGs, whether budgeting ministries who are focused on different sectoral issues, the systemic framework for policy implementation has maybe not kept pace with the science behind these integrated approaches. And so there's a challenge now. We have a framework that provides a systemic approach to sustainable development, but much of this has been layered over policy frameworks and institutions that are still set up for a sector-by-sector approach to implementation. And if we can bring together science to identify in practice how to overcome those barriers, that would be hugely helpful to policymakers who are struggling with how to really, in practice, take an integrated approach to the SDGs.

Thank you.

I think there's a couple things that I'll want to pick up on in the second round. But first, Emma, I would like to bring you in next on this, especially kind of building on the scientific community engagement. Of course, the SDSN works across universities, but also with governments and a lot of other local communities to help move knowledge into practice. So looking across those communities, where do you see the weak link in the chain from evidence to action?

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here. You know, this is my home. I grew up here, so I feel very happy when I come back. In the SDSN, as Anna was saying, there is a community of over 2,000 universities and think tanks globally that is working precisely in supporting implementation of the SDGs, but I also have the pleasure privilege of coordinating 3 scientific panels of over 1,000 scientists: the science panel for the Amazon, the science panel for the Congo Basin, and the science panel for Borneo. And the vision of these 3 panels is precisely to develop what one of the speakers, previous speaker, was saying, the science for the tropical forest. And as you know, the tropical forest is in the south. It's not in the north. So therefore there's not a lot of knowledge in the north about tropical forests. So it's precisely those countries in the tropical forest that have to lead on scientific in this area. And I have to say that in the case of the Science Panel of the Amazon, we have a lot more basis because Brazil had invested a lot in science to understand the Amazon and the other countries as well. So the first assessment report report, however, that was produced by the Science Panel of the Amazon 4 years ago is seen as the encyclopedia of the Amazon. And it had a tremendous impact because it was an effort of scientists of the 8 countries and a French territory, which is French Guiana. So that was inspirational in terms of moving with Congo. Congo was more difficult because there was less communication among the scientists and they were— but after we— they managed to produce their first report they presented at Belém and it's amazing because it's for the first time again the state of— the scientific state of the Congo Basin. It's being published by Springer Nature so you should go and download it and it's been highly appreciated by scientists as well. And then we have the board. So we have the tree tropical forest and one of the important things that is that now they're moving, particularly in the Science Panel of the Amazon but also in the other panels, to understand the specific issues. For instance, what is a sustainable city in the Amazon? What is a sustainable city in the Congo Basin, which is an area that's growing? So they have to think about a sustainable city in the Congo Basin, which is very different than a sustainable city in the north. So this is the kind of issues that the scientists are going to start working. What is sustainable infrastructure in areas that are mostly with rivers? So this is the kind of questions that again has to come from the south. So it's inspirational in the sense that they're also engaging with policymakers. And I was just telling my colleague here, Ed, that we're very proud that for instance one of the policy papers of this Panel of the Amazon, which was on restoration precisely to address the tipping point inspired the National Development Bank of Brazil of creating a billion-dollar restoration fund. So this is the kind of thing scientists can do. They can really come with the facts and evidence, but they have to reach out. The panels are independent. I always work at the UN, so I'm very respectful of governments, but these are independent scientific teams. But I also tell the scientists, you are independent, but you're not politically deaf. So you have to be engaged in a dialogue with them. And that's kind of my job, to really make sure that this translates. Now, I'm going to give you a preview of one of the policy papers that is coming up from the Panel of the Amazon, trying to address the questions that you were saying, how to link the science more with policy. And they're recommending, in fact, 4 pathways. Number one is to develop much more context-specific science. What is the context-specific science? And I think this is critical, particularly let's say on the Amazon. Also, the second point that they're saying is create rapid response task forces, because what happens, the scientists, they work for 10 years and, you know, 3 governments have changed in the process. So make specific concrete task force for specific issues. I think this is a very powerful thing. Strengthen communication. I think, for instance, the languages, we need translation, you know, the different languages. And I speak 5 languages, so I'm very good in translating, so I keep telling them you have to talk to politicians in their political language, you know, they don't understand necessarily. And I think it's a whole effort that needs to be done in that, and they're putting that as a priority. finally create living laboratories of experiment addressing specific issues. I also have to say that one of the fascinating things about the Science Panel of the Amazon is that in addition to having over 300 top scientists on the Amazon, we have a significant percentage of scientists that are from indigenous people. And one of the great things is that they're producing now— and again, I'm going to give the You should go to our website because we're going to have a very important paper about— which will be one of the first— of how to have this dialogue of Western science with indigenous people scientists. And we have had amazing work to do that. And that, I think, is going to be again one of the contributions. I'm already briefing our Congo Basin because they just produced their report. So I'm saying now you have to move into the issues and this could be a big issue. Because again, there's a lot of autonomous knowledge that is not documented. It's a little more documented in the Amazon than in the Congo. But also the other interesting thing is that we have a lot more social scientists joining, and I am going to— although they're kicking and screaming, I'm going to force them to get some economists because one of the problems we have is that, for instance, we have governments right now with a lot of pressure, we need to make an economic case based on science, but an economic case. So I think it's very exciting and I really invite you to visit our website both in the Science Plan of the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Borneo. And I think we're going to come with original thinking. We're going to come with original thinking so they could contribute, the scientists can contribute to a transformative model. Thank you.

Thank you, Amma. Clearly, a lot of themes picking up again on connection. That's the biggest takeaway that I hear there, that it breaks down when we're not connecting the right knowledge, when we're not connecting the right communities, and when we're failing to connect ultimately what scientists are coming up with, with those crucial policy dialogues. And I think, as you mentioned, those science panels are very good examples of when that can work, but it also helps us understand when it doesn't.

Thank you.

understand how to draw lessons from that and apply it elsewhere. Ed, I will go to you for the last word on this round, because a lot of your work has also helped on— focused on helping institutions, I'd say, use evidence and kind of navigate that complexity. You've heard what your other panelists have had to say. What do you think we're missing, or are we underestimating something here?

Thanks.

I have to start by saying I'm feeling remarkably validated as a geographer and anthropologist by Robert and Emma. That's not a normal thing that happens to us social scientists here. I should also point out that there's a weird arc with physicists where they come all the way around and end up as social scientists. So Robert, welcome to the club. I'm interested— I think I'm picking up on— there's a lot of things to pick up on here, but maybe I'll just pick up on 2 of them. since they got brought up by various people. And I maybe have a slightly different perspective on these. If we think about big bottlenecks or pain points, pinch points that don't let us do the work we want to do, I think one of the biggest ones is understanding and alignment between academia and the policy and implementation communities that are trying to use research work. That came up— we heard that from Mr. Hanif when he mentioned that science does not, by itself, change policy. We We heard that from Robert. We heard this from Emma, various versions of this sort of thing. The simple fact is that academia continues to, on the main, downgrade applied and engaged work against, quote, pure work. And as long as academia keeps doing that, there aren't going to be incentives to engage in a serious way with the worlds of implementation and policy. But at the other side, policy and implementation does not understand academia. And I can give you a very quick anecdote on this. I was a policy advisor at USAID, rest in peace, and when I was there, I had a fairly small budget by USAID standards within my bureau, about $5 million, to work on some climate change stuff. And I remember saying to one of my colleagues, okay, I'm just going to go spend $1 million of this and I'll have 8 to 10 teams solving all our problems for the next 2 years in academia. And everyone looked at me and their jaws hit the floor. I'm like, no, no, no, you put it out as grants. People will respond to grants. We'll have like 10 times the number of people who we can actually fund respond, and half of them will also take up this work and just do it anyway. They'll find someone else to fund it. No one in my office had any understanding that that is the incentive structure within academia and that you could leverage that kind of outcome. So there's still this huge disconnect that we have to find some way to bridge. So I think that's—

one of the barriers.

The second barrier speaks to what I would think of as mission lag. And, Astro, this speaks to what you were saying, but I'm going to point to the science side problem here. And, Emma, this goes to your point about rapid response. The science and policy contexts can evolve very, very rapidly. The mission of science policy bodies and the structures of those bodies often do not evolve at the same speed or even close to the same speed. I speak to you as an IPCC lead author from the 6th Assessment Report. Any of you who've read the assessment report, you know that that is a global assessment. It's framed in the end as an argument we have a really big global problem.

We know.

There's no reason to keep making the same argument that we have a global problem. On the other hand, you cannot use the ARs in any meaningful way at a country level because none of the data and none of the assessment is organized that way. Where's the policy decision-making happening? At the country level and below, by and large. So we have a significant lag in what the IPCC does and puts out versus what people are starting to clamor for. So there's, on the research side of that, a need and an assessment side need to align those things better. So maybe I'll stop there and throw it back to you, Anna.

Thank you, Ed. I'll actually turn over to Flora maybe for the second round of follow-up questions, and I'll just note that we'll do a second round for a few minutes and then at least leave 5 or 10 minutes for some audience questions. So start gathering your questions. We'll turn to you in just a moment.

Okay, I want to start— I want to start with you, Emma. I was so inspired by the stories you were sharing, But the question that came to my mind, and correct me if I'm wrong, because, you know, I'm an outsider, right? But I have this impression that a lot of science policy papers don't go anywhere, don't lead to action. So why does that happen? And when they do, what's the secret sauce?

Thank you. Well, I think I gave a specific example. specific example where a policy brief became into real investment. For instance, another example that we're doing in the case of the Amazon is precisely on this issue of sustainable cities, because there are 40 million people living in the Amazon, so you need to think about sustainable cities. I remember talking with one big financier that has the Amazon, but it's the Amazon for the Amazon. So it's a service that, you know, they provided by rivers instead of these guys that deliver here. Anyhow, and he was saying something very interesting. He said when you talk to these 40 million people, they have the same needs that the 40 million people that live in New York, let's say. They want education, they want health, they want good infrastructure, they want access to the internet. So the scientists have to think of solutions solutions for these problems, which are problems that they have but in a different context. And this inspired very much the kind of work that we are pushing with the Science Lab of the Amazon. What is a sustainable city in the Amazon? What is sustainable infrastructure? They produced a very good note and I think we're now talking with people that are investing in infrastructure. I am reaching out to the Asian Infrastructure Infrastructure Development Bank, telling them, since you're going to invest in the Amazon, do you want to hear what is the infrastructure that the scientists think is sustainable? So I think we need to make those bridges, but also the scientists have to address the priorities that are emerging from those regions.

So how do we get scientists to do that?

Well, they're doing it.

They're doing it in your case, but not always, right? Bart, do you have a thought on this?

I think you have to—

oh, sorry.

Well, building on what Emma said, I think mostly the issue is that we, in terms of policy, it's very much still supply-driven, right, instead of demand-driven. And my experience in politics is that there is demand, but it might come up, you know, on specific moments, so I think time is incredibly important in politics and policy. Usually things are frozen, but then for a brief time they are fluid. This is the moment when you need an intervention, and often scientists say, well, I'll get you a report, but it will take another 2 years or something, or, I wrote a report 5 years ago, or something, and that's simply not working. Then it disappears in a drawer. So you need a real living dialogue, and I think absolutely crucial, so, is that within government agencies, ministries, there are people who can be the other side of the bridge, can be a bridgehead, are able to understand, make those requests, know how to make sure that these insights actually delivered come into real policies.

So I think—

What do they look like? Who are those people?

What's their role? These are typically— so, Just a little anecdote. When I, as a scientist, went into— became a government officer, which means that you go from a category of people which have the highest respect in societies to those who have the lowest, literally the lowest. There was a cartoon, you saw me disappearing into a big black hole called politics. Black holes is also my field of study. And I think it is not a black hole. We need many more scientists. scientists to engage, be, you know, go into government, go into ministry, go into agencies, because actually you can have a real, real impact. And I think this is a more expansive view as an expanding world of what science is. It's not only something that happens in universities. It's not only that happens in those ivory towers. Actually cross the bridge, be on the other side, and be, so to say, at the receiving end. of those very important messages from science.

Ed?

I think I'm picking up again on what I— we're hearing from Emma and Robert. Another way to frame this is we need to know our audience when we're doing the science side. And again, I think this is a problem with a lot of science assessments right now. Are you writing for the scientific community? Are you writing for policymakers? Are you writing for implementers? Policy and implementation is not the same thing. These communities require different things, different kinds of information. They require information on different timelines, like we heard. And I think that deconflating all of that and figuring out who you're working for— and one of the ways you do that is exactly what Robert said. You need to put people with scientific training onto the other side of that and then develop relationships where those people in government or in those kinds of entities have an opportunity to come back to the scientific community and and explain this stuff in a legitimate way. Because, you know, someone without that degree, yeah, good luck lecturing professors. That doesn't tend to go well unless it's another professor. So, you know, if you get that kind of engagement going, I think there's a real opportunity.

I want to just get a few more remarks and then we'll go to the audience in a minute. Astra, I saw you writing something down. Tell us.

No, this is fantastic. And I think coming back to the context-specific science that was mentioned. When we look at the SDGs as a global agenda, and there is— there have been huge advances in science. The tradeoffs, the synergies, we know much more. But they're not all in context-specific locations. And there's a lot more science that we know about the synergies, tradeoffs, how the SDGs interact. in certain contexts that may have, you know, much better funding, research institutes. We had an expert group meeting, I remember this, on SDG 2 and how to implement food security and nutrition in the context of an integrated approach, taking into account water, taking into account greenhouse gas emissions. And there was a modeler from Kenya who was there who said that she did not have access to modeling training for watershed analysis in her country. She had to use models replicating watersheds from other areas and, you know, have training outside of her country. So there are some very big challenges that still remain in terms of the ability to produce science on context-specific SDG SDG synergies to take into account. And just looking ahead with the advent of AI, this is a big part of the conversation this week with a global AI governance dialogue taking place in Geneva. This is going to only exacerbate this type of challenge if the access to these technologies and the ability to drive these systems to take into account datasets and research from different contexts effects are taken into account. So, just to put that into the discussion.

Thank you. Yes. Okay. One more thought from Emma, and then we're going to the audience.

I'm just going to give 3 examples that are inspirational. One is the president of Peru during COVID was a physicist, and it's the country that— one of the countries that best managed COVID. And it's very impressive, and he's going to go in the record of history because of that. A second thing is particular for me, and I'm Catholic, it's very spiritual. Pope Leo is a scientist. He's a scientist, but he's also a social scientist as well. And of course, he lived in Latin America, so he's very inspired. So it's interesting because to have that kind of leadership is inspirational. And a couple of our scientists from the Science Panel of the Amazon, and one of the leading ones on tipping points, is running for Congress. So we are all going to be in the campaign for her. Thank you.

Going down the black hole. Okay, great. Okay, so let's go to the audience. I'm not sure I'll be able to see your light up, so I'm just going to take hands. And I'll start with you over there in the red dress. Yes, you press that button that looks like a microphone. Talk loud and I'll come to you. And I'm just going to remind you, questions.

Yes, yeah, it is a question. So I'm a scientist and I sit in 2 camps.

I sit—

I work for a conservation organization and I work for an academic institution. And one of the observations I've made is that people who fund organizations want to fund implementation. They don't want to fund monitoring and evaluation of the science that would inform better implementation. On the flip side, academic funders and academic institutions don't always value or see it in real things like your promotion, your ability to get grants, to do the work to sort of inform evidence implementation. And so, I'm just curious from your positions how do you sort of signal at those higher levels that this kind of work is important and then should be funded and considered in career advancement for scientists to enable this kind of, you know, work that we're discussing?

That's a great question. Who wants to take it? We got 2 takers. Robert, go ahead.

I think this is a crucial remark because funding determines to a large extent and how science progresses, how it's being implemented. It's closely connected to a point you made, Ed, about the incentives and the recognition of contributions of scientists, so it's very important, and it's absolute— there's a lack of the kind of research that we're talking about here and the priorities that funding agencies set, so they're really lagging behind, so— and indeed, we somehow disappear in this gap between these 2 kind of funding models, where particularly the ones that try to cross the gap, building those bridges, is not being determined. And in some sense it goes back to the way scientists think about themselves, where this is indeed not— it's seen as derivative instead of being really, you know, crucial for the health of the planet.

And just very, very quickly to add, because Robert, you covered most of my points actually really well. There's an opportunity here, at least in the United States. I think we're seeing it in several other parts of the world right now with the decline in the amount of research dollars available. Universities, at least— I speak as a former dean now— are heavily motivated by revenue streams. You may have noticed we're having a big problem here in the US and in other places. There's funding for this kind of work, not as much as there needs to be, and institutions are realizing if they don't prioritize this, their staff won't go after it. And if their staff staff don't go after it, they don't have as much research dollar, which means their budgets are in trouble. So there's sort of an institutional moment here that could be leveraged. I don't know that it's being well leveraged. Arizona State seems to be doing this reasonably well, but there's Michigan State, there's a few places in the United States that seem to be jumping onto this, but whether or not that's a broad trend, I'm not sure yet.

Let's go to another question. We have one from the member state in the front. Can anyone—

can you—

can we hear 2 people in the back here? Ah, there we go.

Say again? Yeah. Hi, Anna Pott, working as the National Coordinator for the Sustainable Development Goals for the Netherlands. Thank you so much for this conversation. Lost in translation, I think that's what it is about. We know more than ever, but still there is this evidence gap— well, not an evidence gap, but an action gap. Actually, I see another gap, and as was mentioned, it's a— we are currently in a pivotal time in the run-up to the 2030 deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals, and I'm particularly concerned about the communication gap. You know, how do we communicate? And that's what my question is about. You know, where do you as scientists or as a scientist community see your role in terms of How can we cross the gap in terms of engaging with the people who actually vote, you know, in the Netherlands? So we are here at the UN, it's a member state community. When we are, you know, in 2030 and deciding on what's going to happen with the future of the Sustainable Development Goals, it's, you know, it's my neighbor, it's my hairdresser, it's the teacher in the school, you know, these are the people who actually vote for a government who's going to be here to decide. And yes, there is a lot of evidence and there is a lot of, you know, knowledge, but how do we communicate and how could we create this narrative that, you know, people who actually vote for government to be here, to sit in this chair, have an informed decision in terms of what is the added value of the Sustainable Development Goals, what is the business case. So I'm really looking for for your response in terms of how do we cross that gap in terms of engaging and communicating on the added value of the Sustainable Development Goals?

Thank you.

Such a great question. Astra.

Just thanking the Netherlands for this really excellent question, and it is so timely, and this Science Day is very timely because next year in September of 2027, there will be the SDG Summit, and this is where the progress on the SDGs is is considered at the level of heads of state and government. So it's really a visible moment for sustainable development. And this particular summit will both put an emphasis on what can really be done and what science is saying for those final years to 2030, but it will also be a moment where the consideration of sustainable development beyond 2030 and what that looks like. And so the science community, if if starting now, and I think the science community is one of the more active stakeholder groups in terms of preparing for that summit, but publishing work in, you know, Nature, in op-eds, in any capacity that gets those messages out to a broader public about, one, why this matters, why this is a really crucial moment, and what we've learned from, you know, over a decade of implementing the SDGs, because it's really crucial that there's a clear body of evidence that can inform the next steps that's available for the decision makers to draw from. So really urging all of the science community to contribute to those preparations.

Media probably has a small role to play here as well. Just throwing that out there. Other questions? Did you have one?

Thank you. Am I audible?

Clear?

Yes. Thank you very much. So, first of all, thank you very much. Thank you for the genuine discussion and conversation here. The way I look at it is that most of the diagnosis today assumes that there is somehow a shortage of evidence. But the way we look at it today, or the way I see it here, is that reaching the decision and the policymakers of this evidence is actually a barrier today. And The way we look at it is that, from a delivery perspective, that is rarely the binding constraint. The evidence usually exists, but what is missing is the institutional absorption capacity. And that is actually where we talk about the measures architecture within the organizations. We talk about the data pipelines. We talk about the cross-entity decision rights that let a system act on on evidence and course-correct. So what we can see is that you can pour science into a state with no absorption plumbing and nothing moves. So the question is not only how do we get the science into policy, it is do the governments have the institutional machinery to metabolize that? And here I wonder really, how do we evaluate the evolution of AI in upscaling organizations' capacities to make more relevant decisions and bridge the science-policy gap? Thank you very much. This is Saad Al-Ghambi. I'm from the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia.

What a great question. What's AI's role in creating more absorption of science in policy? Go ahead.

I think this is really an excellent question, and we— Astra mentioned the risk of AI of, you know, increasing the various gaps, but there is a positive side to it because it's one way to deal with greater complexity. And actually, we did a foresight with the Science Advisory Board to the UN Secretary-General. Among those issues was that AI will be crucial in in the action of governments. It might be a way to transcend those barriers, the silos that are still also within government. It might be a way to bring the various disciplines closer together, and it will be evolving very rapidly, so this could be also a source for optimism. And talking, if I can allow— if you allow me, this absorption I think is an incredibly important point, and it's also related to the question from the Netherlands, you know, not only the absorption by institutions, but I would say in society. And again, I want to emphasize there's a lot of research being done how to do the right kind of messaging, do the messaging with those groups that have been disconnected, the uncomfortable conversations we need to have. The media play a very important role, but also that area can be science-informed. It's a different kind of science. It's the communication science, those social scientists again.

Yes, this is very personally interesting to me. Anna, I'm going to turn it back to you because we're, we're just at about time for this, this section.

Thank you.

Thank you, Flora, and thank you for all the questions. As usual, we wish that we had another hour for all of the questions, but we will come back to all of you after the next section. I think we've got 2 more opportunities for you all to engage here. I will just maybe do a quick sum-up of some of the key themes. And I know that we asked all of you to focus on the barriers, but I am keeping in mind what you said, Robert, at the beginning, that science is a reliable source of optimism and we will get to solutions in the next section. But to me, one of the core themes of this one, if we really had to pinpoint it, is that misalignment between science and policy frameworks that happens when we produce policy papers that aren't picked up, when we produce evidence and there's a mission lag, as you mentioned, Ed, or as you mentioned, Astra, that the systemic framework hasn't kept pace, or as you mentioned very eloquently, this idea of this kind of institutional absorption capacity. So that, I think, if we can sum up where we actually, I think, are pretty aligned, and we got to it, there's that misalignment between systems, and we are starting to poke at the solutions, which is connection, dialogue, and starting to chip away and reframe both sides of that to make sure that they meet in the middle and are connecting effectively. So we'll leave you with that as we move on to our focus talk provocations. Thank you very much for joining us today, and a big round of applause for our panelists. Thank you for this discussion.

Okay, how's everybody feeling? We've been sitting in our seats. Does everyone maybe need a stretch? Maybe we should just stand up and stretch for 2 minutes, just take a moment.

Any—

We're good. Just do this part, you do your bit in the beginning to introduce the segment, and then I'll launch into it.

Okay. We're gonna get, get started here. Please take your seats. We're gonna get going here. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so as we, we get back to our seats and get ready for the second half of this program, this morning we have been talking about barriers and challenges. Okay, everybody.

Hello.

What do they do in— with small children in schools? You, like, hand— hold up your hand? Is there a UN version of that? Okay. Okay, so I want to get moving on the second half of this program. We've been talking about challenges and barriers, and now for the inspiring part, solutions. James, I'm going to hand it to you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Flora, and thank you also on behalf of the International Science Council to our most esteemed speakers this morning, to our opening speakers as well. It's fabulous to have you with us once more for our Science Day. So now, as Flora said, we're going to move into a bit of a different segment, one that's more solutions-oriented. I was going to attempt, I have to admit, to sort of recap quite briefly the questions that came up this morning, but it's almost impossible. So I'm going to pull together one thread, which is, if we have so much scientific knowledge, then why are we falling short on progress? And, you know, this next part of the program is really what we like to call the DNA of Science Day, because we start looking at real-world solutions and progress. We're going to hear from researchers, practitioners who are working at the interface between science and policy almost on a daily basis. And these are the people who are testing ideas, who are learning from their successes, and I expect also the occasional failure, and trying to bridge that gap between evidence, decision-making, and implementation. And by the way, they're doing so in very different contexts. So you'll notice that these are not traditional academic presentations. Each speaker has just about 5 minutes, if not fewer, to really leave us with one key provocation, one lesson from their own experience or context that others can maybe take away and adapt elsewhere. And taken together, and this is just a really small preview from me, we're going to look at talks that move from communities and local leadership through cities and institutions to the systems we need to build if science is to make a lasting difference. And so I think that's enough from me. I'll just introduce our first speaker, Joshua Anponsam. So Joshua is the co-executive director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund, and he is the founder of the Green Africa Youth Organization. Through his career, he has challenged the idea that young people should simply be consulted, arguing instead that they should be trusted partners in implementation and decision-making. And today he'll ask what happens when we start treating lived experience not as anecdote but as lived evidence, and youth institutions not as projects but as implementation infrastructure.

Joshua.

Thank you so much, James. I'm so happy to be here for several reasons. First, I see so many young people in the room, and that makes me happy. Um, my provocation is very simple. The, the final stretch, um, the 4 years we have ahead of us to 2030, we cannot do more of what we're doing now. And the reason is simple. We are living in an era where young people are experiencing the complexity of all the crises that we could ever imagine, from the attack on democracy, loss of biodiversity, new terminologies coming up like climate anxiety, which is very unique to young people and the ability to exercise their civic responsibility and duties, to vote and to get people in power. All of these are on the line. And when you think about that, it becomes very clear that the biggest opportunity we have for the next 4 years and for the years to come is deep investment and trust with youth movements and young people. And I have this, and I know this from my own story. I first heard about climate change when I was a student. I grew up in rural West Africa. When I heard about climate, the science was very clear in my mind. The problem was that the science was very disconnected to what communities were experiencing. What that turns into is that you have publications, research that is available that communities do not feel connected to. With that, you have lack of ownership, and lack of leadership at the community level. They cannot connect to the science. When I first heard about climate change, the first thing that came to me was, we have to do something. I gathered a group of students— this was in 2013— and we started a student association called Green Africa Youth Organization. What that student association did was going to communities and working together with them and looking at how do climate translate into the everyday life. And for them, it was coastal erosion, it was salt intrusion, the inability to farm, an attack on their livelihood. We worked with them to start tracing back how do they really own that and start acting on it. Today, Green Africa Youth Organization is the biggest youth-led organization in Africa. It is working across several issue areas, and one of the most significant ones is methane. Methane has become one of these scientific discoveries on how we reduce climate impact. And yet, about 10 years ago, when someone talked about methane in a climate conversation, they would tell them, well, this sits in environment, so go to UNEP, not the UNFCCC. That policy divide and that siloed approach of dealing with issues really made it possible for communities even to have their own ability to act on these issues. Today, they are working with cities and reducing methane emissions up to 50% in a single municipality. Ed, you talked about something around the disconnect between when big reports happen at the international level and at the national level. The biggest risk for most young people is even the bigger disconnect at a subnational level. Subnational governments are seeing these lived experiences all around them. They are hearing it from their constituents, from their communities. Young people are feeling it and experiencing it, and yet they cannot connect that with any of the mega reports that happen. But science has a very unique role, and this is what I've seen in another aspect of my work, the Youth Climate Justice Fund. When I was a student and I came across climate and I started my work, one of the things that saddened me was that many young people in sub-Saharan Africa were so ambitious in the research they wanted to do. The challenge is there are no laboratories, there are no modeling capacity, no computing capacity, and just lack of infrastructure to pursue those ambitious works. And yet I wondered, how do the countries facing the most extreme vulnerability do not have the basic infrastructure to advance science at the scale that is needed for them to thrive? So I did the work. I started looking at the flow of funding towards science in these regions, and one of the surprises I found was that in the previous decade, 2010 to 2020, 78% of all the funding dedicated to climate research for Africa was sitting with institutions in the Global North. By doing that, not only is it literally starving off the ability of those institutions, but it's literally disincentivizing young people, early career researchers, and literally shutting down the ambition to solve the problems we so much need in this world right now. I work at the UN. I left my role here in 2023. I was at the Youth and Voice Office, and one of the things that I saw the most was how emails would come to the United Nations from many young people around the world asking for funding to pursue their dreams, their ambition, and to act on climate. So I left the United Nations and worked with philanthropy to set up a Youth Climate Justice Fund. The idea was simple: people live in places, they don't live in portfolios. And if funding keeps going towards sectors and portfolios, we break the lived reality of people apart. Now, lived reality is approximate intelligence. It is the only thing that makes sense and literally roots science, grounds science, and makes it believable in a way that people can pursue it. Today we are funding about 120 groups around the world, but what I find the most interesting is that when we lean into lived experience, and make it a strategy and make it the logic of funding, the logic of science, be empowered and build trust. The future of the world and the future of the economy is going to be a future of trust and an economy of trust. And the reason is because what happens in 10 years in today's world can happen in a day because of tech and AI. When we are in a fast-paced environment like this, the only way we can act as a society is by building trust. And trust is not a communication strategy, it is a leadership strategy, it is a governance strategy. If we can lean and really put young people who are living through the era where tech is part of every aspect of their life, if we can make them part of governance, part of decision-making, and fund their leadership and lean into it, I really believe that that last race to 2030 and what comes next will be highly possible, highly ambitious, and highly achievable. Thank you.

Thanks, Joshua. I'll just maybe flag to room services if we could have the second handheld mic activated, that would be great.

Thank you.

Okay, so that— thank you, Joshua. That was, I think, a powerful reminder that, you know, it's ultimately— implementation is ultimately about trust, agency, and who gets to shape the decisions. I'm going to keep us moving at quite a brisk pace, and I will remind you that if you have any questions, please just write them down, and we'll come to them just after the focus talks. So let's stay with that theme now on locally rooted leadership as we move across the Pacific. I'm really delighted to introduce Rani Nashu. Rani is the Executive Director of the Pacific Academy of Sciences and has spent her career working at the intersection of climate, health, sustainable development, and Pacific knowledge systems. And today she's going to challenge us to rethink how we actually see Pacific communities, so not as vulnerable populations but rather as leaders and stewards whose knowledge should shape Global responses. Over to you.

So what if the story of the Pacific changed from the smallest and the most vulnerable to the guardians and the protectors of the largest living system on Earth? Because that is already what we are. Talofa lava, warm Pacific greetings, everybody. Historically, most Pacific climate research has focused on analyzing datasets without the voices of Pacific communities. This is starting to change as climate projects and donors have realized the importance on engaging Pacific scientists and communities. For example, we know that seawalls are critical to managing coastal communities. However, the use of seawalls can sometimes cause further destruction to our coastal communities. So if we look at the country of Tokelau, for example, A seawall that was constructed there by donors using imported materials actually caused further erosion, which led to community villagers and leaders asking for donors to create a seawall across the entire Atafu Island. In Ambu in the Solomon Islands, however, for the last 20 years, they have been constructing their own seawall with local methods and resources. However, with constant surges and increasing king tides, they've realized that managing this coastal seawall is taking more and more effort. If we look across to Kiribati, which is often highlighted as the forefront of climate action, we can see that communities there are implementing both traditional knowledge and Western science in order to have good effect in managing coastal erosion, and this is supported by their governments. So I guess this demonstrates the effectiveness of science and public policy when communities are engaged. Climate research often focuses on land and continents, which does not translate very well to our small island developing states. Marine heatwaves and the protection of oceans for sustaining lives and livelihoods is just as important as land heatwaves and also agriculture. And this is why Pacific coastal communities and families are growing coral themselves to replenish coral reefs, to protect the marine ecosystem, and to replenish local fish stock. Pacific communities do not lack knowledge, leadership, or will. What we lack is decision-making and authority and resources. At this point, I really want to acknowledge the Pacific leaders who have come to the UN and highlighted the unique challenges that we as Pacific communities have faced. I'd also like to acknowledge our young Pacific leaders who have been at the forefront of climate activism with their catchcry, we are not drowning, we are fighting. And this fighting spirit led to the landmark ICJ opinion advisory on climate change last year. So I guess leaning into Pacific young people and their catchcry of, we are not drowning, we are fighting, we are also protecting. Pacific communities need to be resourced in order to do what we do well, and that is protecting the Pacific Ocean. So I want to finish, I guess, with a couple of key messages. Pacific notions of stewardship and protection are the missing piece for implementing just and effective climate action in the Pacific region. Building global leadership for Pacific communities as trusted and resource stewards of the Pacific Ocean is critical. We need to adapt science-based interventions to Pacific context before implementation, with Pacific knowledge holders and leaders leading adaptation. We need to fund and scale innovative Pacific projects, and we also need to accredit and resource Pacific institutions to receive climate finance directly, recognizing the capability that already exists rather than routing around it. If SDGs and climate goals are to succeed at a global level, then Pacific leadership and knowledge must move from rhetoric and from the margins to being at the center. The Pacific Ocean is the largest buffer to climate change. No one knows it best than Pacific communities themselves. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Roani. I think another powerful invitation to rethink also where leadership comes from and whose knowledge we we value in dealing with the challenges that we face. Again, brisk pace. Our next speaker takes us to another scale of implementation, the everyday realities of cities and communities. So our next speaker is Marie-Hélène Zerra from the French National Institute for Sustainable Development, l'Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, IRD. And Marie-Hélène's research explores how access to essential services— water, sanitation, and energy— actually works across cities, small towns, and informal settlements as well. Her central message is critically important: sustainable development cannot rely on one-size-fits-all solutions, because communities themselves are often already creating innovative ways of meeting their own needs. Over to you.

Thank you, James. I'm sorry, I think I made a very scientific presentation, and I'm very so please stop me if I take too much time. So I actually want to acknowledge that the institute where I work for really developed co-construction programs with academic institutions, and I want to talk to you about a project I was coordinating with a range of 10 or 15 academic institutions in India and a range of 20 researchers. I want to highlight that this collective project, which was called Suburban Urbanization in India, used quantitative data, qualitative data, ethnographic inquiry, and GIS database, and we believed in really transdisciplinary activities in social science. The project we were dealing with was trying to understand what's the role of small towns in the Indian urbanization process. The dominant view of urbanization is that it's dominated by large cities like Mumbai, Delhi. Everybody knows about it. There are 20 million people plus. They face a lot of problems. And we believe— I mean, it's a belief only— that migration to this kind of settlements is what's driving the urbanization process. But if we look at data from census of India and if you look at geospatial mapping, you actually realize that 40% of India's urban population still live in smaller cities. So what we were trying to understand is what drives the growth of these small cities and how we can understand and nuance our understanding of urbanization. I wanted to give you some of our results, but maybe I'll cut this a bit shorter. But there are still 3 points I want to make. These small settlements, often invisible in policymaking, are actually the ones who have the less level of urban services, call it water, energy, transport services, and what people do, individual household communities, they rely on their self-provision, they provide their own services, they rely on the market, and they actually are ingenious. There's a lot of ingenuity, there's a lot of creativity, but at the same time, it can really deepen inequalities and have also impact on environment. So the message is clearly that The dogma that this will be provided by private sector is probably a false dogma, and there is a need to simplify procedures, reduce barriers for connections, and public investment is essential in this kind of settlements. The second result is that often these settlements are invisible because they are not centers of economics of agglomeration, and right now the debate is very much about large cities, economies of agglomeration for economic growth. But what we see in this settlement is that there is a lot of economic activities, small trade, agribusinesses, petty businesses, but this is what makes the lives of and the livelihoods that people create. They also migrate to these places because they want better education, better health facilities, and these are possibly what we can call ordinary economies, but these ordinary economies, they also shape the future of a lot of urban in the future in India but in other places, and it needs to be recognized as such. The third point is that often in these smaller settlements, smaller cities, the political voice is not very strong, right? They are not very strong in national politics, they are not very strong in international politics. Nevertheless, the challenges are important, and it's coming back to the comment that I think Emma was making that we need to translate locally the result of what we understand of what's going on in these kind of cities. Now let me come back to the question of the science policy dialogue. I think it was very important for us as a collective to do very sound social research, and social science requires long engagement with communities and local places, but we decided to engage continuously with policymakers, so we did the classic things that we know how to do, and maybe we don't do it very well, but we try to do it. We engage in policy dialogues, we wrote policy briefs, we presented our work in UN Habitat Forum, for instance, whenever we had conferences, we made sure we had panels with policymakers, and in many ways we were successful because suddenly the debate about small centers in India became very important. Not only us, others also contributed, and a rural urban commission was created with 2 of our Indian colleagues being part of this commission. And in many ways we felt, yes, we have got a message through the policymakers. But nevertheless, because I'm a scientist and I have to be a bit critical, I want to mention that at times we need to also understand that policymakers need simple message, easy communicable things which are easy to understand to implement. And what they did, they created this commission, but they also decided that, okay, all small settlements needed to have the same urban planning tools. And this was very contrary to what we were arguing. We were arguing that one-size-fits-all approaches are not the solution. One needs to have policies which are flexible, which are context-sensitive, and which are grounded in local realities. And this is still a challenge. How do we manage to engage with the idea that dominant views, dogma on an overall development is not sufficient, and at the same time being able to translate this locally? I'm not sure this is a strong message, but this is what I wanted to bring forward to you. And I want to add, if I have a minute, that I want to reiterate the importance of social science and empirical social science. I know we are talking about AI, but empirical social science is under attack right now, I think, and it's important to defend it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Marie-Hélène. I very much agree with you on the social sciences part. I know at the IASC we have a strong track for that, and it's yet again another reminder that implementation really succeeds when it starts from local realities, rather than assuming every place faces the same challenges. And I think that brings us quite naturally to the role of cities themselves. Our next speaker Our next speaker is Ivan Shunkov. He is co-chair of the UN-Habited Partnership on the Future of Cities. Ivan argues that cities are far more than places where the SDGs are implemented. They are where scientific knowledge becomes reality. And drawing on his work bringing together scientists, mayors, planners, and communities, he'll explore how cities can become living laboratories for sustainable development. Over to you.

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you. I'm honored to represent the UN-Habitat Partnership on the Future of Cities, which is a joint initiative between SDSN and UN-Habitat, which was actually launched 2 months ago at the World Urban Forum in, in Baku. Today I come also to you as an architect, urban designer, entrepreneur, and educator. And as an architect, I consider myself half scientist and half artist because architecture is both. And so, you know, I'm honored to be on this panel, and thank you so much for the invitation. I wanted to start with you with a question since we're talking about science, and my question is, where does science actually belong? Does it belong in the labs? Does it belong in the— In the field. universities? Does it belong in all the scientific communities? Or it belongs in the places where actually people live and where it actually gets implemented? And if we think that science is where people are, cities are the places where people actually live. Okay, so if we really want to understand how science gets implemented, and if we really want to implement it, we need focus our attention on cities, which is what I want to talk about today. Cities are possibly the oldest and the most important scientific experiment that humanity has ever done. People have been building cities for more than 10,000 years. And just like any scientist, we build, we fail, destroy, we rebuild, fail, destroy, and eventually we figure it out. Okay, New York is a great experiment. In fact, it started 400 years ago and it's actually thriving today and flourishing. So it's, it's one of the great examples. Cities are also the places where— not just the places where scientific research gets generated, but are the places where this research becomes reality and where this research makes an impact into people's life. Science and, and research themselves are meaningless if they don't actually get implemented and if they don't get transformed into action. The challenge that we have today is not generating more research and more knowledge. We have plenty of that, and, you know, it accelerates more and more. The challenge today is how do we implement all this knowledge? How do we develop the tools, the communities, the policies, also the expertise, and also the initiatives to implement this scientific knowledge? Cities are living labs, okay? And so as living labs, you know, those of you who are scientists, I really want to point your attention to cities. Every SDG that we are talking about somehow gets implemented in cities, you know, whether it has to do with education or equality or prosperity. We even have an SDG 11 about sustainable cities, and interestingly enough, today is the day when we review SDG 11 this afternoon at 3 PM, so it's an important day for cities. And this brings me also to the initiative that we launched 2 months ago with UN-Habitat and SDSN, the UN Partnership on the Future of Cities. One of the challenges that we have as humanity is that we focus a lot on the urgent, but we don't focus enough on the important, on the long-term planning, on the long-term vision. When we talk about cities, every implementation that we make today has an impact decades, centuries, sometimes millennia to come from now. Many cities are designed thousands of years ago, and we still either enjoy or suffer because of those decisions that are made so many years before us. So in that sense, whatever we do on the scale of cities has incredibly long-term impact and can influence the life of millions of people and many, many generations to come. This is why the UN-Habitat Partnership on the Future of Cities is actually a collective. It's a partnership between experts, between policymakers, between economists, architects, engineers, and mayors. And so what we are trying to do is actually to build a community not just for scientific research, but a community that can enable the solutions and the implementations on the scale of cities. And this brings me to talk about the interface between science and cities. For so many years, we have focused on science and business, science and policy, but not that many people talk about city science, okay? And city science is something where all of these solutions that we're all discovering somehow can make an impact. And this is something that I want to bring your attention to. Cities are, in a way, the manifestation of all of these collective efforts that humanity have done over generations, and it's something that will remain for generations to come. So my provocation to you today is to think what solutions can you develop that could be implemented in cities, and how can you participate in the implementation of those scientific solutions in a way that it would have actual tangible impact on the life of people and would improve the life of people, not just for the survival of humanity, but also for the thriving and the flourishing of humanity for the generations to come. Thank you so much.

Thank you for bearing with me and my furious scribbling. So thank you very much, Ivan. Cities as engines of implementation. Our next speaker really turns to another challenge, so how we translate increasingly sophisticated science into decisions before crises. I'm pleased to introduce Professor Amir Agha-Kushak from the University of California in Irvine. He is an internationally recognized expert for his work on droughts, floods, and climate extremes, developing systems as well that help governments anticipate risks before before disaster strikes. His provocation today is that early warning systems shouldn't simply monitor hazards, they should help institutions act. Amir.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you. This morning, we heard from the first panel, was focused on what policymakers and government agencies need from scientists. I'd like to talk about what scientists need from government agencies, maybe even UN agencies. As a scientist, I'm more on the other side. So, I'm sure everyone agrees that hazard monitoring and prediction is absolutely critical. We need drought monitoring systems, floods, fires, and in some of them we have made more progress, in some other ones less progress, and some countries have their own operational drought monitoring prediction systems or flood monitoring. In the US and many European countries have their own models. In the Global South, countries that don't have resources rely on third-party tools. Our center, for example, produces this operational drought monitoring prediction systems that are widely used by many countries in Global South. They rely on our data. They keep contacting us, and we produce this data for free. But there are barriers. As scientists, we have reached a point— if you have made a lot of progress on providing this hazard information, but we cannot provide information on impacts. And when we talk to government agencies, they need impact data. For example, they say, oh, drought is coming in 2 months. That's good information, but I want to know What's going to happen to my hydropower generation? Is it going to go down by 10%, 20%? Or what's going to happen to my crop yield? That's what I need. At this point, we cannot provide this information because we don't have impact data. Some countries don't collect the data systematically. Countries that do collect data, they don't share data. So my provocation is related to government data sharing policies. We cannot progress without impact data, and that's a huge barrier. This organization, United Nations, has done this successfully for some applications. FAO, for example, over the years convinced countries to systematically report their water use and agricultural production statistics. It's happening. The data is available. Or Human Development Index. That group convinced countries to provide data in a certain way at a certain period of cycle for production of Human Development Index. So there are success stories, and I hope United Nations, one group or multiple groups, come together and urge countries to provide impact data, specifically hazard-related impact data, in a systematic way so we can go beyond hazard monitoring and develop those impact-based monitoring and prediction systems. And at least on my behalf, I can promise if the data is available, we work for free. We make the data available for free for everyone to use. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Amir. Another compelling reminder that better information only really matters if it changes decisions. And certainly, last but not least, our final speaker invites us to really step back and ask perhaps a very big question. So I'm going to welcome Brendan Case of Harvard University Human Flourishing Program. Brendan's work asks us how to reconsider how we define success itself.

Thank you.

And as we think about, you know, sustainable development as well beyond 2030, he also challenges us to ask whether economic growth and better health alone are sufficient, or whether our understanding of progress should also include meaning, relationships, and human flourishing more broadly.

Thank you, James.

Thank you all. It's such an honor to get to address this Good morning, esteemed gathering. So, as James mentioned, I am the Associate Director for Research of a group called the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. We are an interdisciplinary team that studies the nature, distribution, and determinants of a good life in a very broad sense. Human flourishing, as we define it sort of heuristically within our program, is a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good, including the communities in which they live. Now, that's obviously Maybe unhelpfully broad for research purposes. That involves probably indefinitely many aspects of your life and mine. But we think that almost everyone across time and space values at least the 6 following aspects of a good life. So this includes happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial and material security. This is not an exhaustive list of what makes up a good life, but it's a good start, we think, as a bid for consensus.

Okay.

And the provocation which I'd like to pose for you today, as James mentioned, is that the proper aim of international development and of policymaking more broadly really ought to be flourishing in that broad sense, in the fullest possible sense that we can strive for. And this is a provocation in this context, I think, because the Sustainable Development Goals as varied and capacious as they are, and as ambitious as they already are, really concern overwhelmingly just 2 of those 6 domains that I've mentioned, right? They're really overwhelmingly focused on health, especially physical health, and financial material prosperity done sustainably, right, over time, which is— and this is an ambitious and important set of goals. Don't at all hear me as saying that these don't matter, but the risk—

Yes.

Of that narrow, perhaps even myopic focus on those 2 of, let's say, 6 or more broad buckets that make up a good life for people around the world is that a narrow focus on those outcomes risks imposing costs, significant trade-offs in terms of losses in other areas. So losses in terms of meaning in life, losses in terms of subjective well-being, relationships, prosocial character traits. Now, what's the evidence for this? And this is the science part of the talk. Well, there's a variety of converging lines of evidence for this, and frankly, there's substantial evidence that these trade-offs have already occurred across much of the developed world. And this is the really alarming thing, is that we might be pushing developing countries to follow in some ways, the unhappy trajectory of the West in its own developmental course. The evidence I'd like to focus our attention on for about 1.5 more minutes is the global— is from the Global Flourishing Study, which is our program's largest empirical project at the moment. The Global Flourishing Study is a projected 5-year longitudinal study of well-being. It's now in its 4th year of data collection, which is tracking 208,000 people in 22 countries around the world. All 6 inhabited continents, about 2/3 of the world's population represented. And we're essentially asking them about 100 questions every year about many aspects of their life. This is in partnership with a group at Baylor University, Gallup, which is doing the data collection, and the Center for Open Science, which is making all of this data available on an open access basis. So please do— hope that you'll look it up and make use of those data for your own purposes as well. One of the most surprising findings sort of early findings from the Global Flourishing Study has been a pronounced flourishing gap between the developed and developing countries in the sample. So the developed countries include the United States, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, and middle-income countries like Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, where the middle-income countries that I just mentioned are reporting much higher levels of meaning in life, relationship satisfaction across a variety of aspects of relationships, much higher levels of prosocial character traits like forgivingness, like gratitude, like hope, like love for others. And let's say across many aspects of well-being, I could go on. What we're seeing is that the places you might intuitively think of as places that have made it in developmental terms are really struggling with many aspects of subjective well-being. Many of the things that actually make a life worth living are in relatively short supply in the United States or Sweden or especially Japan compared to places like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Mexico. The Japanese case is particularly concerning, I should say, and this is maybe where I'll conclude, Because Japan, of course, is one of the great success stories of the postwar push for international development. Developed earliest, fastest. And Japan reports by far the lowest levels of meaning, of love and care for others, of having friends even, of any country in the sample. And it's a strong indication, we think, that the pace of development might matter as much as the overall aims and trajectory. So where to end with this? What do we need? I mean, we're supposed to be talking about solutions. We need data of this kind, we think, about meaning in life, about love, about friendship, about hope, not just for 22 countries but for 140, 150, 160 countries. We're working with a couple of funders to embed items on these topics in the Gallup World Poll, which would give us access to that data at the national level. And if we had that data, the next thing we need, I think— and this is the really ambitious provocation— is for whatever comes after the SDGs to move from thinking about sustainable development in this ambitious but still, I think, too narrow sense to really thinking about flourishing as the lodestar for the work that we're doing together. So happy to have a conversation. And thanks for your attention.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Brendan. Okay, so we've heard from 6 provocations. Can I please get another big round of applause for our speakers?

Those were fantastic. Thank you. What, what a varied group. James, before we go to the audience, just one quick question for you. What surprised you from what you heard?

Well, I think— and by the way, I'm going to have to pull all of these furious notes together towards the end of this segment— but I think that the main thing is that a lot of these perspectives that you've offered us today are very human-centered. I think it's that really people are at the heart of implementation rather than projects. So, that's the one thing I would say for now, but let me think on it a bit.

Okay, okay, you think on it. Yes, I put you in a hot seat. Okay, questions? Questions for our group. I'm going to go to you over there.

Hi, thank you all for sharing your perspectives. I'm a youth advisor with the Canadian Health Research Funding Agency and also lead a youth planetary health science policy coalition where we've seen that the— one of the most effective ways to address climate anxiety in youth is meaningful collective agency. So, this question is for Joshua. My question is, if trust and collective agency are increasingly central to effective science policy processes, what concrete models can national and subnational governments adopt to ensure young people and citizen science can meaningful— meaningfully shape policy responses to scientific evidence?

Joshua, take it away.

I hope you can hear me. Thanks a lot for that question. I think it's absolutely brilliant. When I was invited to join the United Nations, one of the biggest provocations I had was youth movements do not trust the United Nations to act on climate, right? This was post-pandemic, and pre-pandemic, there were all these mega protests led by the youth movements, and what we saw was that the Secretary-General's Climate Action Strategy was pretty ambitious, except that young people did not feel connected to that. One of the things that we did at the very early stages when I joined was to bring young people into the United Nations to advise on that strategy. So we set up something called the Youth Advisory Group to the Secretary-General on Climate, and once we did that, a lot of other UN agencies, including national country offices, set up a Youth Advisory Group. That brought young people to advise their country offices on how they act on climate. That micro— I call it very micro— it's sort of a micro shift, but what that did was that all of a sudden, lots of youth movements felt like, okay, now we actually have a conversation, we can actually engage, we can question it, and we can actually have a cumulative or sort of a joint approach on how to act on this. So I think the very sort of fundamental response to your question is, We need to get more governments, subnational governments, international organizations to get as many young people on their governance structures. Once young people are part of the governance, whether it's an advisory group, board membership, whatever structures they have, it really opens the door for very constructive dialogue that really gives agency to young people to believe in the institution, to question the institution, but also to help the institutions to move forward in the way that it needs to go.

Thank you so much. We have 3 minutes, so we're going to go as fast as we can here. I'll go to you right there.

So, first of all, thank you to the entire panel for all your insights. My name is Smith Himakaisan, and I'm a youth representative from Thailand and also a director of Crying Cloud, a mental health social enterprise, and we've reached over 60 million people, built a community of over 120,000, and also connected more than 7,000 youth to affordable therapy as well. And I've seen how quickly digital platforms can spread both evidence-based resources and also misinformation to millions of people as well. So a question to the entire panel would be, as scientific knowledge becomes increasingly generated and communicated through AI and also digital platforms, what new responsibilities should scientists have not only for producing knowledge, but also for producing— for ensuring that it is understandable, trustworthy, and resilient against distortion as well?

That's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it, and I'm so glad I'm not a panelist. So who wants to take it? Someone has to— go ahead.

I'm not sure I can take it, but I agree with you that scientists, I think, whether they are physical scientists, or social scientists, or their legitimacy is rather greatly questioned nowadays, and I think from an academic point of view, I would say we need to do our research very thoroughly, and this is very important because we are also tempted sometimes to go into the, you know, to speed up the process and to give results very rapidly. So I think the question that was raised this morning about bridges and who are the bridges is very key because we still need to do our work with the time we need to bring out our results, but I think this idea that we need people who are interfacing, and this could be the kind of organization you lead, think tanks, maybe more communication with government institutions, is key, because we also can risk the— to go into the race of producing results much too fast. I mean, as a scientist, I think this is important for me to make sure that I keep the rhythm of my research as well. And I raise the level of legitimacy and cannot be questioned on the result I produce. I don't know if it's an answer. It's a bit of an old person answer, but—

No, I think that's right.

I think it's still a— We have— I know we have so many more questions, but we have to keep moving to keep on time. James, I'm going to turn it over to you to do the very difficult job of giving us a single take-home point.

Well, I might do more than just one. And I do like a good lectern. Okay, can you hear me all right?

Okay.

So thanks, Flora, and thank you to all of our brilliant speakers. I think listening across both the presentations and this discussion from the floor we've just heard, or small towns in India or city partnerships. I think you reminded us today that sustainable development does not happen because solutions are solely technically sound, but rather because people trust them, because people shape them, because they make them their own. And I think science is really most powerful when it works with communities and not simply for communities. Second, just briefly, is that context really does matter. I mean, again and again, I think our speakers challenged the idea that the solutions can, you know, simply be copied and pasted into different contexts or from one place to another. And whether we're talking about drought or urban services or climate adaptation, I think the message was quite remarkably consistent, that implementation succeeds when scientific knowledge is adapted to local realities and, of course, informed by lived experience, and so on. And finally, I think the biggest lesson that I'm certainly taking away is that I think our assumptions deserve to be challenged. Several speakers invited us to rethink quite familiar narratives, particularly at the UN, and to see how people, young people, can be leaders and not necessarily just beneficiaries, how Pacific communities are stewards rather than and simple victims of climate change, how cities can be laboratories or engines of implementation, and so on. So it's— progress really isn't just about doing more of what has always been done, but it's also about asking better questions about what success really looks like. And that's a really hopeful message for me in this 4th edition of Science Day.

Thank you so much. That was great. And let's just give it up for Let's give it up for our speakers one more time, please.

Thank you.

So, we're next going to move into the fireside chat. If you are a fireside chat panelist, you know who you are, please come up. And just to sort of set the stage for this, you know, we've been talking about practical case studies. The next conversation, we're turning to the horizon, right? As we look to 2030 and beyond, What should we keep doing, because it's actually working? And what do we need to let go? What do we need to invent altogether to sort of make some of these ambitions come true? And as people are sitting down, I'm going to introduce them. You can sit however. Yeah. Oh, and we have a gavel. Let's put that to good use today.

Hi.

Okay, so let me introduce our panelists here. We have Dr. Mariana Beisheim, the senior researcher studying global governance and international law and environmental policy in the Global Issues Division at STP in Germany. We have Professor Norichika Kane of SDSN Japan and a professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University. And we have Dr. Ed Carr back up here again. Ed, I'm going to start with you. I'm going to put you right in the hot seat. And I want to be— I want to sort of start with a case study. So what kind of international scientific cooperation is so valuable, like, you know, I'm thinking of disease monitoring, for example, that we can't let it go, that we just have to keep on keeping on with it.

Thanks, Laura. Maybe I'll just quickly respond to that and actually ideally provoke a conversation with my colleagues here.

If I—

let me answer that in a really meta, high-level kind of way, which is government engagement with the endorsement of evidence bases. That has to continue.

Or start.

Well, yeah, no, but I'm thinking, for example, of the IPCC, of IPBES. It is one of the challenges around the negotiation of those outlines and the acceptance of results, but it is also where the legitimacy of those findings come from and why people take them up. So for me, that's something that has to keep going forward or else we're not going to get anywhere. But I'm curious how you all would respond to that. Or if you think there's other things that are much more important.

First of all, you always have to find the right button, okay, so you can be heard. And second, before I start, I would like to thank James, actually, for encouraging us to engage directly without preparing too many notes. Notes, because I think that is something that needs to evolve more. Not the reading out of statements that you have so often in these halls, but— and it's very uncomfortable, specifically for a non-native speaker, right? And Klaus Töpfer, the former executive director of UNEP, the environmental program, used to say, bad English is what they get for making it the language of the United Nations. But still, it is difficult to speak up. So, to enable researchers from all over the world to do so is important. And one thing I think that worked quite well in these past years, and where we improved really, is a multilevel engagement of scientists. So, you have more and more scientists here at United Nations in these preparatory meetings for the official negotiations, like here for the HLPF. We always have several expert meetings in preparing for the SDG reviews, so they produce little background papers that all too often remain in the drawer. So that's something that needs to change. But then also at home, we have a national HLPF conference in Germany now, and in the science community, we try to prepare for that. We try to produce papers and set up, you know, advice for this. So, that is something that I think is very valuable that we developed in the context of the SDGs, and that should stay. And maybe we even need to go more local. That's something I learned from our discussions here.

Norichika?

Yep, I start with agreeing with what has been just said. Starting with local, bottom-up knowledge is getting more and more important. I think when we look at the implementation, and implementation is getting more important in the years to come, even after 2030. Local knowledge is getting more valuable for make things more sustainable. And I had a workshop yesterday about Beyond 2030 Agenda, and there are also many voices heard emphasizing on the importance of local knowledge. So that's one thing I think is important. Another thing is the communication I think you emphasized the importance of IPCC, IPBES, and so on, and I think that's also the way how science communicates with policymakers, and what we need more is communicating with the society as well as policymakers. So in the— I was one of the members of independent group of scientists who prepared— who wrote actually 2023 GSDL. And what we emphasized there was the importance of science policy and society interface. So we brought society into this context. And that, I think, is also great.

Can I follow up on something that you said? So we've heard a lot about local knowledge and the importance. How do we amplify? local knowledge?

Well, I think when you look at what's happening at local level, we can see lots of synergies are there. We talk a lot about theoretical or conceptual framing of how SDGs are interconnected, how we can create synergies and eliminate trade-offs, But local practices are there in implementing it, in actually— with embedded cultural practices or their inherited practices. So I think it is quite important to learn from those stories and narratives out there. And, yeah, I think those are the things that we need to look more into.

Ed, I want to turn to you. I see you nodding. Can you give me an example?

Yes, because I really like that point. And maybe to extend it, if we want to get down to that local level— and that's where I've spent my career, actually, as a researcher, was like at the community, actually sub-household level type work. We need to get better at embracing multiple forms of knowledge about the world. This is something that's becoming, I would say, trendy, but is in fact quite practical. It is a huge challenge, and we see this, for example, in the way it's playing out in the different assessment spaces. IPBES is getting pretty good at this. IPCC is lagging on this but trying to catch up, and they have different structures for all of it. That's part of why.

Wait, can I ask you a question? What do you mean by different Different ways of knowing? What are you talking about exactly?

Everything. So, for example, there are— if we go out there, there's whole bodies of research on different forms of indigenous knowledge of, for example, the environment, which are not fully commensurate with a scientific worldview or necessarily with each other. Now, there's huge advantages to these things because, of course, other ways of knowing create other opportunities for understanding problems or finding solutions. But there's also a big challenge there, right? Because we get into science policy spaces, and we call them science policy spaces. All of a sudden, we're trying to bring non-scientific forms of knowledge in. Are these things seen as legitimate? Are they seen as valid? But there's a tremendous opportunity, and I think this gets to something Robert said at the beginning, and we heard from Joshua, which is you can grow the tent of participation in this and start to get at some of this challenge if you're bringing in people's forms of knowledge and they see themselves in this work, they're far more likely to engage, take it seriously, participate, carry it forward.

Marianne, I want to follow up on something you said. You had this metaphor, we've got to get the papers out of the drawer. How do we get the papers out of the drawer?

Yeah, I think we tackled that issue already a bit in the previous rounds of discussions. Often, we had in the past the topic that we as scientists need to communicate better. We need to be clearer, more practical, more targeted, more timely. But I always tend to think the science policy interface— and that's also my experience— has 2 sides. There's the science and then there's the policies. And the colleague from Saudi Arabia in one of the previous discussions said, And we need to strengthen absorption capacities. But I think it's not only about capacities. It's actually about how do we incentivize research uptake. Because, you know, those recipients out there in the world of politics, they really have no time and currently also have only very low incentives to engage with science. Science tends to be complicated. complicated, complex, and not very practical all too often. So, it takes time. And I think we need to change the incentive structures. Emma talked about how do we generate business cases. I think that is one way to go about it. But also, how do we change, for example, career paths in politics? So, we reward those who spend time on science, engaging with science, science uptake? And also, how do we generate— how do we create institutions where we can exchange on meaningful narratives? How to explain better to your citizenry why it is worthwhile to go down a certain path that might be a bit difficult in the beginning, but very rewarding in the very I think these kind of things are relevant.

Ed, do you have a perspective on that? I know you talked about incentives too.

I actually don't have one that goes beyond that, so maybe we should keep going.

You know, one of the questions I posed at the top was, do we need new systems? Like, are there things that are missing, gaps in our current systems, things that need to be invented?

Maybe if I can follow up. There's also one thing that I find not very helpful. Like here in the UN, whenever you have mandates for IPCC, IPBES, also for our own group— I'm also a member of this 15-scientist group that is preparing the next GSDR, the next Global Sustainable Development Report— we always hear we need to be policy relevant without being policy prescriptive. And that's fine. I mean, in the end, it's the choice of the politicians to do whatever they want to do. But there's one thing I think we need to have more openness for evaluating policies, specifically if we want to go for scaling up, right? We want to know first whether this really works in different environments before before we scale up. So we need to evaluate policies, and that means we get more policy-prescriptive. So that is maybe something that also should change.

And when you say we, who do you mean?

Well, I think maybe there needs to be more trust in science when they mandate us as science groups to give advice, to also allow us to be a bit more policy-prescriptive.

Descriptive.

Well, you asked a question about new system. I think we should go back to what we did about 10 years ago, Future Earth, which is a science initiative to create better science policy interface, science Policy-Society Interface and Science for Sustainability, which tried to bring together science but also bringing practitioners into the scientific investigation. Transdisciplinarity was what the Future Earth was trying to do, but to my view, it's not been so successful because Futures is sort of failing to bring more actors into the process. It's quite science-oriented, which is good, but at the same time, we— I mean, as science community should be open up more to the society, to business sector, to local community, and that has been missing. So if we need any new system, them, I think we should— I mean, we means science side— should be more open to those actors, especially with business sector, who have accumulated quite a large scale of knowledge, especially finance sector, for example, that is not necessarily accumulated in the science section. So I think that sort of interaction is necessary to explore further the frontier of new type of science.

Is that a cultural change that needs to happen, or is that a policy change? How do you actually do that?

I think we need both. And yeah. International Science Council may have something to play a role there too in terms of policy, but I think also the culture, scientific culture, may need to change, including the evaluation system of scientific outcomes.

Ed, I see you nodding vigorously.

No, no, I agree with that, and I think I think the problem is that it is a culture change, and culture change takes time and a lot of work. It's also nonlinear. So, it's the kind of thing that we'll work on and work on, and it may not feel like we're making much progress, and then all of a sudden, you get big changes. So, that's something that's in front of us here, is to keep grinding away at that, even if it doesn't feel like it's paying off right now, ideally so that we hit some sort of critical mass in the future so that we get that cultural change.

Have we seen examples of cultural change that we can learn from in the past?

I can talk about myself.

By all means.

So, you know, beginning of my career, I was a tenure-line professor. You know, I went through the whole process, went through and became really frustrated with the fact that I was being evaluated on the basis of papers and, you know, citation counts and things like that, and no one cared if anything was happening in the world, so much so that I nearly quit right after I got tenure. And it was, in fact, you know, going to USAID for a couple of years, serving as a policy advisor, and understanding for the first time what it was that that big machine we call development actually needed from me, and it pivoted all my work. And I developed a whole bunch of relationships that allowed me to do the kind of translation we're talking about, because there were relationships of trust on both sides. We'd gotten to know each other. And that, for me, was incredibly transformative. It changed the entire direction of my career. I mean, and I can say, and I'm excited about this, like, you can go look at my citation counts if you want, but I can also tell you that I changed the way USAID spent like $80 million on climate services, weather and climate services, because they plagiarized the report I wrote for them in a call for a new project. Which is actually the best single thing that can happen because it means they took all of your ideas and recommendations and just put them into the world. So, for me, it was that kind of an experience. And what I'd love to see is a lot more people who start where I started, start with that PhD, start with that research background, and have that opportunity to build those relationships and do that work. And we don't have enough pathways for that. And that's been brought up a couple of times today.

Marianne, is this jogging any thoughts for you?

Yeah, because I did quit, actually. So, I left the university after I completed my PhD and worked for Parliament, and I learned a lot about politics there. Then I went back to the university and then eventually quit again just when I was promised tenure to work in an institution And that is more of a science policy interface. That's what my institution is all about. And with that knowledge, I was much better equipped to, you know, bridge the two worlds and the different kinds of incentives in these two worlds. But now, maybe— I don't know what's on your list. I feel the next big thing is really really how do we tackle AI in the future. And I see that coming. And I don't know about the young people, because they seem to know much more about this than I do. But I definitely feel we need to get the governance right there in order to really exploit AI for us being better able to not only, you know, work on these complex issues, because the SDGs are all about these interlinkages, and then sometimes it tends to be wicked problems that are really difficult for politicians to work on. Not only to better understand, analyze, develop solutions— we were asked for solutions—

Yes.

but also to communicate them better to the people, to make it more people-centered. So that is a burning topic for me without being an expert, really.

That's your provocation. Okay, so we have just a minute left, so we're gonna do a lightning round. And the question I'm gonna pose to all 3 of you is, what is the moral of the story today? I'll give you a moment to think, and then I'm going to actually turn to the audience for as many as we can fit in. The moral of the story of today.

Okay.

For me, it's how do we better deal with complexity? How do we explain why going the more complicated way in the end will be more rewarding. Right, I'll leave it at that.

A good moral is always short, so that's perfect.

So, Ed mentioned earlier, and this may not respond directly to your question, but that it takes time. Change takes time. And as we move on to 2030, I think implementation of SDGs so far is 36% that was mentioned earlier, but we need more time to do things and to create better science-policy-society interface. I mean, earlier you said, you know, whether we need a system change or not.

Yes.

But whether it's yes or not, we need more time to do things. Now, it's only time when people start to realize that SDG is there and how we should deal with that. So we need, I think, more time. And yeah, I'm not sure if this answers to your question, but I stop here.

No, I think that's good.

Go ahead, Ed.

From everything you hear today, I think the moral of the story is we know what to do. We know a lot about what to do. We don't know everything. We'll always need better information. We'll always need more experience than we already have. But we know a tremendous amount. So, what we need are the incentives to do it and to stick with it until such time as the kinds of changes we're talking about start to manifest. And probably on top of all that, to think about, are there ways to catalyze that change any faster?

That's perfect. I think that's a perfect place to land. Thank you very much to the panelists. Let's give it up for them. Okay, we have like 2 and a half minutes, but I'm dying to hear what you all think the moral of the story is. You in the back. Yes, it should be red, I think.

Thank you very much. I am a neurophysiologist and I'm head of International Medical Crisis Response Alliance. There is a key unifying factor, a key unifying issue that's been touched upon by several panelists here today and attendees regards implementation of scientific progress and how it impacts the populations who vote for who support and who take action on the policies implemented by their governments. It's an important focus. I think Marie-Hélène Zohra said it well before when she noted that empirical science is under attack right now. The targets of the attack that we need to recognize are the populations that stand to benefit from science. With the additional observations that were made by the Netherlands representative and the Thai representative, the Thai youth representative, we have to be cognizant that there's a serious crisis playing out right now internationally, which is the strategically planned spread of politically motivated and politically agendaed anti-science misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. So my question, which I will pose to the panel and to anyone else who wants to ask, is that the worst aspect of this MDP— misinformation, disinformation, propaganda— is the disavowal of the need for critical objectivity, which is essential to science and to understanding what science provides for these populations. We at IMCRA have a plan for dealing with this called DTTC, or Disseminating Truth in Telecommunications, but I'm very interested to hear how other people have recognize this problem and how they are determined to deal with it, because the pathology is very, very fundamental and we can strike at the heart of it.

I want to get to one more sort of conclusion for the day. Does anyone have a 15- to 30-second answer to that very, very big question?

I think it's true, and I think if we had a good answer, we'd be moving on it, so I think you've put your finger on, like, one of the single biggest challenges we're facing right now, and I don't claim to have a great answer. I mean, this is one of the things that's plagued us in the IPCC, IPBES, other kinds of settings, and I know we're working on it. I know there's an enormous research body out there now on, like, the effect of social media on communications and people's perceptions, but no, I do not have a good answer right now.

I think it's a whole other day. I really do. Okay, I want to go to you for our You're our last word from the audience, so go ahead.

Thank you. My name is Ammar. Is it on? It is.

Just lean in.

Okay. My name is Ammar. I'm Lebanese, and I'm an aerospace engineer. I work here in the United States. When I started working in my company, the first question that I asked my employer was, can I be only on the commercial side? And as a Lebanese, as a person who does not I'm not a citizen. I don't even have experience. I'm already in an unfavorable situation, and I would have gotten a no for my question. And I would have maybe worked as a waitress for a while until God knows what happens afterwards, but I was willing to do so. He accepted, and I really wanted to know what are the values of the scientists and the engineers in the workplace that lead to people to make war happen. Policy is a big part of it. Customers are a big part of it. If all the customers are asking for missiles, I mean, at the end of the day, we're going to make missiles. We're going to make weapons. And I'm focusing on the commercial side, but I'm sitting among missiles around me in the factory. And They are going to my people, to my country, invading Lebanon, killing friends of mine all the time. And I try to have these conversations with the people around me who are my colleagues, which is kind of ironic because we would say happy birthday to each other and they fix my bike. And I look at them and I'm like, Do you know that you are killing us? Do you support that? And some of them do. Some of them are so far to realize that these missiles kill people. And they vote based on that. And they are really geographically so apart, separated by thousands of kilometers, miles, whatever you want to call it, by water, by borders.

Yeah.

by luxury, by safety, to realize that, you know? And I think that it's not a question. I don't have a question. And thanks so much for all the panelists. It's very inspiring and it's very timely for me because I was having these questions of how can we— where's the point where scientists put their values first?

Right.

I think that at some point, I kind of feel that it's about the intention. Like, my intention is to earn this skill in order to be able to make an alternative for me and for others. And I go around in the United States, I visit factories, I visit other manufacturers and see what's working and what can we do more of it that is not hurting so many people that we can make more of it. But, you know, we have to have the skill. We have to have—

we have to be here.

Like, I got a master's degree in international peacebuilding as well, and I got the opportunity to come here before, and we should— like, it's really so wonderful that you're bringing all of us here from all the backgrounds to make this change happen, and thank you so much.

It's such a powerful point. I just— thank you for sharing that. I think that is— I think that's the perfect place to land. I am going to bring up Astro Bonini to close out today. I just wanted to say thank you all for being here, for the wonderful, thoughtful questions and reflections. It was really my privilege.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much. And it's been, I mean, such a fruitful day. And I think we really understand the power of what science is in a position to do and the challenges that the scientific community faces in terms of how to contribute at this incredibly challenging moment in time. I will not attempt to summarize all of the discussions that have taken place because it's been very rich. And I know we had incredible note-takers who were capturing all of the discussions at hand. I would just like to thank everyone who contributed to the discussions throughout the morning for taking the time and being part of this discussion. It really has been difficult and honest conversation about how to bridge this gap between what science is contributing and within scientific communities bringing together the knowledge to respond to what is a very complex agenda. The SDGs span so many different sectors, so many critical issues, but science is so well positioned position to understand the complexity and break it down in ways that policymakers can use in practice to tackle these issues. It was wonderful to have the focus talks to bring it down to specific things that are happening and how science is contributing to real challenges in cities, in communities across the world, and show really what is happening And this comes back to the optimism that came at the beginning of the day. If there's any community that member states are looking to, to help provide solutions in this incredibly complex time and for the 2030 Agenda, it's the science community. It's science, it's innovation, it's technology. The pace of discovery and change is really incredible. relative to the challenges at hand. So, it is both an opportunity and a moment for science to really shine in terms of the contributions. Before concluding, I would really like to sincerely thank our moderator for the day for bringing a new perspective and taking this a little bit— we're talking about how to reach out to a broader community. And I think the media and those who have access to many different listeners, it's really important to take that discussion to those listeners. Really, thank you to the speakers, panelists, and organizers, the International Science Council, SEI, SDSN, UNDP, and the colleagues within DESA who have really worked hard on making this event come together. I hope that this conversation really contributes not only to the HLPF this year, but as we look ahead to the SDG Summit next September, it will be so important to have the voice of science contributing to those discussions as well. And this Science Day really had a future-oriented perspective looking at sustainable development 2030 and beyond. And I know that the science community will be an integral part of those discussions, including our independent group of scientist members. What happens after 2030 and how do we continue the sustainable development journey? So thank you so much. Really wonderful conversations. And wishing everyone a good week ahead with the HLPF discussions.

Thank you.