SDGs – Science Summit at UN General Assembly

Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations

The conference will examine what enabling policy, regulatory and financial environments are needed to put in place and sustain the science mechanisms needed to support genuinely global scientific collaborations across continents, across nations, and across themes. Scientific discovery through the analysis of massive data sets is at hand. This data-enabled approach to science, research and development will be necessary if the SDGs are to be achieved.

Attainment of the SDGs requires the alignment of policies and regulations that impact science and technology to allow science data transfers globally. The recognition and importance of digital technologies as a hugely transformative and enabling influence across all science disciplines will be a key theme of ScienceDitial@UNGA75. Without regulatory equivalence, it’s difficult to see how health science and research cooperation that needs to happen between developed and less developed nations will take place. Without alignment, existing disparate regulatory and policy frameworks are and will continue to be a barrier: a barrier to innovation; a barrier to technology transfer; a barrier that will impede progress in addressing health deprivations and other challenges. This applies to diagnostics, therapy development and healthcare delivery. ICT technologies and health research are intertwined.

ScienceDigital@UNGA75 will promote unitary science: all science disciplines are ultimately linked and enabled by ICT data infrastructures. Without understanding this, policymakers and legislators are likely to embark on disparate and disconnected initiatives. Here also, lack of coordination and national vested interests will conspire to impede scientific progress and innovations to address truly global and immediate challenges. This lack of alignment at the local and national level is an impediment to progress: lack of alignment at a global level will be deleterious and dissonant.