26 May 2015: The third meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary-General, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 25-26 May 2015, discussed a call by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for members to express “scientific concerns you have about the future of people and the planet” for his consideration.
During successive rounds, Advisory Board members discussed and ranked the outcomes of a ‘Delphi Study’ undertaken in response to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call, which had asked each member to propose “a big idea that would have a global impact in addressing the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the next 15 years.” They prioritized, among other ideas, the need for: sustainably managing oceans; addressing threats to biodiversity and establishing “a new paradigm for the global tropics;” developing a comprehensive global strategy against infectious agents; investing in basic science research and education; averting major human disasters through improved prediction tools; ‘Changing the Fossil Fuel Paradigm;’ achieving universal access to safe drinking water; and ‘Finding Solutions for a World Overwhelmed by Unequal Resource-use and Continued Population Growth.’
In its final conclusions, the Advisory Board notes that “humanity has already crossed several planetary boundaries,” and stresses that “only an immediate stop to ecosystem destruction, large-scale restoration of ecosystems, and effective family planning might restore global biotic regulation and prevent the collapse of ecosystems, including the human species.” The Advisory Board makes three specific recommendations relating to: improving the science-policy interface, including through making the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) into “a high-quality scientific assessment tackling critical concerns;” reducing the data divide between rich and poor in order to “provide solutions to seemingly unrelated problems such as gender inequality and rural poverty;” and developing a “risk-based approach” to communicating the risks of climate change to policy. The Advisory Board also identified three working groups to further explore each of these issues and develop policy briefs with policy-relevant recommendations.
The 26-member Scientific Advisory Board was created in 2013 at the request of the UN Secretary-General to further inform the debate on sustainable development. The third meeting of the Board was co-chaired by UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Director-General Irina Bokova and Zakri Abdul Hamid, Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of Malaysia. [UNESCO News Story] [UN Scientific Advisory Board Website]