Session 5: Keeping science involved in SDG implementation

29 June 2015, 3.00 – 5.00 pm

Science is critical to help meet the challenges for sustainable development, as it lays the foundations for new approaches and technologies to identify, clarify and tackle global challenges for the future. Science can thus significantly contribute to sustainable development, but requires to that end a broad understanding of science as such. An integrated understanding of sustainable development is one of the prerequisites of science for sustainable development. Such integration calls for integrating disciplines of the natural sciences and the social sciences, and bringing together people and ideas from those and other disciplines to jointly frame problems, devise methodological approaches and analyze data. It also requires involving non-scientists and participatory approaches and reaching out to various communities and considering non-scientific knowledge, such as local and indigenous communities. Other aspects of for science for sustainable development include the need to consider the social responsibility of science, and to ensure ethically acceptable, sustainable and socially desirable innovation processes.