Statement on behalf of the Science and Technology Community
Prof. Laszlo Pinter
May 5, 2014
OWG session
The SDG framework needs to embed the integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Research has made major advances in explaining how people shape ecosystems, from local to the global scale, in the past and in the future, and how we fundamentally depend on healthy ecosystems for human wellbeing and economic development. Therefore, sustainable development requires the pursuit of poverty eradication, social equity, human dignity and wellbeing for all while safeguarding the carrying capacity of the life-support systems on the planet.
Science can provide critical inputs to the definition, implementation and monitoring of the SDGs, not only in relation to technology development and transfer, but also in:
• Identifying and addressing knowledge gaps in our understanding of the drivers and impacts of changes occurring at different scales and pathways for transformation
• Researching and making explicit the interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs across the goal framework (within and between goals),
• Improving the science-policy and science-society interface to support evidence-based decision-making.
• The need to manage and sustain the determinants of economic development and well-being (not fully captured in the current framing on economic growth), namely the natural capital (ecosystems), human capital (health, education, etc.) and produced capital (including infrastructure). These form the productive base of economies in the long term.
• Governance – multi level adaptive governance that can foster equitable stewardship of natural resources and increase capacity to deal with unexpected change.
• The importance of timely and scalable data and observation for the monitoring of SDGs and the need to capacity to develop and use the data
Science has also made advances in understanding the Earth as a system with significant potential for resilience but also capable of sudden and unexpected change. There is evidence that such changes happenned in the past, they are happenning today and they can happen again in the future.
