Global expectations for sustainable development took another hit in 2024. Carbon emissions reacheda new high, world leaders settled on an underwhelming climate finance goal, and countries failed to sign the global plastic treaty.
There was, however, one major accomplishment. In September, at the United Nations (UN) Summit of the Future, Member States adopted the Pact for the Future reconfirming their commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Pact underscores the critical role of science, technology, and innovation (STI) and outlines several key action items — from increasing the use of science in policy making, to promoting interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle complex global challenges, to supporting developing countries in harnessing STI for sustainable development.
If implemented, these measures will transform the global scientific community and science systems worldwide, requiring fundamental shifts in the organization, practice, and funding of science.
As the landscape of actors working towards the SDGs continues to grow, complexity and fragmentation are likely, which could undermine the effectiveness of individual SDG-related efforts. As such, global research efforts and research funding require strategic coordination and prioritization. In recent years, the scientific community has developed a number of research priority frameworks, including the Six Transformations, Unleashing Science, and Towards Sustainable Transformation, that can help steer global collective efforts and accelerate progress towards SDGs.
The Pact also emphasizes the need to increase the use of science in policy making. Although there is significant research on the SDGs, it is often ignored in public debates on societal transformations and rarely used in policy processes. While resolving this challenge is a complex matter, creating practical interfaces between science and policy could certainly help.
A recent initiative of the World Bank, the Coalition for Capacity on Climate Action (C3A), seeks to bridge the gap between science and Ministries of Finance. It is a prime example of how to better integrate climate science considerations in economic and financial decision-making processes. The SDSN SDG Transformation Center is also working directly with governments, including in Benin andUzbekistan, to support efforts in developing science-based pathways for SDG implementation, identifying SDG priorities and context-specific solutions, and aligning policies and financial flows with such priorities. Initiatives like these hold great potential to be scaled and replicated across countries.
As the Pact stresses, responding effectively to current and future challenges requires the engagement of all relevant stakeholders. At the recent Annual C3A Symposium, participating Ministries of Finance emphasized the critical importance of engaging diverse dimensions of expertise to better understand the complexity and dynamic processes of global challenges and changes. Transdisciplinary research can be an effective tool, as it embraces diverse scientific and societal views and helps to identify common context-specific solutions. By providing space for dialogue, learning, and trust building, transdisciplinary research also helps break down the silo mentality that still persists across many institutional structures. But, for this approach to become common practice, both funders and research institutions must introduce incentives and innovative funding models to reduce the structural barriers to transdisciplinarity.
As it stands, engaging in transdisciplinarity can be risky for scientists, especially for early-career researchers. Stakeholder engagement efforts are rarely recognized, and opportunities for transdisciplinary career development within disciplinary institutions are limited and not oftenrewarded. For several years, the International Science Council (ISC) has promoted the creation of environments and reward systems conducive to transdisciplinary research. While transdisciplinarity has become a more frequent requirement in research calls, much remains to be done to fully harness the benefits of knowledge co-production across disciplines and societal actors.
The design of research funding programmes also plays a critical role. Beyond basic research-linked activities, funding mechanisms should support public engagement, science–policy interfaces, capacity development, community-building, and peer learning. Research funding needs to also enable the accumulation, application, and deployment of knowledge. Longer-term funding is especially needed for international research collaboration on societal transformations towards sustainability.
While no single country can address complex sustainability challenges, the scale of current support for global multilateral scientific collaboration on pressing global challenges still remains marginal. Despite a few examples of global sustainability research collaborative funding efforts, including the ISC Science Missions for Sustainability and the Belmont Forum, research funding mostly prioritizes national scientific efforts over international research collaboration, with only 5% of research projects dedicated to multilateral collaboration.
Ongoing public science funding cuts and rising geopolitical tensions — which have become particularly apparent over the past years — are not conducive to cross-border scientific initiatives. But in times of insecurity and conflicts, it is important to remember that international research collaboration on global sustainability challenges provides a common language and critical mechanism that helps bridge the divide between nations. Strengthening international research collaboration and implementing the STI actions outlined in the Pact for the Future is, therefore, a necessity for ensuring a more peaceful, sustainable, and resilient future for all.
