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Transforming the Global Scientific System: Why Fundamental Shifts Are Desperately Needed
In times of insecurity and conflicts worldwide, it is important to remember that international research collaboration has a role to play in building bridges—and a brighter future for all.
Dec 23, 2024
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.
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World Bank Leads Development Giants in Investing $2.27 Billion in Factory Farms
"We're calling on World Bank President Ajay Banja to phase out these investments, which are undermining his climate agenda," said one researcher.
Oct 21, 2024
The Green Climate Fund and 11 of the 15 multilateral development banks together invested at least $2.27 billion in factory farming in 2023, undercutting their stated climate goals, according to a report published Monday by the Stop Financing Factory Farming coalition.
The report, launched the same day as the start of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank's annual meetings in Washington, D.C., found that the World Bank was the worst offender. The bank—principally through its private-sector lending arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC)—put nearly $750 million toward industrial agricultural projects, five times more than any of the other banks.
"Factory farming is a leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity loss, animal cruelty, and water pollution," Merel van der Mark, head of Animal Welfare and Finance at Sinergia Animal, said in a statement. "Development banks have all pledged to align their investments with the Paris climate agreement, yet are failing to make the kinds of investments needed to keep the goal to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C within reach."
"There are examples of better practices out there."
The report was based on 2023 disclosure information scraped from project webpages by the Early Warning System. It found that the Green Climate Fund and 11 of the 15 multilateral development banks had invested a total of $3.3 billion in animal agriculture generally, funding 62 projects. The banks also mobilized another $3.4 billion for the sector from other sources including banks and governments. The World Bank Group also led the pack in animal agriculture financing overall at over $1.5 billion.
Factory farming—or industrial agriculture—received most of that money, representing 68.3% of investments and 76.7% of supported projects. Only 2.3% of investments and 6.7% of projects involved non-industrial farming that might potentially be sustainable.
The report's authors said their research "reveals a concerning trend toward support for the industrialization of animal agriculture." This can occur through more monocropping of plants like soy or corn for animal feed; more warehousing of large numbers of animals in concentrated feed operations that release large amounts of climate-, land-, and water-polluting waste; and the construction of slaughterhouses.
The World Bank's investments in factory farming go against its own research. The bank released a report in May finding that the agrifood system generates a third of total greenhouse gas emissions, and that animal production and consumption make up almost 60% of those emissions. It even stopped serving meat in its staff cafe.
"The World Bank has set out an ambitious road map to drastically cut agricultural emissions while feeding the world. However, this good work is being undermined by its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation," said International Accountability Project researcher Alessandro Ramazzotti. "Last year IFC invested $501 million in factory farming including a $47 million loan to a Chinese company for a multi-story pig farm, making it the largest investor of all the development banks. We're calling on World Bank President Ajay Banja to phase out these investments, which are undermining his climate agenda."
In addition, the groups behind the Stop Financing Factory Farming coalition—which is headed by Bank Information Center, Friends of the Earth U.S., Global Forest Coalition, International Accountability Project, Sinergia Animal, and World Animal Protection—call on all development banks to move their money from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture that boosts biodiversity, helps the environment, and strengthens local communities, following the model of the five banks in the report that did not invest in factory farms in 2023.
"There are examples of better practices out there," said Ladd Connell, environment director at Bank Information Center. "The Green Climate Fund supports some low-carbon projects, such as providing financial and technical support to smallholder women farmers in Cote D'Ivoire to help them adapt to climate change. Where banks invest in new livestock projects, they should be innovative and sustainable, following agroecological principles."
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Multilateral Banks Must Stop Funding the Factory Farms Fueling the Biodiversity Crisis
Animal livestock is the leading driver of biodiversity loss. At the U.N. biodiversity summit next week, leaders must agree to shift finance towards more sustainable forms of food production.
Oct 18, 2024
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that pig farms in Ecuador's Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas region generated roughly 15 million pounds a day. It has been corrected to reflect the fact that 4.4 million pounds of waste are generated per day.
Our natural world is in crisis. An area the size of Portugal is deforested every year on average, and wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. Deforestation is a leading driver of the climate crisis, and wildlife loss can destabilize precious ecosystems.
To tackle this, two years ago governments agreed on the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a set of goals and targets to protect nature. On October 21, leaders will meet at the United Nations biodiversity COP16 summit in Colombia to formally review their progress for the first time.
The industrial animal livestock sector is by far the largest driver of biodiversity loss, and must be where attendees at COP16 focus their attention.
“There is no nature anymore. Pollution in the air, pollution in the river.”
In the last 50 years, global milk production has more than doubled and meat production has more than tripled. This increase has been achieved through industrialisation—by putting more and more animals in smaller spaces, in worse conditions, feeding them more supplements and medicines, and using resources more intensely. It has led to poor animal welfare, low quality of food, and health risks for humans and other animals, including antibiotic resistance.
It has also led to hugely negative impacts on the environment, including for wild animals and their habitats. Livestock farming is the leading driver of deforestation—with clearing of forests for land for cattle accounting for 42% of all deforestation. The production of farmed animals and the feed for them now occupies 80% of the world’s agricultural land, yet provides just 17% of humans’ global calorie supply.
As a result of these factors, today 70% of all birds on Earth are farmed poultry, and 93% of all non-human mammals are livestock with just 7% wild. Overhauling the way we produce food is vital to protect our natural environment and to stem species loss.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs)—such as the World Bank Group—have made a series of commitments to protect nature, yet despite this the five biggest MDBs invested over $4.6 billion in factory farming between 2011 and 2021, and have shown no signs of reducing their spending since.
At the U.N. climate conference COP26 in 2021, leading MDBs released a Joint Nature Statement promising to support governments and the private sector to tackle nature loss. And at COP28 last year they went a step further, including committing to “tackl[e] the drivers of nature loss by fostering ‘nature positive’ investments” and “valu[e] nature to guide decision-making.”
In addition, Target 14 of the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed by world leaders requires public and private financial flows to be aligned with the goals of the GBF. This means MDBs must ensure their investments align with other GBF targets, like Target 4 to halt species extinction, and Target 10 to enhance biodiversity and sustainability in agriculture.
But rather than investing in sustainable forms of food production, MDBs are propping up a broken model of factory farming that is totally at odds with these pledges.
For example, the private sector branches of the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank Group have together invested over $200 million into PRONACA, Ecuador's largest pork and poultry producer. PRONACA used the funds to build and expand a series of factory farms, including in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, an area of Ecuador home to Indigenous peoples and tropical forest.
According to a shocking report by the Ecuadorian Coordinator of Organizations for the Defense of Nature and the Environment (CEDENMA), PRONACA's pig farms in the area generate roughly 4.4 million pounds of toxic waste each day, fouling the soil, air, and waterways.
CEDENMA surveyed local communities about the impact of the factory farms. Interviewees told them that PRONACA contaminated rivers, killing off fish that local people rely on for food and jobs, and harming local tourism. One intensive pig breeding farm was set up just meters away from a sacred site.
“There is no nature anymore. Pollution in the air, pollution in the river,” said one local resident.
Investments like in PRONACA are unfortunately just one of hundreds of harmful factory farm investments made by MDBs. Similar investments have been made or are being planned in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Poland, and elsewhere all over the world.
Ahead of COP16, we and other members of the Stop Financing Farming coalition are calling on MDBs to stick to the commitments they’ve made to protect nature by ruling out any further finance for factory farming and instead supporting more nature-friendly forms of agriculture. This means investing in the production of more plant-rich foods, and when they do finance animal agriculture, ensuring it is sustainable, following the principles of agroecology.
Shifting finance in this way would not only help protect nature, but also promote nutritionally superior diets, create jobs, and tackle climate change.
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