International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development
- Aug 8
- 2 min read
On 15 July I was at UNESCO headquarters in Paris to moderate a high-level plenary at the Global Conference of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development. The session was called Science Diplomacy in Action: Governing Global Commons, and I still find it slightly unreal to write the list of people who were on that stage.
Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, former President of Iceland and founder of the Arctic Circle, Lidia Brito, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Priority Africana and External Relations, Maria Fernanda Rollo, historian of scientific cooperation at NOVA University Lisbon ; Marilyne Andersen of the GESDA Foundation in Geneva; Professor Wei Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Anil Mishra, Chief of the Hydrological Systems, Climate Change and Adaptation Section of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme; Robert Blasiak of the Ocean Decade Advisory Board; and Charles Spillane, Chief Scientist of the FAO.
But at the end, the organisers gave me eight minutes for a closing keynote.
I wanted to say four things.
That the cryosphere is the ultimate global commons, its importance is existential.
That science can be done differently and open to everyone, as demonstrated by Matthieu Tordeur and I on our Under Antarctica traverse.
That we need to be clear-eyed about what we're up against. Gathering the data is no longer enough. What we have done so far has not been enough to outlast the lobbies, or to out-shout the disinformation.
That the knowledge is not ours alone. Western science holds part of the picture. The Indigenous peoples of the polar and mountain worlds have held the rest for a hundred generations.
The UN Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences has just begun, running alongside the Science Decade. A rare moment when science and diplomacy might finally pull on the same rope.
Many thanks to Adiaratou Diakite and Anil Mishra for their trust!
