United Nations - Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation

By JJB

This week, the third annual Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) took place at the United Nation's headquarters in New York. This forum is also known as the "annual collaborative Multi-stakeholder Forum on science, technology and innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)". Indeed, the United Nations adopted 17 SDGs in order to structure and coordinate the world's efforts to reach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Forum on STI is part of the Technology Facilitation Mechanism that aims to support the efforts of reaching the SDGs.

Banner of the STI Forum at the UN Headquarters

A large variety of topics were discussed during the STI Forum, thus reflecting the fact that the SDGs are multidisciplinary and cut across all sectors of economy and society.
For example, during the panel discussion on SDG 6 (sustainable management of water and sanitation for all), Hungarian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN, Katalin Annamaria Bogyay, argued that this goal needed to be addressed systematically, by strategies that are also closely linked to SDG 5 (gender equality).

Discussion in the UN's large auditorium 4 on SDG 11: Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable Cities

Despite the interdependent nature of sustainability and the SDGs, this blog article will focus on some main aspects around the Food-Water-Energy nexus, which was also the topic of this blog's previous post.

The interconnection between food-, water- and energy-related sustainability efforts was highlighted for example during the session on SDG 12 (sustainable consumption and production patterns). The Inga Foundation presented their projects promoting soil- and water-improvements by planting Inga Trees as agricultural component, allowing farmers to escape the vicious cycle of poverty and Slash-and-Burn practices in rain forest areas, therefore also reducing deforestation and protecting biodiversity.
The trend of decentralization, as well as its opportunities for enhancing sustainability, were discussed in the same session, for example by NYU energy researchers and by urban farming experts from Madagascar.
In the follow-up session on SDG 15 (sustainable terrestrial ecosystems), Inger Elisabeth Måren, from the University of Bergen, Norway, laid out a similar argument in favor of local and indigenous agricultural knowledge. According to Måren, those smaller local farms, their surroundings and other decentralized sources still provide a majority of the global food supply, while the share of big argicultural corporations is still much smaller than one might expect. Harnessing and empowering this local knowledge could foster biodiversity and agricultural efficiency in unique ways, as many speakers of the STI Forum agreed. In contrast, new technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence were seen on the one hand as very promising, game-changing opportunities, but on the other hand also as a threat to jobs in particular in countries identified as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), where many rely on small-scale farming.

This underlined once more the importance of keeping an effective overview and a (sustainability-oriented) control of development strategies and their multiple effects across all economic and society sectors. In this spirit, Jack Metthey (Deputy Director-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission) for example highlighted the importance of tackling energy and climate issues in a comprehensive way, and Jim Watson (Director of UK Energy Research Centre and University of Sussex) argued that high-level sustainability roadmaps may be important, but that capacity building was almost equally as important. As examples for capacity building measures, Watson quoted for instance training and human resources, efficient institutions capable to follow up on implementation progress, as well as a sufficient long-term funding.