An assessment of the role of the new UN Scientific Advisory Board is presented, as is an overview of the kinds of scientific advice that it might provide from the social sciences and the physical and engineering sciences. Development is emphasized as is environmental sustainability. It is concluded that a small Board might encourage full use of the many scientific advisory resources available to the UN. Some issues are identified with the Board as announced.
In September, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that he had decided to to create a Scientific Advisory Board to inform the UN's debate on sustainable development. The Director-General of UNESCO was asked to establish the Board and UNESCO to host its Secretariat. Now the 26 members of the Board have been named. The Board was to be composed of "renowned scientists representing various fields of natural, social and human sciences."
What is the Appropriate Role for the Board?
There already exists a UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development; it, however, is composed of representatives of governments of UN member states, and is largely drawn from people interested in international science policy rather than from distinguished working scientists.
The decentralized agencies of the United Nations system of course have the ability to draw on scientific expertise. WHO, FAO, UNIDO, ITU, WMO and other agencies regularly draw on thousands of scientists for advice in their areas of expertise.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently serves 195 member states. It has drawn on the expertise of more than 1000 individual scientific experts in making each of its assessments of climate change, demonstrating the complexity involved in science in a single area of sustainable development. The process involved in obtaining consensus of large numbers of scientists representing the best available information from the full range of research and theory, as exemplified by the IPCC, is long and complex.
Individual nations have created national academies, and there is a Third World Academy of Sciences (serving countries that do not have large enough scientific communities to justify national academies). These academies typically are composed of distinguished scientists elected by their peers, and have as part of their charters provision of scientific advice to governments. In the United States, for example, the National Research Council is composed of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine; each of these academies has a membership of hundreds of distinguished experts in its field. Moreover, the National Research Council has a large staff that organizes expert panels on specific issues when called upon by the government to do so. At any given time there are hundreds of such panels in operation, and thousands of scientists (Academicians and others) participating. This is considered necessary to bring detailed expertise to bear on important scientific issues of interest to government.
There exists an InterAcademy Council which has been formed to draw upon the expertise of participating national academies to conduct studies of global importance.
Scientific fields and knowledge have proliferated for centuries and the time is long past when a few people can together dominate the entire body of scientific knowledge. Indeed, much of scientific knowledge and understanding is tacit rather than explicit. In order to bring detailed scientific expertise to a wide variety of issues, large numbers of scientific experts are needed with complementary expertise, each bringing his/her specific expertise to bear of the question at hand.
What then does the United Nations expect of its relatively small Scientific Advisory Board, and why has it chosen to establish a new body rather than draw on existing sources of scientific expertise? Why has it chosen to place the responsibility for management of this Board with UNESCO, an agency currently facing a financial crisis? "Gretchen Kalonji, assistant director-general for natural sciences at UNESCO, told SciDev.Net that it was still too early to say how much the advisory board would cost, who would fund it, or how the proposed chief scientific adviser would liaise between the board and the secretary-general."
What is the Task Before the Board?
The purpose of the Scientific Advisory Board is to provide expert scientific advice on "sustainable development". Even in a small Board, I would hope to see a wide variety of professional scientific backgrounds represented.
Fundamental to understanding sustainable development is understanding of demography. In the past emphasis has been on population growth, but now other issues are also of interest. It appears that birth rates in rich countries are likely to fall below the replacement level while African and Asian populations are still growing. Urban growth, rural-urban migration and international migration seem relevant topics in consideration of global sustainable development, as does the changing gender balance in some large countries.
The bases of sustainable development are institution building and development of appropriate policies; both depend on cultural changes. Thus one would expect expertise in the social sciences on the panel -- economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, organizational science and psychology, It is not obvious that a single economist or a single political scientist would be fully expert on the literature of his/her field bearing on social and economic growth and on the sustainability of that growth. It seems clear that the greatest problems in achieving sustainable development occur in fragile and (especially) failed states and experiencing armed conflict; these too are social science specialties. Thus one might expect several social scientists to participate in the Board.
There is, of course, a need for advice from the physical sciences. I would expect the panel to be able to advise on the state of the resource base, including water resources, arable soils, fossil fuels and (scarce) mineral resources. Indications are that some of the resources that we have treated as renewable may not prove adequate to development needs over the coming century; other natural resources are clearly not renewable but seem now to be critical for economic development.
I would also expect the panel to advise on scientific issues related to the infrastructure -- telecommunications, the electrical grid, roads, railroads, bridges, ports, airports, water and sanitation, etc. Given the importance of infrastructure to development, I would therefore expect experts from the engineering sciences to be included on such an advisory board.
Economic development is based on increases in production drawn from extractive, manufacturing and service industries. Thus for the primary industries one would expect the Board to include scientists expert in fields relevant to agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and extraction of oil and gas. Note that the expertise on extractive industries is not identical to expertise on the resource base from which those industries work.
With respect to manufacturing, scientific advice at first glance is most relevant to high technology and emerging sectors such as industrial applications of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information and communications technology. However, manufacturing is a very broad field and there are likely to be numerous areas in heavy industry development in which scientific advice would prove valuable. There will even be issues in light industry in which policy makers may benefit from scientific advice.
In service industries such as government, health, educational and financial services there is considerable need for advice based on research findings and theory on how the services can be made more effective and efficient, and in some cases advice on the physical basis of the services (e.g. physiology and pathology, brain development and cognitive psychology).
With regard to sustainability, perhaps the key areas of concern would be climate change and biodiversity. Biodiversity, like climate change, is an enormously complicated scientific topic, involving many different scientific fields and requiring global understanding to be built upon detailed understanding of local conditions.
Added scientific advice on the sustainability of development efforts, might involve topics such as desertification, deforestation, depletion of fisheries, pollution (water, soil and air), and changes in the oceans and coastal zones, glaciers and ice caps, etc. This would be in addition to the advice described above on water resources and soil resources. Note that the advice from those expert on mineral, gas and oil resources and their depletion might need to be complemented by expert advice from others on the environmental impact of the exploitation of these resources.
One of the important issues for the United Nations in promoting sustainable development will be in measuring progress and identifying problems. I would imagine that the UN might need expert advice on statistics (both in the sense of data collection by the state and statistical analysis of data), remote sensing, and management and analysis of huge data sets.
Thus there is a huge array of topics on which scientific advice should be sought be decision makers formulating the world's development goals and monitoring the achievements toward those goals.
The UNESCO Appointed Advisory Board
UNESCO has balanced the Board for gender and for the national origin of members. I hope that it will provide a public declaration of interests by Board members to help decision makers and the public properly assess the advice provided by the Board.
Having chosen to appoint a fairly small Board, it is important not only that the members have broad knowledge and understanding of sustainable development, but that their advice be seen as worthy of the attention of the global community. While Nobel and World Food Prize winners are included among the members, one might question whether all the appointees have global reputations adequate to assure the credence to the Board's advice. I would also wonder whether people in senior administrative positions (running universities or academies of science) still have active mastery of the scientific literature of their scientific specialties.
I would question the balance of expertise in the Board as chosen. Thus, there are no scientific experts on demography, education, government, infrastructure, deforestation nor desertification, but two on biodiversity, two on climate change, and one on high-energy particle accelerators.
Perhaps the most valuable role that this Board can play is to encourage the United Nations to draw more fully on the other resources that the UN can command for scientific advice with respect to the specific issues of sustainable development. The Board might then add its voice and authority to the more detailed advice from the other advisers. Clearly, the Board will need a strong professional secretariat and a budget sufficient for travel and dissemination of its reports. It will need a strong relationship with the science adviser who is to be appointed to serve on the staff of the UN Secretary General. It may be necessary for the United Nations to help UNESCO to finance and staff this Board.
No comments:
Post a Comment