Rich countries need to align science funding with the UN’s goals

How the UN SDGs Need a Global Rescue Plan: The Case of the Intergovernmental Scientific Research Council (Flipping the Science Model)

It is crucial for the goals to get research going, as the Nature Portfolio has been reporting in a series of editorials on how the goals can be improved. So far, none of the SDGs is on track to being achieved by the 2030 deadline. The organizers of the summit are keen on making science more accessible, and they hope to build research collaborations, between scientists in different sectors and across nations.

In July, the International Science Council, a Paris-based network representing research academies around the world, published a report appropriately called Flipping the Science Model that was co-chaired by New Zealand’s former prime minister Helen Clark and UNESCO’s former director-general Irina Bokova (see go.nature.com/48aozg6). The majority of science is funded by national budgets.

This re-prioritization of funding will need both governments and national funding agencies to think more globally, and to not see national priorities as competing with global ones. The EU has a model for how this could be done. EU member states have their own research programmes, but they also contribute to the EU Horizon Europe research-funding scheme (worth around $100 billion between 2021 and 2027), which explicitly prioritizes international collaborations on global challenges. As of 2022, the fund had disbursed more than $10 billion to 39,000 researchers in 142 countries. Although 39% of grant recipients are from universities, 29% are from businesses working together on projects in health, inclusive societies, climate, energy and food

World leaders this week vowed to redouble their efforts on an ambitious plan to end poverty and protect the environment, which is woefully behind schedule.

A 12-page “political declaration”, approved during the UN SDG Summit in New York on 18 and 19 September, declares that the goals remain the world’s “overarching roadmap” for the future. The agreement states that we will act quickly in order to realize the vision of a plan of action for people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership.

“The SDGs need a global rescue plan,” UN secretary-general António Guterres declared at the opening of the summit. Guterres is proposing to increase funding for sustainable development by at least US$500 billion to help countries to achieve the goals, as well as other financial aid, including debt relief for the poorest nations so they can survive and thrive after economic shocks.

The former diplomat who helped create the framework of theSDG needs the world to take bold action to accomplish the agenda.

She says that the final ‘take-It-or-leave-It’ deadline should not be seen as a final deadline. The end goal of the 2030 Global Goals is not an end goal according to Caballero, the Latin American head of The Nature Conservancy. It is a big deal.

Sociologist Shirin Malekpour, one of the GSDR authors, agrees. The targets and the goals need to be changed, rather than what they are doing, says Malekpour, who is at a university in Australia.

The goals are focusing minds on the integrated nature of the challenges confronting humanity and that is what the #SDG summit is proof of. But she says that the UN system is still making the mistake of treating sustainable development and climate as separate issues, including by holding separate SDG and climate summits in New York this week.

Unless you deal with the climate, you can’t meet the goals of the sustainable development goals.