In this interview during the opening ceremony of IYBSSD, Mathieu Denis, Senior Director and Head of the Centre for Science Futures (ISC), explained their scientific organisation’s efforts towards promoting basic sciences.
How can global sustainable development be achieved ?
Global challenges of the moment is sustainability. Achieving sustainability clearly is where a lot of our members and all of our partners are meeting and are wanting to collaborate together.
So we represent science, different disciplines from basic sciences to social and human sciences. And for us, the sustainable development, sustainability and the sustainable goal is an agenda that where we bring, where we’re all meeting and we’re all collaborating.
That’s that’s where all of our efforts are put together on a daily basis. We do that with through different research programs that we sponsor, through different reports that we produce, through the helping Member States to build capacity in government science advice. So there’s a lot of activities that the council sponsor that speaks directly to the the sustainable development agenda.
What are the challenges of this period?
Global challenges of the moment, then sustainability. Achieving sustainability clearly is where a lot of our members and all of our partners are meeting and are wanting to collaborate together. There’s a particular challenge, I would say, in this moment in time to foster advance international research collaboration. There are trends, there’s a lot of duplication of efforts ; there’s a lot of competition for funding, for visibility. There’s not enough synergies, even though we know that the potential is there, there’s not enough capacity and money going into for research on sustainable development in global South countries. So this is where our efforts as International Science Council are going.
How can we mobilise efforts, people, institutions, but also funding?
What disciplines are involved?
Frankly speaking, will not be only basic sciences, it will be basic sciences, yes, working with other types of applied sciences, social sciences, human sciences, and different types of knowledge systems as well. This is where our efforts are going.