Welcome to the United Nations
The Scientific and Technological Community (STC) Major Group greatly welcomes the theme of the High-level Political Forum 2020 "Accelerated action and transformative pathways: realizing the decade of action and delivery for sustainable development". With the present theme, the world is moving into a decade in which concrete action to overcome the numerous pressing challenges and obstacles to reaching a sustainable world and the identification of visionary, context-sensitive and attainable pathways towards achieving transformation will be essential.
As signalled in all recent scientific assessments, no country is on track to accomplish the SDGs, positive trends are decelerating, and some SDGs are currently retrogressing despite positive long-term developments. The growing risks of major planetary disruptions, such as the risk of the Amazon crossing a tipping point that would turn the world’s largest rainforest into dry scrubland due to climate change, deforestation and fires,7 or the growing risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change8, pose existential threats. They would drastically undermine all attempts for sustainable development and erode the very foundations on which we all depend to live and thrive.
In this critical context, the STC Major Group strongly endorses the Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 (GSDR 2019) and the ‘transformations approach’ outlined within it, which identifies six major systemic transformations9 that need to occur to achieve desired outcomes and to move the world onto the path to sustainability. The adoption of an integrative framework and its application at all levels will allow us to address sustainability challenges simultaneously and in an integrated manner by focusing on amplifying co-benefits and mitigating trade-offs to accelerate action.
Science is vital in comprehending and balancing the links between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, as highlighted in the GSDR 2019, which recognizes science and technology as an important lever for transformation to accelerate progress in achieving the SDGs, together with governance, economy and finance, and individual and collective action. To ensure that the decade of action and delivery is realized, the scientific and technological community is willing to closely collaborate with actors from all these domains and calls for a strengthened and strategic collaboration between the different levers.
