By Sara Frueh

As the number of cases of COVID-19 reached about 4.5 million worldwide last week, an international virtual conference explored how science, technology, and innovation (STI) can respond to the global crisis — and continue to drive progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. 

The world’s capacity to get through the COVID crisis will depend on two things — science and international cooperation, said U.N. Undersecretary-General Fabrizio Hochschild in opening the conference.  “Where international cooperation works and countries come together, lives will be saved. Where the lessons of science are respected, lives will be saved.”

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine helped to convene the conference, which was co-chaired by the Permanent Missions of Israel and Ghana to the U.N. and co-sponsored by the Permanent Missions of eight additional countries, together with the U.N.’s Office of the Special Advisor to the Secretary-General working on Digital Cooperation. 

Spurring progress on the SDGs, despite COVID-19

The conference explored how science and technology can drive progress on a long-term global effort, one made more complicated by the pandemic — meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 global goals for ending poverty and hunger, ensuring clean water and sanitation, and taking action on climate change, among other aims.

“I suggest we start to treat each of the SDGs just like we do the pandemic,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt. “We should supercharge the rate of global progress by harnessing the same tools we are using now for the pandemic” — for example, by using videoconferencing rather than in-person meetings to ease collaboration, and by embracing open science to speed the dissemination of new knowledge.

McNutt also urged scientists to resist the trend toward nationalism and to instead work together. “The coronavirus is the classic example of a problem that we will not solve anywhere until we solve it everywhere,” she said. “There are others in the SDGs — climate change being a great example — that also need to be solved everywhere before it is solved anywhere.”

The need for researchers to collaborate was reiterated by Marian Asantewah Nkansah of the Global Young Academy, who called for a “bold, global approach to transdisciplinary collaborative research in STI …coupled with human sciences dimensions.”  

Peter Gluckman of the International Science Council pointed to inefficiencies in international science that need to be solved to better support progress. “Science itself has to change,” he said, noting that conferences, organizations, and funding organizations too often duplicate rather than coordinate. The ISC has been trying to help address this issue by promoting better coordination, he added. “I think it's fundamental to really accelerating progress.”

Shantanu Mukherjee of the UN’s Division for Sustainable Development noted that the pandemic has illustrated multiple opportunities for the science and technology community — to learn to better manage trade-offs, to set up more robust avenues for sharing innovations, to build public trust in science, and to address inequalities, among others.

“COVID-19 is a huge stress test of all of our systems at various levels, and like all stress tests it has brought to the fore gaps and challenges,” said Mukherjee. “But, it is also highlighting opportunities. It is highlighting trends that may have been somewhat incipient, many even under the radar, but which can be harnessed to emerge better and stronger.”

Robert Opp, chief digital officer for the United Nations Development Programme, pointed to the opportunity to “build back better” from the pandemic in ways that support the SDGs. He noted some of the technologies accelerated by the pandemic response that can also support progress on development — remote service availability for citizens, for example, and the expansion of mobile money. “A number of these kind of platforms and factors…are very important in underpinning some of our longer-term development efforts.”

Navigating technology’s promise and pitfalls

A panel discussion explored technologies that governments, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations are using to contain and manage COVID-19. For example, Israel is using machine learning and other technologies to identify COVID-19 cases, map outbreaks, and predict the disease’s spread. In Ghana, drones are delivering COVID-19 test samples from remote parts of the country to research laboratories. And tech companies are developing wearable devices that monitor temperature and heart rate to help track outbreaks in real time.

New technologies will not be a silver bullet, cautioned Daniel Burka of Resolve to Save Lives. “I think we all do a disservice if we think of innovation in tech as only the latest cutting-edge solutions.” Instead, what we need is a scaled-up workforce to do traditional contact tracing and pragmatic technologies to help them do so efficiently, he said.

Multiple speakers voiced concerns that technology could amplify inequalities. The pandemic has turned the digital world into the mainstream world, given that activities like health care and education have moved online — a shift that further marginalizes the 50% of the world’s people who are offline, said Valentine Rugwabiza, Rwanda’s permanent representative to the U.N. “What policies do we need in place to make sure that the fact that we’ve moved the digital world into the mainstream doesn't end up pushing further behind those who are already left behind?”

The need to work against inequities that could be exacerbated by the pandemic was also stressed by National Academy of Medicine President Victor Dzau, who described a new international initiative that recently raised $8 billion in pledges to speed the development of treatments and vaccines and to support equitable access to them. “We need to be able to ensure every country will have access,” he said. “No country should be left behind.” 

Video recordings of the presentations and more information about the conference can be found at www.sticonference.com.