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Issue No. 14 | Monday, July 20, 2026

Good morning,

Welcome to The Science Diplomat Playbook, your Monday morning guide to what’s shaping the week ahead in global science diplomacy.

The lead

Three years on, the AU–EU Innovation Agenda turns from ambition to delivery.

African Union and European officials have largely moved beyond defining the ambitions of their joint research and innovation partnership. This week, they turn to a more difficult question: how to convert those ambitions into durable partnerships, stronger innovation ecosystems and new opportunities for young researchers and entrepreneurs.

Launched in July 2023, the agenda provides a framework for strengthening research, innovation and entrepreneurship between Africa and Europe to support sustainable and inclusive growth. The sixth implementation workshop on Thursday shifts attention from political commitments to the practical work of expanding research collaboration, strengthening innovation ecosystems and supporting a new generation of entrepreneurs.

The workshop also reflects a broader shift in international science diplomacy. After years of launching new frameworks and partnerships, many institutions now face the harder task of making them work.

The agenda was created to provide a common framework for cooperation in research, innovation, entrepreneurship and scientific capacity building across five priority areas, including the green transition, public health, science and technology, and research capacity.

A series of implementation workshops has brought together researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, innovation hubs and youth organizations to translate those objectives into practical collaborations.

This year’s workshop focuses on youth-led innovation, highlighting how startups, universities, innovation hubs and policymakers can strengthen cross-continental partnerships. Sessions will examine mobility programs, entrepreneurship support, intellectual property, university-industry partnerships and funding opportunities while taking stock of progress under the first phase of the 2023–2033 agenda.

As one AU official told us, the main task is no longer simply financing collaboration but building institutional capacity that turns research into innovation partnerships.

Major processes to watch

International Seabed Authority — Negotiations on the Mining Code deepen

The international organization in Kingston, Jamaica, enters another week of intensive negotiations on the Mining Code, the rules that would govern commercial exploitation of mineral resources in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

This week’s agenda moves beyond broad principles into the architecture of regulation, including compliance and enforcement mechanisms, closure plans for mining operations, regulatory provisions and environmental protections. Parallel discussions examine regional environmental management plans, transparency of environmental data and the relationship between the ISA and the U.N. High Seas (BBNJ) Agreement.

The Council meets through July 24 before the ISA Assembly opens the following week to consider broader institutional, budgetary and governance questions.

Geneva — CITES moves from decisions to implementation

The CITES Plants Committee meets for the first time since CoP20 in Samarkand to begin the scientific work of implementing conference decisions.

While governments adopted new resolutions and species listings at CoP20, the Plants Committee now begins translating those political decisions into technical guidance on sustainable trade, species identification and scientific assessments used by national authorities.

This week, the Plants Committee will work to advance the scientific priorities and measures for sustainable trade in medicinal and aromatic plants, rosewood trees, orchids, and other wild flora.

Inside institutions

WMO — Ozone assessment panel meets

Scientists meet at World Meteorological Organization headquarters to finalize the Executive Summary for the 2026 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, the quadrennial report that informs Parties to the Montreal Protocol.

U.N. Global Mechanism — Strengthening ICT security

Diplomats begin the first plenary session of the General Assembly's new permanent mechanism on developments in information and communications technologies in the context of international security.

The meeting is scheduled for Monday through Thursday, starting with statements from U.N. Undersecretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu and El Salvador’s U.N. Ambassador Egriselda López, who chairs the global mechanism.

Security Council watch — Diplomats examine governance beyond crisis response

The U.N. Security Council convenes two debates that look beyond immediate conflicts toward the institutions designed to prevent them.

On Wednesday, diplomats examine how governance of natural resources, including critical minerals, affects peace and security. On Thursday, the Council considers U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ recommendations for strengthening mediation and other Chapter VI mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes.

Across regions

Africa–Europe — The AU–EU Innovation Agenda implementation workshop explores how young innovators, entrepreneurs and research organizations can strengthen cross-continental collaboration through funding, mobility and innovation partnerships.

New York — The High-Level Political Forum concludes its annual review of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, with ministers focusing on accelerating implementation in the final years before 2030.

Signals

• International partnerships are judged more by implementation than new commitments.

• Scientific advisory bodies continue to play a larger role in translating political agreements into operational guidance.

• Capacity building has become a central objective of international science cooperation.

• Governance of strategic resources, from biodiversity to critical minerals, is moving closer to the center of global diplomacy.

• Preventive governance is receiving renewed attention across domains ranging from cybersecurity to conflict prevention.

On the calendar

July 14–23 — High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (New York)
Governments continue annual reviews of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. → Program

July 17–23 — CITES Plants Committee (Geneva)
Scientific experts meet for the first time since CITES CoP20 to advance implementation of new species listings and guidance on sustainable trade in medicinal plants, rosewoods, orchids and other wild flora. → Agenda

July 20–24 — Plenary Session, Global Mechanism on ICTs in the Context of International Security (New York)

Diplomats hold the first substantive plenary session of the new Global Mechanism on ICT Security. → Documents

July 23 — AU–EU Innovation Agenda Workshop (Online)

African Union and European Commission officials review implementation of the 10-year Innovation Agenda, with a focus on youth-led innovation and entrepreneurship. → Program

July 13–31 — International Seabed Authority Annual Session (Kingston, Jamaica)
Delegates continue negotiations on rules governing potential deep-sea mining activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction. → Overview

Closing

You’re reading The Science Diplomat Playbook, a weekly briefing mapping the institutions, technologies and governance systems shaping international cooperation.

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LAXENBURG, Austria — By the final day of the inaugural Raiffa Academy, participants were already thinking beyond the classroom.

A governance scholar from South Africa envisioned using systems mapping to better understand the country’s informal taxi industry and its links to illicit networks. A researcher working on water diplomacy was planning conversations about applying the academy’s methods to transboundary river basins stretching from the Nile to South Asia. A competition law expert saw new opportunities to help regulators navigate increasingly complex global markets.

Although they came from different disciplines and countries, participants shared a common goal as the first Raiffa Academy Short Course wrapped up on Thursday. The third day of the course immersed participants in two case studies that demonstrated how systems analysis and robust decision-making can help leaders examine complex problems under tight timelines and incomplete information.

During the morning session, participants explored Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI through systems mapping and network analysis. Led by Elena Rovenskaya, program director of IIASA’s Advancing Systems Analysis Program, the exercise examined how partnerships can reshape competition, innovation and consumer welfare while challenging traditional regulatory frameworks.

The afternoon shifted from technology markets to one of North America’s most contested natural resources. Led by Princeton University professor Elke Weber, participants developed strategies for managing water allocations in the Colorado River Basin after key provisions of the century-old compact expire, weighing uncertain hydrology, competing political interests and the needs of multiple stakeholders.

For many participants, the value of the exercises extended well beyond the individual cases.

Rekgotsofetse Chikane, director of the Tayarisha Centre for Digital Governance at the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said he immediately recognized how systems mapping could strengthen research underway at home.

“I was thinking about one of my Ph.D. students who’s trying to map up what we call the taxi industry in South Africa,” he said. “I think the systems map would help us have a better understanding about how this system functions.”

He said the academy also demonstrated how decision analysis could be adapted to governance environments where institutions are less predictable.

“I think what I would push them towards is thinking about the rationality of actors, not kind of informed by a Western lens,” he said. “How do you handle decision making in contexts in which corruption runs rampant?”

Beyond the coursework, Chikane said the academy’s multidisciplinary environment created unexpected opportunities to learn from colleagues working in different fields.

“The multidisciplinary aspect of things caught me off guard, but it’s been a pleasant surprise,” he said.

Emma Zajdela, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute who also works with the Malta Conferences Foundation on science diplomacy, saw opportunities to build new international collaborations.

She said conversations during the course had already sparked plans to explore how decision analysis could support cooperation on shared water challenges involving researchers working in the Nile Basin, Pakistan and the Middle East.

“I think it’s the connections that we make outside of the actual course,” she said.

Moloko Mathipa Mdakane, an information scientist at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and a policy fellow at the National Research Foundation, said the academy expanded her understanding of systems thinking and reinforced the importance of connecting researchers with policymakers.

“I got the bigger picture,” she said. “How everything fits together, how the systems work, the analysis, the loops back, and all of that.”

She said she plans to continue applying the approaches introduced during the course and hopes future academies allow even more time for participants to practice them together.

Alexey Ivanov, director of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, based in Moscow, said the methods complement his ongoing collaboration with Rovenskaya to bring systems analysis into competition law.

Competition authorities, he said, increasingly face markets whose complexity exceeds traditional analytical approaches. “We want to equip them with better tools,” he said.

The academy also introduced him to new ideas outside his own discipline. “I just enjoyed being here, talking to people who were quite from different fields than mine,” he said.

Mohammad Reza Yeganegi, a research scholar in IIASA’s Advancing Systems Analysis Program, said the discussions reinforced his interest in developing decision frameworks that are more inclusive and adaptable.

He said future decision processes should better reflect changing communities while helping negotiators manage conflict without sacrificing scientific neutrality.

Amir Albadvi, a professor at University Canada West in Vancouver with a joint affiliation with Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) in Tehran, whose research focuses on complexity science and network analysis, said the academy’s collaborative format stood out even for someone already familiar with many of the concepts.

“I think the way that they arrange it, that the participation part, it was quite interesting,” he said, and working through case studies in small groups created “quite a good learning environment.”

Looking ahead, Albadvi said he hopes future academies build on the relationships formed during the course by creating opportunities for participants to continue collaborating after they return home.

“I see different people in the area that at least I see that we can have joint paper together,” he said. “Each one has some sort of opportunity in terms of resources and also the possibilities of grants and research support.”

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China moved to establish itself at the center of an emerging global system for governing artificial intelligence, formally launching a new intergovernmental organization and offering training, technology and institutional partnerships to countries across the Global South.

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, was established after representatives of 29 countries signed an agreement in Shanghai. China described it as the world’s first intergovernmental international organization devoted specifically to artificial intelligence, with a mandate covering technological development, international cooperation and global governance. Its headquarters will be in Shanghai.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called the organization an “important milestone” in the history of AI development as he opened the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday.

“AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” Xi said. “Thanks to our joint efforts, WAICO has come into being in Shanghai.”

The organization’s founding members include Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba and Venezuela, along with countries from Africa and Asia that China says represent a broad coalition of developing nations.

China said WAICO would be open to all countries and would uphold the purposes of the U.N. Charter, respect national sovereignty and cultural diversity, and promote artificial intelligence that is “beneficial, safe and fair.” The organization aims to support developing countries in strengthening AI innovation, applications and governance while narrowing global technology gaps.

The launch marks a significant step in China’s effort to move from promoting AI governance principles to building permanent institutions. For several years Beijing has advanced initiatives through the United Nations and other diplomatic forums. WAICO provides China with a dedicated international organization through which it can pursue cooperation, capacity building and governance initiatives.

Xi framed the effort as a response to demands from the Global South and warned that unequal access to computing power, data, infrastructure and expertise could reproduce historical inequalities.

“We must carry out extensive international cooperation and help Global South countries with capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides,” he said.

Xi announced that China would provide developing countries with 5,000 places in AI training and seminar programs over the next five years. China will also establish AI cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

In addition, China said it would enable 30 countries to use MAZU, an AI-powered meteorological warning system designed to improve forecasting and disaster preparedness.

The announcements place capacity building at the center of China’s AI diplomacy. Beijing portrays open-source AI models, affordable computing resources and technology transfer as alternatives to systems dominated by a small number of Western technology companies.

Xi called for greater openness, collaboration and sharing while also emphasizing that AI systems must remain under human control and be governed through laws, monitoring mechanisms and emergency response systems.

The conference’s chair statement similarly called for open-source AI ecosystems, international cooperation on standards, and greater participation by developing countries in AI supply chains and governance processes. It also warned of emerging risks involving critical infrastructure, frontier models and autonomous AI agents.

The launch came little more than a week after governments, researchers and technology experts met in Geneva for the first U.N. Global Dialogue on AI Governance, part of a broader effort by the United Nations to create a more inclusive framework for international oversight of artificial intelligence.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres attended the signing ceremony in Shanghai and delivered a speech that largely welcomed China’s efforts while emphasizing the need for AI governance to remain anchored in multilateral institutions.

“Technology that will shape the future of humanity must be shaped by all humanity,” Guterres said. “It cannot be governed by a handful of countries or a handful of companies.”

Guterres linked China’s initiatives to the Global Digital Compact adopted by the U.N. General Assembly and described the creation of WAICO as part of a broader effort to expand participation in AI governance.

At the same time, he argued that governance must remain grounded in international law and human rights. He called for common approaches to testing, risk assessment and accountability, saying that humans must retain control over life-and-death decisions.

The secretary-general also announced that he would soon present recommendations for a Global Fund for AI intended to support developing countries and said that more than 20 countries, including China, had already nominated centers for a U.N.-supported Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building.

The parallel initiatives highlight a larger question confronting policymakers: whether AI governance will converge around a common international framework or evolve through multiple overlapping institutions and coalitions.

China’s vision emphasizes sovereignty, development, capacity building and open-source technologies. U.N. initiatives have focused on inclusiveness, scientific assessment and global coordination. Western governments have generally placed greater emphasis on safety, regulation and advanced-system risks.

For now, Beijing and the United Nations insist those approaches can be complementary. The conference statement explicitly called for strengthening the U.N.’s central role in AI governance and warned against fragmentation of global governance efforts.

Much about WAICO remains unclear, including its financing, governance structure, membership obligations and relationship with existing international organizations. It is also uncertain whether the body will eventually play a role in technical standards, safety frameworks or international rulemaking.

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VIENNA — Ethical failures in government are often treated as failures of character, training or compliance. Avril Haines, a former U.S. director of national intelligence, argued that they are more often failures of institutional design.

Delivering the inaugural Howard Raiffa Lecture in Vienna on Wednesday, Haines, the president-elect of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called for national security institutions to draw more heavily on decision science, behavioral psychology and organizational research to strengthen ethical decision-making under pressure.

The lecture helped launch the Howard Raiffa Academy, a new initiative of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Friends of IIASA dedicated to applying decision-analysis methods to public policy and governance.

“The social sciences have been telling us for decades that these assumptions are wrong,” Haines said, referring to the widespread belief that officials who receive sufficient ethics training and clear instructions will reliably make the right decisions.

Instead, she argued, ethical behavior is shaped not only by reasoning but also by institutional culture, social dynamics, hierarchy, incentives and situational pressures.

Haines, who served as director of national intelligence under former U.S. president Joe Biden and previously held senior positions at the CIA, National Security Council and State Department, framed her remarks around how to close the gap between ethical principles and actual behavior inside government institutions.

Drawing on the work of decision theorist Howard Raiffa, IIASA’s founding director, she distinguished between normative approaches that describe how people should make decisions, descriptive approaches that explain how people actually behave, and prescriptive approaches that seek to help real people make better choices under real-world conditions.

“Most institutional ethical frameworks rest on the implicit assumption that officials, when confronted with an ethical choice, will reason their way to the correct answer if they have been adequately trained, clearly instructed, and appropriately incentivized,” she said. Yet decades of research suggest that intuition, social context and situational pressures often play an equally important role.

The problem of institutional pressure

Throughout the lecture, hosted by IIASA and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Haines described scenarios familiar to many large organizations. Analysts can soften judgments to avoid conflict, junior officials remain silent in meetings, employees defer to group consensus despite reservations, and staff hesitate to raise concerns because of hierarchical or cultural pressures.

In many such cases, she argued, officials already know the ethical course of action. The challenge is not a lack of knowledge but the cost of acting on it.

To explain the phenomenon, Haines drew on research by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement, and Thomas Schelling’s studies of how individual behavior can produce unintended collective outcomes.

The implication, she said, is that institutions should devote greater attention to the environments in which decisions are made rather than relying primarily on codes of conduct and ethics training.

Among the possible reforms she suggested were structured dissent mechanisms, “premortem” exercises that require teams to imagine why a decision might fail, leadership practices designed to encourage challenge and disagreement, psychologically informed ethics training, and decision-making processes that reduce the personal costs of speaking up.

Research on psychological safety, she noted, has shown that people are significantly more likely to report concerns and acknowledge errors when they believe doing so will not result in punishment or exclusion.

Decision science and public institutions

The lecture aligned with the Raiffa Academy’s inaugural short course this week. Haines suggested that some of the tools taught in decision analysis may themselves support stronger ethical decision-making.

Making uncertainty explicit, systematically considering alternative explanations, and incorporating a wider range of perspectives can make it easier for officials to challenge assumptions and raise concerns without relying solely on personal courage, she said.

“When Raiffa developed tools for structured negotiation and decision analysis,” she said, “he was building machinery that lowers the social cost of truth telling.”

The lecture also reflected an evolution in Haines’s thinking since a major address on ethics in national security she delivered at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs last year.

In that speech, she focused largely on the ethical principles that guide public service, including integrity, impartiality and accountability. In Vienna, she shifted attention toward the institutional conditions that determine whether officials are able to act on those principles in practice, drawing on behavioral science and decision analysis to examine why ethical norms sometimes fail under pressure.

The role of artificial intelligence

Haines also explored the implications of artificial intelligence for public decision-making.

Used appropriately, she suggested, AI systems could serve as “tireless devil’s advocates,” generating alternative hypotheses, stress-testing consensus views and helping institutions surface perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked.

But she warned that AI could also create new risks if officials begin treating machine-generated recommendations as substitutes for human judgment.

The danger, she said, is that responsibility becomes diffused into systems that appear authoritative but cannot themselves be held accountable.

“The design principle I would suggest is that AI should be used to enhance our judgment, not replace it,” she said.

Ethics as diplomatic infrastructure

Although much of the lecture focused on national security institutions, Haines concluded by connecting ethical decision-making to international cooperation.

Countries are more willing to share information, coordinate policies and accept risks on one another’s behalf when they trust that decisions are being made honestly and with integrity, she argued.

“In that sense,” Haines said, “the infrastructure I described tonight is also diplomatic infrastructure.”

For Haines, who assumes her role as the eleventh president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in late September, the same logic applies today. Better institutions, she suggested, are not only more ethical but also may be better equipped to navigate a divided and uncertain world.

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LAXENBURG, Austria — Policymakers rarely have the luxury of waiting for perfect evidence. Decisions about energy, public health and emerging technologies often must be made while scientific uncertainty persists and stakeholders remain deeply divided.

That challenge was at the center of the second day of the Raiffa Academy’s inaugural short course, where participants explored how structured decision analysis can help policymakers make choices even when uncertainty cannot be fully resolved.

The morning session on Wednesday focused on the decades-long controversy over possible health risks from electromagnetic fields generated by power lines. Detlof von Winterfeldt, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, used the case to show how decision science can help stakeholders navigate disputes when evidence is uncertain and interests conflict.

The challenge, von Winterfeldt said, was not simply analyzing the science. It was creating a framework that allowed stakeholders to focus on a simplified set of decisions that mattered most.

“Most of these problems involve some amount of science,” he said. “The lesson from this particular case is how to simplify problems, because they usually, when they come to you, are awfully complex, with too many objectives, too many alternatives, too many stakeholders.”

Through interviews with utilities, regulators, residents and public health advocates, von Winterfeldt’s research team identified the objectives driving the conflict. These ranged from concerns about health risks and property values to costs and electricity reliability. The analysis reduced 19 potential criteria to four factors that stakeholders could evaluate together.

“The transition from complexity to simplicity, with approval by the stakeholders, provides the clarity,” he said. “And clarity is the most important thing if you have multiple stakeholders, because often they just talk by each other.”

The exercise introduced participants to stakeholder analysis, helping them map the objectives, concerns and tradeoffs facing utilities, regulators, property owners, public health advocates and community groups. The goal was to identify where competing interests might be reconciled and which factors ultimately mattered most when evaluating policy alternatives.

The themes extended beyond the power line case itself. Similar tensions between scientific uncertainty, competing interests and political constraints shape decisions on artificial intelligence, climate adaptation, biotechnology and public health.

The afternoon session shifted from domestic policy challenges to international negotiation, placing participants in the roles of governments seeking agreement on transboundary air pollution across Europe.

Drawing on one of IIASA’s longest-running contributions to environmental policymaking, the simulation challenged participants to negotiate emissions reductions while balancing scientific evidence, economic costs and national interests.

‘Negotiations reveal something about yourself’

Before negotiations began, IIASA principal research scholar Fabian Wagner briefed the group on the science underpinning the exercise, introducing a simplified version of the institute’s GAINS integrated assessment model, which has helped inform European air pollution agreements for decades.

Wagner said the exercise demonstrated that IIASA’s role extends beyond producing scientific research to developing practical tools that support policy decisions.

“IIASA’s tradition is not only to produce knowledge and write scientific papers, but also to develop tools that are actually useful for decision makers,” he said.

Participants used the model to test different emissions-reduction scenarios, explore their environmental and economic consequences, and negotiate a written agreement among countries with differing priorities and capacities.

Wagner said the value of the model was not that it produced a perfect answer, but that it gave participants a shared foundation for negotiating difficult trade-offs.

“Everybody now understands that the GAINS model is not necessarily the most accurate model, nor is it maybe the most efficient model,” he said. “But it provides a common methodology that everybody can work with.”

Beyond the technical exercise, Wagner said the simulation was intended to help participants better understand their own negotiating styles.

“The negotiations reveal something about yourself,” he said. “You can observe yourself. How do you react in certain situations? Where are your strengths? Maybe where are your weaknesses?”

The compressed timetable also reflected the realities of policymaking, where negotiators are often forced to reach decisions under significant time pressure.

“Negotiations are often like this,” Wagner said. “You wish you had more time. You had actually planned to have more time, but in the end, you have to take decisions really quickly.”

For participants, the exercise demonstrated how scientific evidence can inform negotiations without determining their outcome.

Kevin Hsu, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research focuses on energy and infrastructure policy, said the simulation highlighted the intersection between scientific analysis and the human dimensions of policymaking.

“There’s a scientific basis for understanding the problem, but there are also very human challenges because we’re dealing with societies, stakeholders, corporations, nonprofit groups and the public,” Hsu said. “Being able to understand the scientific basis, but then translate it into this human side of problem-solving, seems to be what’s animating our conversations.”

Hsu said the academy’s interdisciplinary cohort, including researchers and practitioners from multiple countries and disciplines, reflected the kind of collaboration needed to tackle complex policy challenges.

“I think they’re really striving for that interdisciplinary problem-solving approach, which I think more of could be done in the real world,” he said.

Although the exercise simplified real-world negotiations, Hsu said it provided an opportunity to practice approaches that participants could apply in more complex settings.

“The real world is more complex, but there are still lessons you can draw from a shorter practice experience,” he said.

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Humanity has never possessed more scientific knowledge, more computing power or more research capacity than it does today. Yet progress on many of the world’s most pressing challenges continues to lag.

A new UNESCO report released on Wednesday highlights that contradiction. The report’s central argument is straightforward: the problem is no longer a lack of scientific knowledge.

“The gap is not a shortage of scientific knowledge,” the report says. “It is a failure to translate that knowledge into policy, governance and action at scale.”

The report’s release coincides with the start of UNESCO’s first Global Conference of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development this week. More than 800 ministers, scientists and policymakers have gathered at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris to assess the role of science in addressing global challenges.

The gathering, which runs through Friday, is intended to examine how scientific evidence can better inform government decision-making and the post-2030 development agenda. But the report’s conclusion arrives at a difficult moment for the Sustainable Development Goals. Nearly half of the monitored targets are advancing too slowly to meet the 2030 deadline, while 18% have moved backward since 2015.

For decades, international discussions about science and development largely focused on generating more research, expanding scientific capacity and accelerating innovation. UNESCO’s assessment suggests a different challenge may now be emerging.

The world knows more than ever about climate change, biodiversity loss, public health threats and the risks and opportunities associated with emerging technologies. The harder question is why so much knowledge struggles to shape public decisions.

“For a country like Haiti, science is not a luxury,” Haiti’s Environment Minister Valéry Fils-Aimé said of the governance gap between science and public policy.

“The gap between what we know and what we do continues to widen. It is frequently a deficit of connection between science and public policy,” he told the conference. “Science should become a government reflex, not an occasional exchange.”

Cuba’s Science Minister Armando Rodríguez Batista similarly emphasized a need to “update your policy every day” due to the fast pace of breakthrough advances. “Our researchers, our innovators are continually looking for solutions.”

A decade built around a familiar problem

The International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development was launched by the United Nations in 2024 as a ten-year effort to mobilize scientific knowledge in support of sustainable development. UNESCO serves as the lead agency.

According to the report, the initiative has received 397 submissions across 79 countries during its first two years, with activities spanning all 17 Sustainable Development Goals and approximately $50 million in confirmed funding.

The numbers suggest substantial engagement from the scientific community. Yet the report repeatedly returns to a more fundamental question: what happens after knowledge is produced? Between discovery and decision lies a complicated landscape of politics, institutions, competing interests, limited resources and public trust.

“The world is not lacking scientific knowledge. What we need now are stronger systems to put that knowledge to work for people and the planet,” UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany said.

Whether stronger governance alone can close the gap between scientific knowledge and political action remains a matter of debate. But UNESCO argues that the imbalance is becoming more pronounced as emerging technologies advance faster than regulatory systems.

One of the report’s more striking findings concerns the balance between innovation and governance. Initiatives associated with SDG 9, which focuses on innovation and infrastructure, outnumber those linked to SDG 16, which focuses on institutions and governance, by more than three to one.

UNESCO describes this as a growing risk as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and other emerging fields continue to advance — a concern increasingly voiced across multilateral institutions.

Scientific and technological capabilities continue to accelerate while governance systems often move far more slowly. The challenge is visible in debates over AI, where governments struggle to establish rules and oversight mechanisms even as increasingly powerful systems are deployed worldwide.

Similar debates are unfolding around quantum technologies, biotechnology and neurotechnology.

“Science allows us to imagine possible futures but above all gives us the tools to build them,” Guatemala’s Vice President Karin Herrera told delegates, calling science a “global public good” that provides the evidence needed for sound government policies.

Science remains unevenly distributed

The report also highlights longstanding inequalities in the global scientific landscape. Africa accounts for fewer than 10% of the Decade's initiatives despite representing 17.5% of the world's population, according to UNESCO’s assessment. Research spending remains heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and East Asia.

Those disparities shape who produces scientific knowledge, which questions receive attention and which countries are best positioned to benefit from scientific advances. “The scientific future cannot belong to the few,” the report argues.

The imbalance has consequences beyond research itself. Countries facing some of the most severe challenges related to climate change, food security and public health are often those with the weakest scientific infrastructure and the fewest researchers.

Perhaps the most unexpected result in the report concerns what participating initiatives identified as their biggest obstacle. Some 40% cited coordination as their primary challenge. Only 10% identified funding as the principal barrier.

The finding complicates a common assumption that the primary problem facing science for sustainable development is a lack of money.

“Science is a human right imperative,” El-Enany told delegates. “Everyone should have the right to participate in science and benefit from its advances.”

The report calls for stronger science advisory systems, expanded access to research infrastructure, reforms to academic incentives and new approaches to governing emerging technologies.

According to UNESCO’s assessment, many of the difficulties arise elsewhere: fragmented institutions, weak links between researchers and policymakers, and difficulties connecting scientific expertise to decision-making processes.

The report focuses on the relationship between science and decision-making. But some delegates raised concerns about the conditions in which science itself operates. Iran’s Science Minister Hossein Simaee Sarraf pointed to yet another danger.

“Today we must ask an important question: How can science help solve problems when science itself is in danger?” he told the conference. “We should all agree on one principle: Scientists must never become victims of crises and scientific institutions must never become targets in conflicts.”

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LAXENBURG, Austria — Scientists know more than ever about climate change, pandemics, energy transitions and other global challenges, but governments often struggle to act on that knowledge.

The inaugural Raiffa Academy opened on Tuesday with the premise that the problem is often not a lack of evidence. Instead, many of the world’s most difficult challenges are shaped by failures in decision-making, negotiation and implementation.

The three-day course at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis brought together dozens of scientists, diplomats, policymakers and decision theorists from 17 countries to explore how analytical methods can help bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public action.

Participants are examining how decision science and negotiation analysis, both of which were pioneered by Howard Raiffa, IIASA’s first director, can help leaders navigate situations where interests conflict, uncertainty is unavoidable and no single solution satisfies everyone involved.

"We could be more effective, more influential, and maybe even more wise if we know more about the process of making decisions and conducting negotiations," said Daniel Goroff, president and chief executive officer of the Social Science Research Council and one of the academy's organizers.

Goroff, also a senior advisor at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, argued that scientific evidence alone does not automatically translate into better policy or international cooperation.

"Howard was an outstanding and inspired advocate for the belief that it matters how we go about international scientific cooperation and policy making," he said.

Helping decision makers navigate complexity

The academy is built around the proposition that improving decisions requires more than producing better evidence. It also requires better methods for understanding uncertainty, evaluating alternatives, managing disagreement and identifying pathways toward action.

International negotiations rarely involve disputes about evidence alone. Countries enter discussions with different interests, values, political constraints and perceptions of risk. Scientific knowledge may inform negotiations, but it does not resolve them.

The academy’s first day focused on methods designed to help decision makers navigate those realities. Participants were introduced to four complementary approaches that have shaped the field of decision science in the past several decades.

Eeva Vilkkumaa, associate professor of management science at Aalto University in Finland, examined how decision analysis can help leaders act under uncertainty.

Detlof von Winterfeldt, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and former director general of IIASA, explored methods for identifying and weighing competing stakeholder interests.

Elke Weber, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, focused on negotiation analysis and the behavioral barriers that often prevent agreement.

Elena Rovenskaya, IIASA program director and principal research scholar, introduced systems approaches for understanding interconnected global challenges.

Modern pubic policy planning focuses on complex, interconnected problems, according to Rovenskaya, who cautioned that complexity is not just a synonym for “complicated or difficult.”

Role of science

Scientific evidence can help explain what is happening and what may happen next. It can identify risks, opportunities and possible consequences. But evidence alone cannot determine which risks societies should accept, which goals they should prioritize or how competing interests should be reconciled.

That challenge is at the center of science diplomacy. The academy is launching at a time when international cooperation faces mounting pressure, said IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber. “Rather than having a better multilateral system,” he said, “it is collapsing before our very eyes, while the global challenges … are exacerbating.”

Navigating decisions requires moving past risks and fear of the unknown. According to Weber, human biology naturally craves predictability because it historically kept us safe from danger. The short course aims to bridge that gap by giving professionals concrete analytical tools.

“What science does is help us become more comfortable with uncertainty by quantifying it,” Weber said. Models, she noted, “basically allow you to digest previous experience into something you can use.”

Former Austrian Ambassador Irene Giner-Reichl, drawing on decades of diplomatic expertise, cautioned that scientific evidence alone rarely determines negotiating outcomes.

“Scientific evidence is usually not a factor in these E.U. meetings,” said Giner-Reichl, chair of the board of the European Forum Alpbach. “It’s really about national positions, national interests, economic interests, interests of various lobby groups.”

Her point was not that evidence is irrelevant, but that scientific information must compete with political, economic and institutional interests that shape negotiating positions.

She welcomed the academy as an effort to strengthen science diplomacy, particularly since one of the central challenges is identifying opportunities for scientific evidence to shape policy before negotiating positions become fixed.

The academy also reflects a return to one of IIASA’s founding ideas. Raiffa, the institute’s first director in 1972, helped establish modern decision analysis and negotiation analysis during a career that spanned nearly six decades at Harvard University.

His work focused on helping people make better decisions under uncertainty and finding practical approaches to negotiation in situations where interests conflict.

Organizers say the new academy seeks to apply those ideas to contemporary challenges ranging from climate change and public health to artificial intelligence and international cooperation.

Reflecting on her father’s legacy, Judy Raiffa said the academy exudes her father’s confidence that a new generation of scientists, policymakers and negotiators can tackle increasingly complex global challenges.

“The real reason that my father wanted the Raiffa Academy at IIASA to be formed was he believed in your potential to change the world for the better,” she said, adding that 25 years ago her father wrote, “The balance between war and peace may be a matter not of the nature of differences that divide us, but of the process we use to resolve these differences.”

In the day’s closing discussions, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence and president-elect of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Avril Haines said the academy’s sessions reflected challenges she had encountered throughout her national security career.

She noted that major policy outcomes often emerge not from a single decisive meeting but through “a sequence of smaller decisions” that progressively constrain future choices. Communicating uncertainty, she added, can be just as difficult as analyzing it, while effective negotiations often begin long before formal talks commence.

“The gap between analysis and decision is really not primarily technical but human,” Haines said. Trust, institutional incentives and creating environments where people can speak candidly are essential if rigorous decision methods are to shape policy.

Her observation echoed a theme that surfaced repeatedly throughout the day: producing better evidence is often easier than creating the conditions under which evidence can influence decisions.

Building on the Raiffa legacy

The inaugural course serves as a pilot for a broader effort to build a network of researchers, policymakers, diplomats and science advisers trained in decision analysis and negotiation methods.

Organizers hope future offerings will expand participation and strengthen connections across disciplines and regions. As global challenges become more complex, decision science can help leaders connect evidence with action.

Throughout the first day, speakers returned to a common theme. Scientific evidence can illuminate choices, but it does not make them. In an era of growing uncertainty and geopolitical strain, the challenge is learning how to turn knowledge into action.

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GENEVA — As governments and technology companies focus on how to govern artificial intelligence, a new coalition of economists and AI leaders is warning that another challenge deserves far more attention: the economic consequences of the technology itself.

Days after diplomats, regulators, researchers and industry executives gathered in Geneva for a week of discussions on AI governance, more than 200 economists, researchers and technology leaders issued a statement calling for urgent preparation for what they describe as a potentially unprecedented economic transformation.

The statement, released on Monday under the title We Must Act Now, argues that artificial intelligence may cause economic changes that exceed those of the Industrial Revolution while unfolding over a much shorter period.

“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,” the coalition wrote.

The statement arrives at a moment when international discussions about AI governance are expanding rapidly. For much of the past two years, debates have centered on safety, misinformation, security risks, technical standards and regulation. But the new declaration suggests growing concern that policymakers may be underestimating the economic implications of AI systems.

Pointing to the possibility of both major productivity gains and large-scale job displacement, the coalition argues that governments and institutions need to begin preparing now.

“Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society,” the statement says.

The signatories include Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and Christopher Pissarides, along with former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, senior figures from OpenAI and Anthropic, venture capital investors and researchers from universities around the world.

The breadth of the coalition is notable because it brings together economists who have often differed on the likely pace and impact of technological change, as well as executives from competing AI companies.

Their willingness to endorse a common statement suggests that concerns about AI’s economic consequences are moving closer to the mainstream of both economics and technology policy. The timing is also significant.

The statement follows two major international gatherings in Geneva: the U.N. Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the AI for Good Global Summit, hosted by the International Telecommunication Union. Those meetings brought together governments, international organizations, researchers and companies to discuss how AI should be governed internationally.

The conversations focused largely on issues such as international coordination, standards, inclusion, development, safety and emerging governance frameworks. A new U.N. architecture for AI governance is also beginning to take shape through a scientific panel, political dialogue process and other mechanisms approved by member nations.

The economists’ declaration highlights a parallel challenge. Rather than focusing primarily on technological risks, it asks whether labor markets, education systems, social protections and public institutions are prepared for potentially rapid changes in the nature of work.

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Tracey Brown has spent more than two decades defending an idea that often seems deceptively simple: evidence matters.

Yet the chief executive of the London-based charity Sense about Science argues that facts alone are never enough. Evidence must be scrutinized, communicated, challenged and defended through institutions that allow citizens to understand the world around them.

“People are very motivated to have people in authority tell the truth and to have honest and independent statistics,” Brown said during an interview on The Science Diplomat Podcast. “I didn’t think we lived in a post-truth society. I think we lived in a post-politics society.”

Since becoming one of Britain’s most prominent advocates for evidence-based public policy, Brown has led campaigns promoting transparency in clinical trials, strengthening protections for independent scientific advisers, and encouraging citizens to ask institutions for evidence behind public claims and decisions.

Brown repeatedly pointed to what she described as the often-overlooked infrastructure that allows societies to distinguish reliable information from opinion, advocacy or misinformation.

One example was a campaign to popularize peer review as a basic indicator of scientific credibility. Twenty years ago, she said, many news reports discussed scientific findings without even identifying the journal in which a study appeared. Today, peer review has become a familiar part of public discussion about scientific evidence.

“It wasn’t a question of, is it true?” Brown said. “It was just, has it been through some really kind of fundamental checks?”

She also highlighted the AllTrials campaign, which sought to ensure that clinical trial results are published rather than selectively disclosed. The effort helped push pharmaceutical companies, regulators and medical organizations toward greater transparency.

Brown argued that evidence should inform public decisions without being treated as beyond question. “I’m nervous of anything that makes science beyond question, because that’s not science,” she said.

That distinction became particularly important during debates over climate change, public health and pandemic policy, where uncertainty itself often became politically contested. Brown warned against both the weaponization of uncertainty to delay action and the temptation to present scientific conclusions as absolute certainties.

“I think we can be clear at the same time that uncertainty doesn’t mean we don’t do anything,” she said. “Everything that we’re researching is uncertain or we wouldn’t be researching it.”

Brown described investigative and specialist journalists as part of a broader ecosystem of what she called “public good curators” — people who assemble information in ways that allow citizens to understand events, institutions and public decisions.

“Almost as though a good journalist, especially a good journalist who will work their way through evidence, a good journalist is like our public representative there in the world,” she said.

Brown also warned that political polarization complicates public discussions about evidence. Scientific findings are often presented alongside competing claims, advocacy campaigns and ideological narratives, making it more difficult for citizens to evaluate information on its merits.

“The real challenge,” she said, is that scientific evidence is treated as just another opinion. Despite those concerns, Brown remained cautiously optimistic about the public’s willingness to engage with evidence when institutions are transparent and accountable.

“We underestimate people’s ability to accept evidence that is contrary to what they think,” she said.

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Issue No. 13 | Monday, July 13, 2026

Good morning,

Welcome to The Science Diplomat Playbook, your Monday morning guide to what’s shaping the week ahead in global science diplomacy.

The lead

IIASA launches the Howard Raiffa Academy to explore how decision science can strengthen diplomacy and public policy.

As governments struggle to navigate complex challenges ranging from artificial intelligence and climate change to public health, resource security and geopolitical competition, a gathering at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis this week will explore a question that sits at the heart of science diplomacy: How can decision-makers make better choices under conditions of uncertainty?

The inaugural Howard Raiffa Academy Short Course, taking place Tuesday through Thursday in Laxenburg, Austria, brings together scientists, diplomats, policymakers, negotiators and decision-analysis experts to examine how analytical tools can improve decision-making and international cooperation. Organized with support from Friends of IIASA and named after Howard Raiffa, IIASA’s first director and one of the founders of modern decision and negotiation analysis, the initiative reflects growing interest in the role of decision science in addressing complex global challenges.

The timing is notable. The international system faces pressure from rapid technological change, rising geopolitical tensions, climate risks and interconnected crises. Yet many of the institutions responsible for managing these challenges were designed for a different era. The Raiffa Academy begins from the premise that scientific evidence alone is often insufficient. What matters equally is how uncertainty is understood, competing objectives are weighed, negotiations are structured and scientific knowledge is incorporated into policy decisions.

The three-day course combines methodological sessions with real-world case studies ranging from transboundary air pollution negotiations and Colorado River water allocation disputes to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Participants will examine how decision analysis, negotiation analysis and systems thinking can be applied to public policy, diplomacy and governance.

A highlight of the week will be the annual Howard Raiffa Lecture at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where former U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, now president-elect of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will speak on “The Ethics of National Security Decisions: Lessons from the Social Sciences.”

The inaugural course is intended as a pilot for a broader effort. Organizers hope to build a network of scientists, policymakers and advisers capable of applying decision-science tools to international challenges where uncertainty is unavoidable, interests diverge and the stakes are high. In that sense, the Raiffa Academy is an experiment in strengthening the analytical foundations of international cooperation itself.

Major processes to watch

WHO Pandemic Agreement — Negotiations move to the implementation phase

Negotiators gather in Geneva for the last week of the seventh meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement, which runs through Friday. Governments will continue work on one of the most difficult unresolved elements of the accord: the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex.

Adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2025, the Pandemic Agreement established a framework for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. But negotiators have yet to finalize the system governing how pathogen samples, genetic sequence data and resulting benefits, including vaccines, diagnostics and treatments, would be shared during future outbreaks.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that governments had hoped to complete the negotiations before this year’s World Health Assembly. Instead, talks have been extended as countries search for consensus on issues at the intersection of public health, equity, intellectual property and global access.

The negotiations will test whether governments can move from agreeing on broad principles to constructing the mechanisms needed to make the agreement operational.

U.S.-Iran diplomacy — Switzerland may host another round

Reports indicate that U.S. and Iranian negotiators could return to Switzerland in the coming week as regional mediators seek to stabilize a fragile diplomatic process following renewed tensions.

Although details remain uncertain, a new round of talks would place questions of nuclear governance, verification, monitoring and regional security back at the center of international diplomacy. Switzerland has already hosted direct discussions between the two sides this year and remains one of the most important venues for sensitive negotiations involving science, technology and security issues.

Whether diplomacy can regain momentum after recent setbacks remains one of the key questions to watch.

High-Level Political Forum — The SDG deadline approaches

The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development continues in New York through Wednesday, as governments assess progress toward the 2030 Agenda with less than five years remaining before the deadline.

This year’s review focuses on water and sanitation, energy, infrastructure and innovation, sustainable cities and international partnerships. Discussions center not on setting new goals but on accelerating implementation of existing commitments.

Inside institutions

IIASA — Building a new bridge between science and policy

Beyond the Raiffa Academy itself, the initiative reflects a broader effort at IIASA to strengthen connections between scientific analysis and decision-making.

The institute has long specialized in systems analysis and international scientific cooperation. The new program seeks to expand that tradition by incorporating decision analysis, negotiation science and emerging AI-enabled approaches into frameworks for public policy and diplomacy. Organizers describe the effort as a way of helping researchers, policymakers and negotiators work more effectively across the science-policy interface.

WHO — Multilateralism under pressure

The Pandemic Agreement negotiations have become one of the most visible tests of contemporary multilateral health diplomacy.

The challenge is whether they can agree on how benefits, responsibilities and access should be distributed when the next global health emergency emerges.

Security Council watch — Resources, governance and the causes of conflict

Congo is using its Security Council presidency to elevate an important question in international affairs: whether competition over natural resources is adequately addressed as a source of conflict and instability.

An Arria-formula meeting on Monday will examine what organizers describe as normative gaps linking natural resources and peace, while a high-level Council debate later this month will focus on “Natural resource governance: The foundation of peace, security and prosperity.”

The discussions come as governments place growing strategic importance on critical minerals, energy resources and industrial supply chains. While the Council traditionally focuses on conflicts after they erupt, Congo’s presidency is seeking to draw greater attention to governance failures, resource competition and institutional weaknesses that can contribute to instability long before violence begins.

Across regions

Paris — UNESCO takes stock of the Science Decade

UNESCO convenes the first Global Conference of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development this week, bringing together governments, researchers, industry leaders, civil society organizations and Indigenous knowledge communities to assess progress since the Decade’s launch in 2024.

The gathering comes as policymakers look beyond individual scientific breakthroughs toward broader questions of how science can support sustainable development, strengthen science-policy interfaces and inform the post-2030 development agenda. A high-level session on “Science diplomacy in action: governing global commons” highlights the growing role of scientific cooperation in addressing challenges that transcend national borders.

Two years into the Decade, the conference offers an opportunity to evaluate whether governments are translating commitments on science for sustainable development into concrete action.

Bangkok — The Montreal Protocol faces a new funding test

Negotiators meet in Bangkok for the Open-ended Working Group of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol as governments begin preparations for the next replenishment of the Multilateral Fund, the financial mechanism that helps developing countries implement the treaty.

Often cited as one of the most successful environmental agreements ever negotiated, the Montreal Protocol now faces a new challenge: maintaining momentum on ozone protection and hydrofluorocarbon phase-down efforts amid mounting fiscal pressures on both governments and multilateral institutions.

The discussions will help shape decisions expected later this year in Kigali, Rwanda, where countries will mark the tenth anniversary of the Kigali Amendment and consider the next phase of funding for one of the world’s most effective science-based international agreements.

Kingston — Deep sea mining negotiations enter another critical phase

The International Seabed Authority resumes negotiations in Jamaica over rules that would govern commercial mining of mineral resources in international waters, one of the most consequential unresolved questions in ocean governance.

Delegates continue efforts to balance competing pressures from countries and companies seeking access to critical minerals used in energy and technology systems and those calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause until environmental risks are better understood.

At stake is more than a mining code. The negotiations are viewed as a test of how the international system manages scientific uncertainty, environmental protection and resource competition in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Signals

• Institutions are investing more in decision-making capacity, not just scientific expertise.

• The hardest phase of global governance begins after agreements are reached.

• Access to data is becoming as politically contested as access to physical resources.

• AI is moving from a governance challenge to a governance tool.

• Resource governance is emerging as a central question in both security and sustainability.

• Infrastructure resilience is becoming a core governance challenge.

On the calendar

July 14–16 — Howard Raiffa Academy Short Course (Laxenburg, Austria)
Scientists, diplomats, policymakers and decision-analysis experts examine how analytical tools can support decision-making, negotiation and diplomacy under uncertainty. → Information

July 15 — Howard Raiffa Lecture: Avril Haines (Vienna)
The former U.S. Director of National Intelligence delivers a lecture on the ethics of national security decision-making and lessons from the social sciences. → Program

July 6–17 — Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement (Geneva)
Negotiators continue work on the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing annex to the Pandemic Agreement. → Information

July 14–23 — High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (New York)
Governments continue annual reviews of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. → Program

July 15–17 — Global Conference of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (Paris)
UNESCO convenes governments, researchers and other stakeholders to assess progress on the Science Decade and explore science-policy cooperation beyond 2030. → Information

July 13–31 — International Seabed Authority Annual Session (Kingston, Jamaica)
Delegates continue negotiations on rules governing potential deep-sea mining activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction. → Overview

Closing

You’re reading The Science Diplomat Playbook, a weekly briefing mapping the institutions, technologies and governance systems shaping international cooperation.

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GENEVA — The global economy depends on a network that most people never see.

Hidden beneath the oceans, hundreds of submarine telecommunications cables carry 99% of all intercontinental data traffic, connecting countries, financial markets, governments, cloud computing systems, hospitals, universities and billions of internet users around the world.

The cables are often described as the backbone of the internet. Despite their importance, they remain largely invisible outside a small community of engineers, telecommunications companies, regulators and maritime specialists.

An international advisory body convened by the International Telecommunication Union approved a final report on Friday aimed at strengthening the resilience of the global submarine cable network, concluding a two-year effort involving governments, industry, international organizations and technical experts.

The recommendations cover everything from faster repair procedures and improved monitoring to greater route diversity and protection for vulnerable regions. Behind the technical language lies a broader question: who is responsible for protecting one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the modern world?

The infrastructure beneath the infrastructure

Most people imagine the internet as something wireless. In reality, almost every international digital interaction eventually reaches a physical cable lying on the seabed.

A video call between Geneva and Washington. A financial transaction between London and Singapore. Cloud computing services used by a hospital in Nairobi. Data transfers supporting artificial intelligence systems. At some point, those communications are likely to travel through fiber-optic cables stretched across oceans.

The system has evolved dramatically since the first submarine telegraph cable was laid between England and France in 1851. Today the global network consists of hundreds of cable systems spanning more than a million kilometers and linking nearly every connected nation on Earth.

The cables have become so fundamental that their disruption can affect economies, emergency communications, government services and financial systems within minutes. “The resilience of submarine cable systems has become a matter of strategic importance,” the report concludes.

A wake-up call from Tonga

One event appears repeatedly in discussions about cable resilience.

In January 2022, the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, an underwater volcano, severed Tonga’s only international submarine cable. The island nation was effectively cut off from much of the outside world for five weeks while repair crews struggled to reach the damaged infrastructure.

Tonga's cable, put into use in 2013, was built with aid from the Asian Development Bank and World Bank. The damage to it exposed a vulnerability that extends far beyond the Pacific.

Many countries, particularly small island developing nations and other geographically isolated regions, remain dependent on only one or a small number of cable systems. A single break can leave entire populations disconnected. The problem is not limited to remote islands.

“Geographical concentration of infrastructure creates systemic vulnerabilities,” the report warns. “A substantial share of global traffic passes through a limited number of maritime chokepoints and major cable corridors. Disruptions in these areas can therefore affect connectivity across multiple regions simultaneously.”

As dependence on digital infrastructure grows, even a single cable break can have national and regional consequences.

Earlier this month, Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, told European officials in Brussels that maritime security is “extremely important” and cited Tyndall National Institute research about how to better protect cable systems off Irish coasts.

“What’s quite clear is that technology is going to play a key role here, particularly when it comes to protecting the undersea cables,” he said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaking during a visit to Ireland, also highlighted the need to strengthen maritime security but respect data protections. “I understand your question that we need a good balance between surveillance and privacy,” she told reporters, adding that new research on acoustic signals could help provide that balance.

Governance without a government

The submarine cable system presents a familiar challenge in global governance. Most cables are privately financed and operated. Governments regulate territorial waters and landing rights; international organizations establish standards and facilitate cooperation; and maritime authorities oversee navigation.

Repair ships move between jurisdictions while technical experts develop best practices and investors finance new routes. Responsibility is distributed across a complex ecosystem. No single government, company or international organization controls the global cable network.

The International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience was created in 2024 by the ITU and the International Cable Protection Committee, bringing together governments, industry representatives, regulators, academics and international organizations.

Its purpose was not to create a new regulatory regime. Instead, it sought to identify practical measures that different actors could implement to improve resilience across the system. The approach reflects a broader trend visible across many areas of technology governance: international coordination without centralized control.

The emerging risks

The report identifies several sources of vulnerability. Some are familiar. Fishing activity and ship anchors remain among the most common causes of cable damage. Natural hazards, including earthquakes and volcanic activity, also pose significant risks.

Others reflect changing technological and geopolitical realities. Repair times are increasing in some regions because of permitting delays, regulatory complexity and limited repair resources.

Climate-related threats are becoming more prominent as changing environmental conditions affect coastal infrastructure and seabed stability.

The concentration of global traffic through a limited number of routes creates systemic vulnerabilities that become more significant as societies digitize more aspects of economic and social life.

The report largely avoids framing these challenges through the lens of conflict or sabotage. Instead, it focuses on resilience — the ability of the network to continue functioning or recover quickly when disruptions occur.

“No region, country, or stakeholder can address the challenges we face alone. Cooperation is not an option; it is indispensable in an interconnected world,” the Advisory Body’s co-chairs Bosun Tijani and Sandra Maximiano, officials in Nigeria and Portugal respectively, wrote in the report.

Building resilience

The advisory body’s recommendations focus on several recurring themes.

Governments are encouraged to streamline permitting procedures for cable deployment and repair. Industry and public authorities are urged to improve coordination and information sharing. Greater route diversity and redundancy are identified as priorities for reducing dependence on individual cable systems or corridors. Investment is encouraged in underserved regions where resilience remains limited.

The report also emphasizes the importance of monitoring, preparedness and international cooperation. The recommendations amount to a governance agenda for an infrastructure system that has become indispensable but remains poorly understood outside specialist circles.

“A robust and efficient global repair system requires coordinated action across governance, financing, and operations,” the report notes, pointing to the need to “strengthen system-wide preparedness, accelerate incident response, and enhance the repair capacity of the global submarine cable ecosystem.”

One obstacle is that cable operators are often reluctant to share information about incidents and vulnerabilities. To address that problem, the report proposes a voluntary reporting system modeled partly on aviation safety reporting, where data can be shared without exposing commercially sensitive information.

The recommendation draws on approaches used by the International Civil Aviation Organization as well as cybersecurity and financial-sector reporting systems.

“By advocating for a voluntary, anonymized, and disassociated reporting mechanism,” the report says, “the proposed framework respects commercial and security sensitivities while addressing the urgent need for actionable source information.”

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GENEVA — For more than 160 years, the Red Cross emblem has conveyed a simple message on battlefields around the world: do not attack.

Displayed on hospitals, ambulances and humanitarian workers, the emblem signals protection under international humanitarian law. It helps identify those who care for the wounded and assist civilians caught in war.

Now, as warfare extends into cyberspace, the International Committee of the Red Cross is trying to carry that protection into the digital age.

At CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation on Thursday, the ICRC formally launched the second phase of its Digital Emblem Project, an initiative aimed at creating a digital equivalent of the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Crystal emblems for networks, servers and other digital infrastructure used by humanitarian and medical organizations.

“The front line is no longer confined to the physical battlefield,” ICRC Director-General Pierre Krähenbühl told a launch ceremony. “It extends into cyberspace and to the digital world where new threats to humanity continue to emerge.”

The launch marks a shift from concept to implementation. The next phase will focus on determining whether a digital emblem can function reliably under real-world conditions and become part of the international architecture governing conflict in cyberspace.

The initiative reflects growing concern that cyber operations affect the critical civilian infrastructure on which modern societies depend.

Hospitals now rely on networks, cloud services and digital records to provide care. Humanitarian organizations depend on digital systems to coordinate aid operations, manage logistics and reconnect families separated by conflict. As these systems have become essential, they have also become vulnerable.

“When that happens, the consequences are real,” Krähenbühl said. “Medical treatment is delayed, ambulances cannot be dispatched, families remain without news of missing relatives, aid cannot reach those who need it, and people suffer and lives may be lost.”

The battlefield expands into cyberspace

For the ICRC, the project is not primarily a technology initiative. It is an effort to preserve a humanitarian principle that predates the digital era by more than a century.

“For more than 160 years, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and more recently, the Red Crystal emblems have carried a very simple message in the midst of war,” Krähenbühl said. “This person, this vehicle, this building is protected. Respect them, protect them, do not attack them.”

“The power of these emblems does not come from the fabric on which they are printed or the paint with which they’re modeled,” he added. “It comes from a shared agreement grounded in international humanitarian law that certain people and objects must be spared because of the humanitarian and medical functions they perform.”

The challenge is that while those protections are visible in the physical world, no comparable mechanism exists in cyberspace.

“There is currently no universally recognized digital sign alerting those planning or conducting cyber operations that networks, servers, or digital services linked to medical or humanitarian activities are protected under international humanitarian law,” Krähenbühl said.

The Digital Emblem Project seeks to address that gap. Since 2020, the ICRC has worked with governments, cybersecurity experts, technology companies, standards bodies and academic institutions to explore whether the protective function of humanitarian emblems could be translated into the digital environment. The effort ultimately produced a prototype known as the Authentic Digital Emblem, or ADEM, which was demonstrated publicly during Thursday’s event.

From prototype to practice

The second phase of the project focuses on key practical questions. “Phase two, which we’re launching today, must now answer some hard questions,” Krähenbühl said. “Can the digital emblem operate reliably in real-world conditions? Can it be integrated into existing systems and operational processes? How should it be authenticated and verified? What forms of governance and authorization will be needed?”

The breadth of participation in the project underscores its unusual position at the intersection of humanitarian law, cybersecurity, diplomacy and internet governance.

Speakers at the launch included representatives from Microsoft, the International Telecommunication Union, Cloudflare, UNESCO, the Swiss National Cybersecurity Centre, the Global Cybersecurity Forum and the Internet Engineering Task Force, one of the principal organizations responsible for developing internet standards.

Swiss Ambassador Thomas Gürber, who represents Switzerland at the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, described the initiative as part of a longer historical evolution involving international humanitarian law, or IHL.

“The distinctive emblems have never been static,” he said. “From the cloth armband in the nineteenth century to the radio and light signals recognized in the 1977 Additional Protocols, the emblem and means to signal IHL’s special protections have always evolved with the technology of the time.”

“A digital emblem is simply the next logical step in this evolution, translating the same message of protection from fabric and radio waves into ones and zeros.”

Tomas Lamanauskas, deputy secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, argued that the project comes at a moment when both armed conflict and reliance on digital infrastructure are increasing.

“Civilians, hospitals, and humanitarian organizations increasingly depend on digital communications and infrastructure,” he said. “If humanitarian protection is to remain effective in an increasingly digital reality, it must be visible not only on buildings and vehicles, not only in armbands, but increasingly in digital systems and networks.”

Microsoft’s chief responsible AI officer, Natasha Crampton, said the project illustrates a broader challenge facing technology governance: turning principles into practical systems.

“The hard part is not usually naming the principles that the technology ought to reflect,” she said. “The harder work is in making those values real.”

For the ICRC, the Digital Emblem Project arrives at a moment when humanitarian protections face growing pressure from both technological change and geopolitical tensions.

“At a time of deep geopolitical tensions, when the respect for international humanitarian law is under immense strain, initiatives that bring states and other actors together around practical measures of protection are more important than ever,” Krähenbühl said.

Whether the digital emblem ultimately achieves widespread adoption remains uncertain. It will require cooperation among governments, militaries, technology companies, standards organizations and humanitarian actors. It will also depend on whether those conducting cyber operations choose to recognize and respect the protections it signals.

The ICRC argues that the effort reflects a larger challenge confronting international institutions: preserving humanitarian protections as warfare evolves beyond traditional battlefields.

“The distinctive emblem transformed a legal protection into a sign that could be recognized on the battlefield,” Krähenbühl said. “Our task now is to ensure that this protection can also be recognized in the networks and systems on which human lives increasingly depend.”

In the video above, Felix Linker, an independent consultant and postdoc at ETH Zürich, introduces the Digital Emblem for which he served as lead designer. (The Science Diplomat)

Season 1, Episode 6 —Tracey Brown on evidence, accountability, and the public interest

Evidence is often treated as something produced by experts and delivered to the public. Tracey Brown argues that the relationship works in the opposite direction as well: citizens have a responsibility to question, scrutinize, and demand the evidence behind decisions that affect their lives.

In this conversation, Brown, director of Sense about Science and founder of the Ask for Evidence campaign, reflects on two decades of efforts to strengthen transparency, accountability, and public access to scientific evidence. Drawing on campaigns ranging from clinical trial transparency to independent scientific advice in government, she discusses why evidence matters, how institutions earn trust, and what happens when uncertainty is manipulated for political purposes.

The conversation explores the limits of evidence in public decision-making, the dangers of polarization, the weaponization of uncertainty, the role of journalism as part of society’s evidence infrastructure, and the growing challenge of maintaining public trust when competing claims to evidence dominate political debate.

Themes covered:

• Evidence, accountability, and public trust

• Transparency in government and policymaking

• The weaponization of uncertainty

• Journalism, scrutiny, and public-interest information

• Clinical trial transparency and institutional reform

• Polarization, authority, and competing claims to evidence

Recorded on June 24, 2026.

Co-hosted by Amna Habiba, Bupe Chikumbi and John Heilprin.

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GENEVA — The United Nations concluded its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance by outlining an emerging approach to governing artificial intelligence built around scientific assessment, regulatory interoperability, capacity-building and oversight for increasingly autonomous AI systems.

The Dialogue built on the preliminary report released last week by the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, the first global body created to assess the technology's opportunities, risks and societal impacts.

“The scientific panel emphasized the shift from static to dynamic system governance,” U.N. technology envoy Amandeep Singh Gill said on Tuesday. As AI systems become more autonomous and capable of interacting with other systems, he argued, governance must evolve from overseeing individual models toward managing continuously changing AI ecosystems.

Gill said governments face growing risks from fragmented regulation, including regulatory arbitrage, accountability gaps, rising compliance costs and widening inequalities between countries with different levels of technical capacity. Rather than pursuing a single global regulatory framework, he argued, countries should develop interoperable approaches that allow different systems to work together while sharing evidence, testing methods and governance tools.

Secretary-General António Guterres opened the Dialogue by warning that AI was advancing “at runaway speed” and announced several initiatives, including an AI Child Safety Pledge, an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, recommendations for a Global Fund for AI and a Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building.

A debate over fragmentation

If there was a recurring theme during the second day of discussions, it was fragmentation.

Speakers warned that artificial intelligence is developing through a patchwork of national regulations, technical standards and voluntary frameworks that often struggle to communicate with one another. The concern was not simply legal complexity. Participants argued that fragmentation could shape who benefits from AI and who is left behind.

Gill described fragmentation as one of the central governance risks facing governments. Divergent regulatory systems, he said, can encourage companies to shift activities to jurisdictions with weaker oversight, complicate accountability when harms occur across borders and increase compliance costs for smaller firms and researchers. For lower-capacity countries, fragmentation can create a different challenge altogether: dependence on governance frameworks developed elsewhere.

Paula Bogantes Zamora, Costa Rica’s minister of science, innovation, technology and telecommunications, framed the issue in terms of influence. Citing data showing that advanced AI models and computing infrastructure remain concentrated in a handful of countries, she argued that technical concentration increasingly translates into governance concentration.

She proposed what she called “minimum viable interoperability” — shared terminology, comparable risk classifications, documentation standards and incident reporting systems that would allow countries to cooperate without requiring identical regulations.

Several speakers rejected the idea that interoperability should mean regulatory uniformity. Instead, a recurring theme was that countries would continue to pursue different legal and policy approaches to AI, while developing common mechanisms for information-sharing, testing, standards and cooperation across borders.

Who gets to govern AI?

Beneath the technical discussions about standards and interoperability lay a deeper concern about power.

Throughout the Dialogue, participants repeatedly returned to the concentration of computing resources, technical expertise and AI development capacity in a relatively small number of countries and companies.

According to figures cited during the discussions, institutions in the United States produced 59 notable AI models in 2025, while Chinese institutions produced 35. The rest of the world produced 13. Speakers also pointed to the concentration of advanced computing infrastructure and data center investment, particularly outside Africa and much of the Global South.

Members of the Scientific Panel warned that many countries remain largely absent from international AI governance discussions. Representatives from developing countries argued that the debate increasingly concerns not only access to AI systems but participation in the institutions that shape their future.

For much of the past several years, discussions focused on whether countries would gain access to advanced AI technologies. In Geneva, the conversation increasingly centered on whether countries would possess the expertise, infrastructure and institutional capacity necessary to influence how those technologies are governed.

From fire to AI

Several speakers argued that governance should extend beyond technical performance to questions of rights, accountability and public trust.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk noted that societies routinely require years of testing before approving medicines or certifying aircraft, and questioned why increasingly powerful AI systems should be treated differently.

Leonardo Cervera Navas, secretary general of the European Data Protection Supervisor, argued that governance should ultimately serve the protection of health, safety, privacy and fundamental rights.

Comparing AI to humanity’s earliest transformative technology, he said societies learned to benefit from fire only by establishing rules for its safe use and constant supervision.

“The E.U. embraces this technology and its potential for advancing science and general well-being,” he said. “And the fact that it comes with some clear risks does not mean that we should oppose AI.”

Rebecca Finlay, co-chair of one of the Dialogue’s thematic sessions, summarized the relationship between the Scientific Panel and the Dialogue in a phrase that surfaced repeatedly during the week.

“The panel provides the evidence,” she said. “The dialogue provides the direction.”

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Issue No. 12 | Monday, July 6, 2026

Good morning,

Welcome to The Science Diplomat Playbook, your Monday morning guide to what’s shaping the week ahead in global science diplomacy.

The lead

The global conversation about artificial intelligence moves from scientific assessment to political negotiation this week as governments, technology companies, researchers and international organizations converge on Geneva for a series of meetings that are helping define the emerging architecture of international AI governance.

More than 1,500 participants are expected for the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, a new United Nations process established by the General Assembly to provide a forum where governments and stakeholders can discuss international cooperation on artificial intelligence. The meeting follows last week’s release of the preliminary report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which warned that access to AI technologies does not necessarily translate into influence over the infrastructure, expertise, standards and governance systems shaping their development.

Now the political conversation begins.

The Global Dialogue takes place alongside the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum and the AI for Good Global Summit, bringing together many of the institutions, governments and organizations shaping the future of digital cooperation, technology governance and artificial intelligence.

Together, the three gatherings illustrate how the international system is beginning to organize itself around AI. WSIS provides the broader framework for digital cooperation and development. The Global Dialogue creates a new political forum for governments to discuss AI governance. AI for Good focuses on practical applications and implementation ranging from health and education to climate and development.

The week also follows the launch of the AI for Good Global Commission, a new high-level initiative bringing together heads of government, business leaders and U.N. officials under the co-chairmanship of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The commission aims to identify practical pathways for expanding access to AI while addressing questions of trust, governance and digital inequality.

The coming days will provide an early indication of how governments respond to the scientific panel’s findings, whether the Global Dialogue develops into a recurring intergovernmental process, and how the various institutions emerging around AI begin to relate to one another.

Major processes to watch

Global Dialogue on AI Governance — Governments enter the conversation

The inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance opens Monday in Geneva as governments, international organizations, companies, researchers and civil society groups gather to discuss international cooperation on artificial intelligence.

Established by the U.N. General Assembly, the Dialogue is intended to provide a dedicated forum where countries can exchange views on AI opportunities and risks, capacity-building, AI divides, human rights and governance. The meeting follows last week’s release of the preliminary report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence and represents the first opportunity for governments to collectively respond to its findings.

The Dialogue will provide an early indication of whether countries can begin building common approaches to AI governance despite differing national priorities, levels of technological development and regulatory philosophies.

AI for Good Global Summit — From governance to implementation

The AI for Good Global Summit opens Tuesday in Geneva, bringing together governments, technology companies, researchers and international organizations to examine how artificial intelligence can be applied to challenges ranging from health and education to climate change and sustainable development.

The summit follows last week’s launch of the AI for Good Global Commission, a new initiative co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff that brings together heads of government, business leaders and U.N. officials to identify practical pathways for expanding access to AI while addressing questions of trust, governance and digital inequality.

The Commission’s creation reflects growing efforts to move beyond discussions of AI risks and regulation toward questions of implementation, access and governance at scale.

WSIS Forum — Twenty years of digital cooperation

The World Summit on the Information Society Forum convenes governments, U.N. agencies, technical organizations, companies and civil society groups to assess progress on digital cooperation and the information society.

Established following the original WSIS process, the forum addresses issues including connectivity, digital inclusion, cybersecurity, digital development and internet governance. While artificial intelligence dominates many discussions this year, the forum provides the broader institutional framework linking digital development, technology governance and international cooperation.

Together with the Global Dialogue and AI for Good, the gathering helps illustrate how a broader ecosystem of AI and digital governance institutions is taking shape.

ICRC Digital Emblem Project — Humanitarian law enters cyberspace

The International Committee of the Red Cross launches the second phase of its Digital Emblem Project on Thursday at CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation, moving an effort to protect humanitarian and medical services in cyberspace from concept development toward operational implementation.

The project seeks to translate the protective function of the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Crystal emblems into the digital environment. The goal is to create a technical means for hospitals, humanitarian organizations and other protected entities to signal their protected status during cyber operations and armed conflict.

The next phase will focus on testing, adoption pathways and implementation. Participants include representatives from the ICRC, Switzerland, the International Telecommunication Union, Microsoft, Cloudflare, UNESCO and other organizations working on humanitarian law, cybersecurity and technology governance.

The initiative highlights a broader challenge confronting international institutions: how legal protections developed for the physical world can be adapted to digital forms of conflict.

High-Level Political Forum — The U.N. takes stock of the Sustainable Development Goals

The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development opens Tuesday at U.N. headquarters in New York as governments assess progress toward the 2030 Agenda with less than five years remaining before the deadline.

This year’s forum will review water and sanitation, energy, infrastructure and innovation, sustainable cities, and international partnerships. Thirty-six countries, including Switzerland, Brazil, Italy, Norway and the United Arab Emirates, will present Voluntary National Reviews outlining their progress, challenges and lessons learned in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.

The forum also will feature the release of the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, providing an updated assessment of global progress.

As with many U.N. processes this year, the central challenge remains implementation. With 2030 approaching, discussions are focused on how to accelerate progress rather than simply measuring it.

Inside institutions

Human Rights Council — Decisions and conclusions

The Human Rights Council resumes consideration of draft resolutions on Monday as its sixty-second session moves through a crowded agenda covering Sudan, Eritrea, Myanmar, humanitarian access in armed conflict, business and human rights, disability rights, education, disinformation, freedom of expression, judicial independence, gender equality and climate change.

Several items intersect directly with this week’s broader technology and governance agenda, including draft texts on disinformation, freedom of expression, business and human rights, and climate change.

The session’s final decisions will provide an indication of how human rights institutions are adapting to interconnected challenges involving conflict, information integrity, humanitarian access, climate impacts and emerging technologies.

UN Trade and Development — Following the investment flows

UN Trade and Development releases its World Investment Report 2026 on Tuesday, offering one of the year’s most comprehensive assessments of global investment patterns.

The report arrives as governments link economic resilience, technological competitiveness, industrial policy and national security. Particular attention is likely to focus on the distribution of investment between developed and developing economies, the concentration of capital in strategic sectors, and whether foreign direct investment is helping countries participate in emerging technological and industrial systems.

The findings will provide another measure of a question that runs through many international debates this year: who benefits from technological transformation, and who risks being left behind.

Security Council watch — Accountability, resources and the causes of conflict

Congo assumes the Security Council presidency this month with an agenda that links accountability, protection and resource governance—three issues that sit at the center of international security debates.

The Council’s work begins this week with a briefing on the International Criminal Court’s Darfur-related activities in Sudan and its annual open debate on conflict-related sexual violence under the theme, “Honouring the promise of international law to survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.”

Later in the month, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi is expected to chair a high-level debate on “Natural resource governance: the foundation of peace, security and prosperity,” while Secretary-General António Guterres is expected to brief. The Council will also discuss recommendations for strengthening mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes under a report requested through Resolution 2788.

The agenda reflects a broader question confronting the Council: whether addressing conflict requires not only responding to violence and violations of international law, but also tackling governance failures, resource competition and institutional weaknesses that contribute to instability in the first place.

Across regions

Brussels — Europe’s regions prepare for the post-2027 era

Officials, regional authorities and policy experts gather in Brussels this week for the Macro-regional and Sea Basin Strategies Days, an annual meeting focused on cross-border cooperation in eight European regional and maritime frameworks, including the Alpine, Danube, Baltic Sea, Adriatic-Ionian and Atlantic regions.

This year’s discussions are expected to focus heavily on the European Union’s next budget cycle and the shape of regional policy after 2027.

Organizers point to growing emphasis on security, resilience, competitiveness, enlargement and place-based implementation amid geopolitical tensions, climate pressures and economic transformation.

Workshops will examine issues ranging from enlargement and support for candidate countries to resilience, civil preparedness, green and digital transitions, and regional cooperation in Europe’s maritime basins.

House of Commons — Britain examines science diplomacy

The Foundation for Science and Technology, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee and Sense about Science host a discussion on science diplomacy on Tuesday as Parliament considers recommendations from a recent inquiry into the role of science in foreign policy.

The event follows a parliamentary inquiry examining how scientific research, international partnerships and foreign policy can be aligned to advance national interests and strengthen international relationships. Participants include committee chair Dame Chi Onwurah, former science minister George Freeman, Wellcome Trust Executive Director Charlotte Watts and former universities minister David Willetts.

It reflects growing interest among governments in treating scientific cooperation not only as a tool for addressing shared challenges but also as an instrument of foreign policy, technological competitiveness and alliance-building.

Signals

• AI governance is entering its political phase.

• Infrastructure is becoming the new source of influence.

• Implementation is replacing aspiration as the dominant theme of multilateral governance.

• Institutions are adapting existing rules to digital realities rather than building entirely new systems.

• Resource governance is emerging as a central security issue.

On the calendar

July 6-7 — Global Dialogue on AI Governance (Geneva)

The inaugural U.N. forum created by the General Assembly to enable governments and stakeholders to discuss international cooperation on artificial intelligence. → Information → Closing Sessions

July 6-10 — WSIS Forum 2026 (Geneva)

The annual World Summit on the Information Society gathering focused on digital cooperation, connectivity, development and technology governance. → Overview

July 7-10 — AI for Good Global Summit (Geneva)

ITU’s flagship event bringing together governments, companies and researchers to explore practical applications of AI for global challenges. → Program

July 7 — Launch of the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 (New York)

The United Nations releases its annual assessment of global progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. → Information

July 7 — U.K. science diplomacy discussion (London)

A House of Commons event exploring how science diplomacy can support international cooperation, alliances and technological competitiveness as Parliament considers recommendations from a recent inquiry. → Program

July 7-15 — High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (New York)

The U.N.’s principal annual review of implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. → Overview

July 7 — Security Council briefing on ICC Sudan (New York)

The International Criminal Court updates the Security Council on investigations and accountability efforts related to crimes in Darfur. → Information

July 8 — Security Council open debate on conflict-related sexual violence (New York)

A high-level discussion examining implementation of international law and protections for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. → Overview

July 9 — Global Launch of the Digital Emblem Project, Phase II (CERN, Geneva)

The ICRC unveils the next phase of its effort to extend the protective function of humanitarian emblems into cyberspace. → Program

July 9 — HLPF Science Day 2026 (New York)

A special forum exploring the role of science, technology and innovation in accelerating progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. → Program

Closing

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A new United Nations scientific assessment warns that artificial intelligence risks creating a new form of global inequality in which countries gain access to powerful technologies while losing influence over how those technologies are developed, governed and deployed.

The warning comes in the first preliminary report issued on Wednesday by the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, a group of 40 experts established by the U.N. General Assembly to provide scientific assessments of AI’s opportunities, risks and impacts.

The report depicts a world in which artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly while the capacity to govern it remains concentrated in a handful of countries and companies. The result, the panel warns, could be a widening gap not only in access to AI technologies but also in the ability to shape their future development.

“This report is the moment the world stops being able to say we did not know,” Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa, who co-chairs the panel with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, told a U.N. press briefing. “No expert today can promise that the most advanced systems will do what you instruct them to do,” she said. “This report is the common ground to act from.”

While much public debate has focused on AI safety, jobs and economic disruption, the report highlights a different concern: the growing concentration of AI capabilities in a small number of countries and companies.

“Access to AI tools alone does not produce equal benefit,” the report says. “Countries that rely on foreign models, cloud infrastructure and data pipelines may gain access to AI while losing practical control over its standards, safeguards and local fit.”

The finding points to one of the central governance questions of the AI era: who gets to shape the rules, standards and institutions surrounding technologies increasingly embedded in economic, political and social systems.

The report notes that the United States and China dominate the development of the most advanced AI models and much of the computing infrastructure required to train and deploy them. It warns that the concentration of AI capabilities in a small number of firms and countries could undermine democratic accountability and leave many nations dependent on technologies they neither control nor fully understand.

Bengio said the report is meant to ensure that policy decisions are informed by the best evidence available about how to establish global governance for “the growing intelligence of machines — and you have to realize that intelligence gives power.”

The concentration extends beyond companies to infrastructure. The report estimates that the United States accounts for roughly 75% of computing power among the world's 500 largest AI computing clusters, compared with 15% for China and 10% for the rest of the world combined.

“The gap between the haves and the have-nots is likely to grow, and I don’t think we’re taking the full measure of that,” Bengio said.

The report also notes that institutions based in the United States produced 59 notable AI models in 2025, compared with 35 in China and 13 across the rest of the world.

The imbalance is particularly significant because many governments lack the expertise needed to evaluate rapidly advancing AI systems.

“Most countries, including many advanced economies, lack the technical expertise to assess the most capable ‘frontier’ models or to participate meaningfully in their governance,” the report concludes.

More than 1 billion people now use conversational AI each week, according to the assessment, while the most advanced systems have achieved rapid gains on scientific and mathematical benchmarks.

One test designed to challenge frontier AI models saw top scores rise from 8% to 45% in just 16 months, while leading systems now correctly answer roughly 95% of questions on a PhD-level scientific reasoning benchmark.

The report surveys AI developments across seven areas, including scientific advances, economic impacts, security risks, human rights, democracy and governance. It argues that AI already offers significant opportunities in fields such as healthcare, education, agriculture and scientific research, while simultaneously creating risks that extend from fraud and cyberattacks to disinformation and political manipulation.

The panel warns that AI capabilities are improving faster than the evaluation methods, oversight mechanisms and governance frameworks needed to assess and manage the technology's risks. One chart included in the assessment shows frontier AI capabilities improving nearly twice as fast since April 2024. Another indicates that the complexity of tasks AI systems can complete autonomously has been doubling every 4.6 months since late 2024, a significant acceleration from earlier trends.

The assessment arrives as governments prepare to gather in Geneva next week for the inaugural U.N. Global Dialogue on AI Governance, where the panel’s findings will be presented to member nations. The meeting is part of a broader effort by the United Nations to build international mechanisms capable of responding to the accelerating development of artificial intelligence.

Speaking at the report’s launch with Ressa and Bengio, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the panel as “the first global, fully independent scientific body” dedicated to closing the world’s AI knowledge gap and assessing the technology’s impacts across economies and societies. He urged governments not to delay action as AI capabilities continue to advance.

“The more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome,” Guterres said. "The science is here. We can no longer say we did not know."

Facts, truth and trust

The report also highlights disparities in language access and digital infrastructure.

While generative AI systems perform well in English and other widely used languages, many languages remain poorly represented in training data and digital tools. More than 2 billion people worldwide remain entirely offline, limiting their ability to participate in AI-driven economic and social transformations.

The governance gap is similarly pronounced. According to the report, 118 countries, most of them in the Global South, are not participating in major AI governance discussions, while fewer than one-third of developing countries have adopted national AI strategies. The panel argues that countries lacking computing infrastructure, technical expertise and testing capacity risk becoming consumers of AI systems rather than participants in shaping them.

Guterres said the panel's findings underscore the need for broader participation in AI governance, arguing that countries must have the capacity not only to use artificial intelligence but also to help shape the rules governing it. He said he plans to present proposals aimed at helping nations build that capacity and share in the technology's benefits.

The panel argues that these disparities risk widening existing divides unless governments invest in computing infrastructure, AI literacy, technical expertise and local AI ecosystems.

Yet some of the report’s strongest language appears not in the assessment itself but in a separate message from Bengio and Ressa. “We are deeply concerned,” they wrote. “The race for competitive advantage is leading the world into risks whose magnitude is grossly underestimated.”

The two argued that AI development is increasingly concentrated among a handful of governments and companies, raising questions not only about technological leadership but also about political power.

“Concentration of capability is becoming concentration of political power,” they wrote. “The sovereignty of most nations is at stake.”

The report does not prescribe specific policies. Its mandate is scientific rather than political, providing governments with a shared evidence base rather than negotiating outcomes. But both the report and Guterres' remarks point toward the same conclusion: the next phase of AI governance may depend less on access to technology than on the ability of countries to understand, evaluate and influence the systems increasingly shaping their futures.

Ressa, whose journalism career has focused on disinformation and democratic resilience, framed AI governance as a challenge to information integrity itself. “Without facts, you cannot have truth. Without truth, you cannot have trust,” the co-chairs wrote. “Without these three, we have no shared reality.”

Editor’s Note: Decision Intelligence Briefs provide concise strategic analysis rooted in the legacy of structured decision science. Each monthly briefing maps emerging institutions, governance frameworks, strategic risks and opportunities shaping international scientific cooperation.

The introduction and strategic outlook are open to all readers. The full briefing and downloadable PDF edition are available to paid subscribers.

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Decision Intelligence Briefs | No. 2
The Science Diplomat
July 2026

How scientific knowledge enters policymaking

Mapping the institutions, networks, and mechanisms that connect expertise to decision-making.

Scientific knowledge rarely moves directly from researchers to policymakers. Between the production of knowledge and the exercise of political authority sits a largely invisible ecosystem of assessment bodies, advisory mechanisms, academies, policy institutes, and international networks that evaluate evidence, broker expertise, and translate scientific findings into forms that decision-makers can use.

This brief maps that institutional architecture and examines how scientific knowledge enters policymaking at national and international levels.

Strategic outlook

Three structural trends are reshaping the global landscape of science advice.

Governments are investing in science advisory capacity.

Countries are expanding the use of chief science advisers, advisory councils, and science-for-policy mechanisms to address complex policy challenges.

International organizations are strengthening scientific assessment systems.

From climate change and public health to artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, international institutions are relying more heavily on expert assessments to inform global governance processes.

Decision-makers are confronting growing uncertainty.

Rapid technological change, geopolitical tensions, and long-term systemic risks are increasing demand for institutions capable not only of generating evidence but also of helping leaders navigate uncertainty.

These dynamics are transforming science advice from a specialized advisory function into a strategic component of governance and international cooperation.

Why this Brief matters

• Governments rarely suffer from a shortage of information. The challenge is identifying which knowledge is relevant, credible, timely, and actionable.

• Scientific expertise reaches policymakers through a diverse ecosystem of advisers, academies, assessment bodies, expert panels, international organizations, and informal networks. Understanding how the systems operate helps explain how evidence enters decision-making and why some forms of knowledge shape policy while others do not.

🔓 Unlock the full Decision Intelligence Brief and download the print-ready PDF edition. Available with a paid subscription or team subscription.

Read more

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Issue No. 11 | Monday, June 29, 2026

Good morning,

Welcome to The Science Diplomat Playbook, your Monday morning guide to what’s shaping the week ahead in global science diplomacy.

The lead

Switzerland’s glaciers are reaching a threshold that extends beyond ice loss.

On Monday, Switzerland reaches what glaciologists call “Glacier Loss Day” — the point at which seasonal snow reserves have been exhausted and every additional liter of meltwater comes directly from glacier ice. Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research say the date arrives unusually early this year following a June heatwave, with melt patterns already resembling those recorded during 2022, the worst year on record for glacier loss in Switzerland.

The more consequential finding may be what scientists are now observing downstream. During the extreme summer of 2022, Swiss glaciers lost more ice than they did during Europe’s historic 2003 heatwave. Yet they contributed less meltwater to river systems. The explanation is simple: there is less glacier left.

For decades, Alpine glaciers functioned as natural reservoirs, releasing water during hot and dry periods. New research suggests that this buffering capacity is beginning to weaken. The question is no longer only how quickly glaciers are disappearing, but what happens when the ice reserves that have long supported rivers, agriculture, hydropower and ecosystems continue to shrink.

The week ahead highlights a similar question across international institutions: what happens when long-term trends become operational realities? From artificial intelligence and migration to trade, development and environmental governance, policymakers are increasingly focused on adaptation rather than anticipation.

Major Processes to Watch

Counterterrorism Week — The U.N. reviews a 20-year-old security framework

Counterterrorism Week opens at U.N. headquarters as governments prepare for the ninth review of the U.N. Global Counterterrorism Strategy, one of the world’s most comprehensive multilateral security frameworks.

Adopted by consensus in 2006 and reviewed every two years by the General Assembly, the strategy has evolved into a broad framework for international cooperation on prevention, capacity-building, human rights, border security, financing, online radicalization and emerging threats. This week’s review process includes the Fourth High-Level Conference of Heads of Counterterrorism Agencies, a General Assembly review involving all U.N. member states, and approximately 40 side events bringing together governments, U.N. entities, regional organizations, researchers, civil society organizations and private-sector representatives.

The timing is notable. The review comes as governments confront a threat landscape that differs substantially from the one that existed when the strategy was adopted two decades ago. Artificial intelligence, digital platforms, encrypted communications, drone technologies and other emerging capabilities are reshaping how security institutions assess risks and coordinate responses.

A dedicated session on the misuse of AI and emerging technologies reflects the growing prominence of technical expertise within international security discussions. Other sessions will examine terrorism in conflict-affected environments, networked forms of multilateral cooperation and preparations for the twentieth anniversary of the strategy in 2026.

For observers of international governance, the review offers a window into how governments are attempting to update a major global framework for a different technological and geopolitical era.

U.S.-Iran Technical Talks

The status of planned U.S.-Iran technical talks, initially expected to continue in Switzerland, may offer the clearest indication this week of whether the recently negotiated ceasefire framework remains intact.

The U.S. and Iran will “stand down” and technical teams are expected to meet Tuesday in Doha after several days of military exchanges threatened to derail the process, according to Axios, Reuters, and CNN. Discussions are expected to focus on implementation of the ceasefire framework, including arrangements governing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, while broader talks on other provisions of the agreement are expected to continue.

The talks follow a weekend agreement by Washington and Tehran to halt attacks and resume negotiations after both sides accused the other of violating the June 17 memorandum of understanding intended to end the conflict. Under that agreement, Iran committed to facilitate commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz while the United States agreed to lift its blockade of Iranian ports.

Whether negotiators can keep technical channels functioning may prove as important to the durability of the agreement as developments on the battlefield.

Inside institutions

International Telecommunication Union — AI governance moves into implementation

The ITU’s Joint Coordination Activity on Artificial Intelligence convenes Monday in Geneva.

The meeting brings together experts working across technical standards, governance frameworks and policy coordination. While public attention often focuses on AI regulation, much of the practical work now involves standards-setting, interoperability and institutional coordination among governments, companies and international organizations.

United Nations Trade and Development Commission — Development under pressure

The sixteenth session of the Trade and Development Commission opens at the Palais des Nations in Geneva this week.

Delegates will examine trade, development financing, economic resilience and structural challenges facing developing countries. The discussions come as many developing countries face the difficult task of financing development while coping with debt pressures, trade disruptions and rising demands for investment in energy, infrastructure and technology.

Human Rights Council — Multiple crises compete for attention

The Human Rights Council continues its sixty-second session in Geneva.

Monday’s agenda includes discussions on Venezuela, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Belarus, Myanmar and Nicaragua, highlighting the breadth of simultaneous crises confronting the international human rights system.

Security Council watch

The Security Council meets Monday morning on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.

Council members are expected to receive updates on Gaza, implementation of existing Council resolutions, settlement activity in the West Bank and broader efforts to sustain diplomatic progress. The discussion comes amid continuing debate over reconstruction, governance and long-term security arrangements.

Congo assumes the Council presidency on July 1.

The council also is likely to negotiate a Panama-authored draft presidential statement on cooperation between the Council and the Organization of American States, and to begin negotiations on a draft resolution, initiated by Greece, on the impact of digital technologies on violations against children in armed conflict.

Across regions

Portugal — Climate migration research broadens

Researchers gather this week at the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists in Carcavelos, Portugal.

Among the notable discussions, IIASA researchers will present new work arguing that climate migration research must move beyond identifying climate drivers of migration and focus more directly on adaptation, resilience and policy responses.

New research presented at the conference finds that simultaneous exposure to drought and violent conflict can nearly double migration aspirations, from an average of 23% to 45%, underscoring the importance of understanding compound risks rather than treating climate and security challenges separately.

European Union — Science diplomacy enters implementation

European diplomats continue adjusting to the newly adopted E.U. Framework for Science Diplomacy.

The framework reflects a growing effort to treat international scientific cooperation as a strategic foreign-policy tool while balancing research openness, economic competitiveness and security concerns.

Geneva — Marine biotechnology and sustainable development

The U.N. Global Seaweed Initiative holds its annual meeting this week, examining how marine biotechnology, scientific research and ocean governance can support economic development, food systems and climate resilience.

Signals

• Switzerland’s glaciers are beginning to reveal not only the pace of climate change but also its consequences for water systems.

• AI governance discussions are shifting from principles and declarations toward standards, coordination and implementation.

• Climate migration research is focusing more heavily on compound risks involving conflict, adaptation and resilience.

• Governments are devoting greater attention to how scientific and technical expertise is incorporated into security, migration and technology governance.

On the calendar

June 29 — ITU Joint Coordination Activity on Artificial Intelligence (Geneva)

Experts meet to coordinate standards, governance approaches and international cooperation related to artificial intelligence. → Information

June 29–30 — Fourth High-Level Conference of Heads of Counterterrorism Agencies (New York) → Overview

June 29–July 3 — Trade and Development Commission (Geneva)

Governments examine trade, development and economic resilience challenges. → Agenda

June 29–July 3 — U.N. Global Seaweed Initiative Annual Meeting

Researchers and policymakers discuss marine biotechnology, sustainability and climate resilience. → Overview

July 1–2 — Climate Change and Migration Sessions, World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (Portugal)

Researchers present new findings on climate migration, adaptation and compound risks. → Program

July 2 — UNIDIR: Due Diligence in Cyberspace (Geneva)

Discussion on how principles of state responsibility are being interpreted in cyberspace and international law. → Agenda

Closing

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GENEVA — The next secretary general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union says national parliaments will need to play a larger role in international governance as artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding and geopolitical tensions reshape the institutions that underpin international cooperation.

Speaking ahead of taking office on July 1, Anda Filip outlined a vision in which parliamentary diplomacy complements traditional diplomacy by giving legislators a greater role in addressing cross-border challenges ranging from armed conflict to artificial intelligence.

“We see parliamentary diplomacy as the fifth pillar of parliamentary action, alongside legislation, representation, government oversight and budgeting,” she told a press briefing at the U.N. in Geneva on Friday.

The concept lies at the heart of the IPU’s new 2027–2031 strategy, which calls for strengthening democratic institutions, reinforcing parliamentary diplomacy and deepening cooperation with the United Nations at a time when many multilateral organizations face growing political pressures.

Founded in 1889, the Geneva-based IPU brings together 183 national parliaments. Filip argued that its role has expanded as international disputes have become more difficult to resolve through traditional diplomatic channels alone.

She pointed to parliamentary dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian lawmakers, contacts involving Russian and Ukrainian parliamentarians, and four meetings between the speakers of the Armenian and Azerbaijani parliaments that she said helped reduce mistrust and sustain communication even during periods of political tension.

At the same time, Filip, a Romanian former diplomat who has worked at the IPU for more than 20 years, described democracy itself as coming under increasing strain.

Artificial intelligence, Filip argued, is becoming part of that broader democratic challenge.

She warned that generative AI has accelerated the spread of abusive content, manipulated images and deepfakes that disproportionately target women in public life. Women remain underrepresented in legislatures worldwide, while the number of younger parliamentarians has also declined, she said. Against that backdrop, Filip argued that artificial intelligence is creating a new barrier to political participation.

“This is clearly not just a technological issue, it also has to do with democracy, because it deters good candidates, especially young women, from entering politics,” said Filip, the first woman and the first Eastern European to lead the organization in its 137-year history.

The IPU currently monitors about 840 cases involving parliamentarians whose rights are alleged to have been violated, including arrests, intimidation, suspension from office and restrictions on political participation.

The issue, she argued, extends beyond regulating technology. Democracies must also ensure that digital intimidation does not narrow political participation or weaken representative institutions.

Filip said the IPU has already begun building what it sees as a parliamentary response to artificial intelligence. The organization adopted a resolution on AI last year and developed ethical guidance on science and technology. It is tracking legislative approaches adopted by national parliaments and is preparing further work through its e-Parliament initiative.

The IPU also plans to participate in the series of international AI meetings taking place in Geneva this summer, where governments, international organizations, researchers and technology companies are debating how artificial intelligence should be governed.

“More and more we are hearing that the only option going forward is to regulate,” she said, arguing that lawmakers increasingly need opportunities to exchange legislative experience as governments develop AI governance frameworks.

“Yes, we have regulations on tobacco, on alcohol consumption. I was a couple of weeks ago in Warsaw, where the Polish Senate organized a very interesting workshop with expertise on the relationship between AI and child protection,” she said. “So this is how we are trying to raise awareness, to encourage action, and to try to get the MPs to play a much more proactive role in tackling the challenges and the risks associated with AI.”

Filip was elected in April at the 152nd IPU Assembly in Istanbul with 72% of the votes cast in a single round. Hundreds of lawmakers from the IPU’s global membership took part in choosing her to succeed Martin Chungong of Cameroon, whose third and final term ends next week.

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LAXENBURG, Austria — When Barbados signed a letter of intent to join the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the move carried significance beyond research cooperation.

For Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, the partnership reflects a longstanding argument that countries on the front lines of climate change should play a larger role in shaping the knowledge systems that influence global decision-making.

“Barbados is proud to be joining IIASA at a time when our planet and our people need us to work together more urgently than ever,” Mottley said during a visit to the institute’s headquarters outside Vienna this week. “We have always believed that science must serve people: it must help make lives easier, economies more resilient, and the planet safer.”

The agreement launches Barbados’ path toward becoming IIASA’s 21st member and establishes a partnership focused on regenerative economies, climate resilience and systems analysis. It also gives one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries a direct voice in an international scientific institution whose models, scenarios and analyses help inform policy discussions on climate change, energy, food systems and sustainable development.

Just this month, IIASA welcomed Greece to its ranks through the Academy of Athens, Greece’s national academy and the highest research establishment in the country. IIASA said the addition, which had been in the works for two years, brought new opportunities to address global challenges and reinforced its own growing role as a platform for international scientific cooperation and science diplomacy.

“IIASA’s mission of transforming science into actionable knowledge for policymaking is completely aligned with the Academy’s enduring role in the service of society and humanity,” said Costas Synolakis, secretary of the Academy’s natural sciences division.

IIASA’s current list of 20 members includes Austria, China, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, Vietnam and a regional organization, SSARMO, with 18 participating African countries.

If completed, Barbados' accession would represent more than the addition of another member country. It reflects a growing effort by climate-vulnerable countries to participate more directly in the institutions that produce the scientific knowledge used to guide international policy.

The country transitioned from a constitutional monarchy to a parliamentary republic in November 2021, replacing the monarch of the U.K. as its head of state with its own president. In recent years, Barbados also has been at the forefront of championing innovative climate and debt relief solutions.

Amid calls by organizations such as the International Energy Agency for trillions of dollars more in annual clean energy investment by 2030, the Bridgetown Agenda proposed by Barbados’ government called for a transformation of the international financing system to include more emergency liquidity from the International Monetary Fund and multilateral lending by the World Bank, along with more spending for climate adaptation.

A small group of nations led by Barbados, France and Kenya also met on the sidelines of the 2024 annual spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington to push for more taxes on fossil fuel burning that developing nations could use to deal with climate shocks. And last year, at the U.N.-hosted at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development held in Seville, Spain, Barbados, France and Kenya said they will explore taxes on premium air travel and private jets.

A growing web of science diplomacy links

The agreement with IIASA positions Barbados as what both sides describe as a real-world testing ground for a regenerative economy, combining IIASA’s expertise in systems analysis, modeling and scenario planning with Barbados’ efforts to build resilience across food, energy, water, ecosystems, digital innovation and sustainable industrial development.

Yet the broader science diplomacy significance may lie in how the partnership reframes the role of Small Island Developing States, a group of countries that have long occupied the front lines of climate change.

For decades, international scientific institutions have often studied the challenges facing this group, comprised of 38 countries and 18 associate members that belong to U.N. regional commissions. Increasingly, however, countries such as Barbados are seeking to help shape the research agendas themselves.

IIASA’s announcement explicitly links the partnership to ensuring that small-island perspectives are not simply consulted but embedded in the analytical frameworks used to guide climate and development policy.

That distinction matters because institutions such as IIASA do more than conduct research. They help generate the models, scenarios and evidence that governments use to evaluate policy choices. Membership provides access not only to scientific expertise but also to the processes through which scientific priorities are established.

The partnership also reflects a growing interest in co-producing knowledge rather than treating science as something transferred from research institutions to policymakers. Barbados will serve as a “living laboratory,” according to the letter of intent, where systems analysis and policy design can be tested against real-world challenges facing a climate-vulnerable island economy.

“We would love to help and to team up with you, and to learn also with you on how to deal with mitigating and adapting to climate change,” IIASA Director General Hans Joachim “John” Schellnhuber told Mottley during one of their meetings.

For IIASA, the arrangement with Barbados extends ongoing work on regenerative economy research, applying its analytical tools to development strategies intended not merely to reduce environmental harm but to restore ecological and social systems.

The agreement comes as concern grows over the possibility of exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5° Celsius warming threshold. Small island nations are expected to be among the first to experience many of the consequences of climate overshoot, from sea-level rise and coastal erosion to disruptions in food, water and energy systems.

Supporters of the partnership argue that this makes small-island nations valuable sources of policy innovation rather than simply vulnerable recipients of assistance.

The collaboration builds on a series of exchanges between Barbados and IIASA. Schellnhuber traveled to Barbados in May to meet government, academic and diplomatic partners and explore opportunities for cooperation on resilience and innovation. Barbados Minister of Innovation, Technology, Energy and Commerce Jonathan Reid visited IIASA in April to discuss the foundations of the partnership. Full membership negotiations are expected to conclude in the coming months.

For small island states, access to advanced data modeling isn't just a technical asset, it is a diplomatic equalizer. According to Ambassador Matthew Wilson, Barbados’s permanent representative to the UN and WTO, joining IIASA provides the framework required to back up policy positions with data.

“When you are from a small, developing country with a small administration and small resources, you need to rely on partnerships to give you the evidence, essentially the ammunition, to be able to negotiate and engage based on facts and analysis,” said Wilson. “This membership gives us the tools, skills, and access to rigorous analysis that builds confidence in small delegations to stand behind their positions.”

Wilson added, "Barbados is a country that likes to follow the facts and follow the science. We believe in making decisions based on assessed and realistic analysis—when that happens, we are stronger for it and better able to persuade people based on reality."

Officials also envision links with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, creating what they describe as an emerging IIASA-Barbados-UNIDO partnership capable of combining science, innovation, artificial intelligence and sustainable industrial policy. The model, they argue, could eventually be adapted elsewhere in the Caribbean, Pacific, Indian Ocean and other small-island regions.

Among those who met with Mottley at IIASA this week was Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, who leads the Integrated Climate Impacts Research Group in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program, and has been a scientific advisor to small island nations for the past 10 years.

“Barbados joining IIASA comes at a critical moment, as a 1.5°C overshoot is becoming an emerging reality with serious implications for climate risks,” he said. “Bringing in a Small Island Developing State perspective is essential, not only because islands are among the first affected, but because they bring vital insights into the solutions, too.”