Season 1, Episode 9 — Jan Lüdert on science diplomacy, global power and the future of scientific cooperation

Science diplomacy is no longer simply a matter of governments using scientific cooperation to build bridges. As artificial intelligence, geopolitical competition and concerns about research security reshape international relations, a more fundamental question is emerging: who decides how science is conducted, shared and governed?

In this conversation, Jan Lüdert, Head of Programs at the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) in New York and co-editor with Martin Wählisch of the Palgrave Handbook of Science Diplomacy, examines how technological disruption and shifting geopolitical interests are transforming the field. Drawing on the handbook’s 28 chapters and contributions from 52 scholars and practitioners, he argues that science diplomacy must be understood through a broader network of governments, universities, international organizations, companies and other institutions that exercise different forms of authority.

A central theme is what Lüdert calls the polycentric nature of contemporary science diplomacy. Governments remain powerful, but they no longer control every element of international scientific cooperation. Universities shape research partnerships, companies own critical computing infrastructure, and international organizations help establish rules and standards. Understanding where authority, expertise and infrastructure reside is essential to understanding how science diplomacy works.

The discussion explores how this changing balance of power is playing out in artificial intelligence. Lüdert examines the growing influence of technology companies, the difficulty governments face in regulating rapidly developing systems, and the competing strategic interests that complicate international cooperation. He also considers whether science diplomacy can help establish accountability when responsibility is distributed among public and private actors.

Germany’s approach to science diplomacy provides another perspective. Lüdert describes how scientific cooperation, traditionally associated with soft power and bridge-building, is understood as an instrument of national interest and strategic capability. The conversation examines the implications for German-American and broader transatlantic research relationships, including cooperation with Canada amid changing political circumstances.

The episode also addresses the persistent underrepresentation of Global South scholars and practitioners in science diplomacy, the importance of following funding flows to understand who shapes research priorities, and the challenge of sustaining major scientific projects as public and private investment patterns evolve.

A major focus is the tension between open science and research security. Lüdert argues the two should not be seen as opposing goals. Instead, he advocates a risk-aware approach that protects scientific freedom while helping researchers and institutions recognize vulnerabilities over sensitive technologies, partnerships and research infrastructure. The discussion considers who should make those judgments and whether scientific cooperation should ever be suspended over security concerns.

Lüdert also reflects on the process of producing the open access handbook, which became more than a publishing project. Through workshops, institutional partnerships and public discussions, its contributors sought to build a lasting community of scholars and practitioners capable of examining science diplomacy through both empirical research and practical experience.

The conversation closes by looking a decade ahead. For Lüdert, the enduring purpose of science diplomacy is to connect scientific knowledge with better public decision-making and societal benefits. Even as competition and security concerns gain prominence, he argues international scientific cooperation remains indispensable for addressing challenges that cross national borders, from climate change to pandemics.

Themes covered:

• Science diplomacy in an era of geopolitical and technological disruption

• The Palgrave Handbook of Science Diplomacy

• Polycentric governance and the changing distribution of authority

• Artificial intelligence, corporate power and accountability

• Germany’s strategic approach to science diplomacy

• Transatlantic scientific cooperation and national interests

• Global South representation in science diplomacy

• Research funding, infrastructure and institutional influence

• Open science, research security and scientific freedom

• Managing risks in international research partnerships

• Building a global community of science diplomacy practitioners

• The future of scientific cooperation and evidence-based policymaking

Recorded on September 17, 2026.

Co-hosted by Amna Habiba, Anneliese (Lisa) Palmer and John Heilprin.

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In the basement of the U.N. refugee agency sits one of the world’s largest collections of humanitarian history. The shelves hold millions of pages documenting refugee movements, emergency responses, diplomatic negotiations and decisions stretching back to the agency’s creation in 1950.

They record not only what happened but how governments and humanitarian organizations responded, what worked, what failed and how international protection gradually evolved over three-quarters of a century. Yet this year, the archives themselves came under pressure.

Budget reductions, restructuring and office closures forced the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to scale back archival operations, reduce staffing and close its public reading room. UNHCR archivists warned that the danger extended beyond preserving documents.

Without continued organization, cataloguing, metadata and specialist knowledge, institutional memory itself begins to erode. An institution can preserve its records while gradually losing the ability to understand them. Information survives, but memory does not.

What survives depends on something relatively fragile: whether governments continue to believe these institutions perform functions that no one else performs as well. That begins with institutional memory, which can shorten learning curves, reducing mistakes.

As humanitarian organizations confront a new displacement crisis, they regularly consult earlier operations to understand legal precedents, registration systems, camp management, repatriation agreements and relationships with host governments.

The archives face pressure at the same time as the refugee system itself. A global Ipsos survey released with UNHCR during the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention found that 66% of respondents across 29 countries continued to support offering refuge to people fleeing war or persecution.

At the same time, 61% believed many asylum seekers were motivated by economic opportunity rather than a well-founded claim. UNHCR officials argued the central challenge was no longer defending the Convention's principles but ensuring that "the promise works in practice" through asylum systems that are fair, timely and credible.

The survey and the archives point to different dimensions of the same institutional problem. One asks whether governments can preserve knowledge accumulated over seventy-five years. The other asks whether they can preserve public confidence that the refugee system still functions as intended.

The same principle extends beyond humanitarian agencies. When governments adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, they committed themselves to 17 global objectives and a shared system for measuring progress. Over the past decade, the global SDGs database has expanded to include millions of observations.

Every indicator now has an internationally agreed methodology even as progress toward the goals continues to lag. Governments have proved better at preserving a common framework for measuring development than at achieving the goals themselves.

The contrast became more pronounced in 2026. The Sustainable Development Goals report concluded that only a small fraction of targets remain on track for achievement by 2030, with conflict, debt, climate pressures and shrinking development assistance slowing or reversing progress in many areas. Yet the statistical architecture continued to expand.

The shared database grew from roughly 330,000 records in 2016 to more than 3.2 million, while every SDG indicator acquired an internationally agreed methodology. Even as governments struggled to achieve common objectives, they continued investing in a common system for observing them.

The outcome illustrates an unusual form of institutional resilience. Governments often disagree about policy, but they continue to cooperate around evidence because shared measurement remains useful even when shared action becomes more difficult.

Authority represents another form of institutional resilience. Speaking to an audience in Geneva in July, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi observed that international organizations should not confuse authority with power. “You don’t have power,” he said. “You have authority.”

Authority depends less on mandates than on technical competence, credibility and trust. Governments invite inspectors, scientists and humanitarian organizations into politically sensitive situations because they believe those institutions can produce knowledge and judgments that others accept as legitimate.

Once credibility erodes, authority quickly follows.

Grossi argued that this distinction has practical consequences. Governments increasingly negotiate major conflicts outside multilateral institutions, he acknowledged, but international organizations continue to possess something governments cannot easily reproduce: authority rooted in technical competence and credibility.

"It's not because the U.N. exists that the U.N. will be called," he said. "The U.N. will be called if it has the credibility and the ability to add value to the peace negotiation."

The World Meteorological Organization's Early Warnings for All initiative highlights another dimension of institutional resilience: translating knowledge into action. Last year, the global push for climate resilience hit a new milestone with 60% of all countries reporting the adoption of a multi-hazard early warning system.

At last 119 nations had a coordinated system to warn residents about impending natural dangers, compared to only 56 nations in 2015, according to the WMO and the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Despite the progress, coverage and capability gaps persisted, underscoring the challenge of achieving the universal protection goal by 2027. Coverage was lowest in the Americas and Caribbean, and small island developing nations lagged significantly.

A significant systemic shortfall noted in the report was the lack of development in disaster risk knowledge, a foundational pillar of any effective warning system. Fewer than a third of all countries reported having adequate capabilities for risk knowledge, making it the least developed early warning pillar globally.

The findings suggest that resilience depends not only on scientific forecasting but also on institutions capable of translating forecasts into public warnings, emergency planning and coordinated response.

Institutions preserve value by maintaining functions that individual governments cannot easily reproduce on their own. They preserve institutional memory, maintain shared systems of evidence, provide expertise that governments trust and help translate knowledge into coordinated action.

Pressure exposes whether those capabilities survive even when budgets shrink, politics hardens and confidence weakens. Institutions that retain them preserve something larger than themselves: the possibility that governments facing the next crisis will not have to begin again from nothing.

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Issue No. 27 | Monday, October 19, 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

Governments gather in Yerevan, Armenia, on Monday for the first global review of their collective progress toward the 2030 biodiversity targets, confronting a new U.N. assessment that finds fewer than half of the national targets evaluated are on track.

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, running Oct. 19–30, will assess implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022 to halt and reverse nature loss.

Nearly 90% of the convention’s 196 parties have established national targets, but the latest assessment finds that existing commitments, even if fulfilled, would protect only 26% of land ecosystems and 12% of marine ecosystems by 2030, against a goal of at least 30% for both.

The negotiations will test whether governments can agree on measures to accelerate implementation, strengthen financing and improve the monitoring of results. Delegates will also address the Cali Fund, established to share benefits from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources, and scientific cooperation to help countries meet their commitments.

The review faces scrutiny beyond conservation policy. Independent U.N. human rights experts warned Friday that Indigenous peoples, local communities and environmental defenders remain inadequately protected and represented in biodiversity decision-making. They urged governments to ensure that the assessment measures changes on the ground rather than simply cataloging commitments.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, presenting the assessment in Yerevan last Thursday, called for greater financial and technical assistance to developing countries, reforms to environmentally harmful subsidies and closer integration of biodiversity protection into economic policy.

The conference’s decisions will affect conservation policy, agricultural and industrial practices, access to genetic information and the distribution of financial resources.

With four years remaining before the framework’s deadline, COP17 will show how far governments are prepared to move from national promises toward measurable environmental improvements.

Elsewhere this week, young professionals from Asia and Europe convene in Jakarta to develop a science diplomacy communiqué, the University of Vienna inaugurates a new international research center, and the Security Council votes on a resolution addressing digital technologies and violations against children.

Major processes to watch

Biodiversity — COP17 confronts the financing gap behind global nature targets

The U.N. Biodiversity Conference begins substantive negotiations Monday in Yerevan, following Sunday’s ceremonial opening. At the center of COP17 is the first collective review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with governments expected to consider measures to accelerate implementation before the 2030 deadline.

Governments are expected to consider recommendations on financing, scientific monitoring and institutional capacity, particularly for developing countries.

Financing is central to that discussion. The framework calls for mobilizing at least $200 billion annually from all sources for biodiversity by 2030, including at least $30 billion a year in international financial flows from developed to developing countries, while reducing environmentally harmful incentives by at least $500 billion annually.

Conservation advocates are pressing governments to establish interim financing milestones, address the relationship between debt and biodiversity loss, and involve finance ministries more directly in subsidy reform.

Governments will also consider how to make the Cali Fund operationally effective. Established to share benefits arising from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources, the fund has attracted limited contributions. Negotiations over contributions, incentives and benefit distribution will test whether the mechanism can deliver meaningful financial support to biodiversity conservation and the countries and communities that help sustain it.

Other agenda items include synthetic biology, scientific and technical cooperation, monitoring and indicators, and conservation measures affecting Indigenous peoples and local communities. U.N. human rights experts have warned that the review must measure meaningful environmental and social outcomes rather than simply count national commitments.

The outcome will depend on whether governments agree on concrete financing, regulatory and implementation measures to close the gap between the framework’s targets and results.

Science diplomacy — Asia and Europe give young professionals a diplomatic voice

About 60 young professionals working across science, technology and international relations gather in Jakarta this week to develop recommendations for strengthening science and technology diplomacy between Asia and Europe.

The Asia-Europe Foundation’s second Youth Summit on Science and Technology Diplomacy runs Oct. 19–24, in partnership with Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The summit follows a preparatory training program and brings together participants from more than 30 Asian and European countries.

Sessions will examine science diplomacy in ASEAN, Indonesia’s international research partnerships and the practical role of scientific expertise in foreign policy. Participants will also meet science attachés and advisers from diplomatic missions, providing opportunities to compare how governments organize scientific cooperation.

Their principal task is to negotiate a Youth Communiqué setting out shared priorities and proposals. Drafting sessions are scheduled for Thursday, followed by a presentation Friday at a UNESCO–ASEF Intergenerational Dialogue on Science Diplomacy involving diplomats, scientists and senior officials.

The dialogue will provide an opportunity to discuss how the recommendations could inform science diplomacy policy, training and professional practice. The communiqué will set out the changes participants believe governments and institutions should make to strengthen science diplomacy.

Research diplomacy — Vienna enters the competition for global scientific talent

The University of Vienna inaugurates its Vienna Centre for Advanced Studies (ViCAS) on Monday, welcoming 19 inaugural fellows from six continents to an interdisciplinary research program designed to bring international scholars together for extended periods of independent work.

The center attracted 1,729 applications for its first cohort, an acceptance rate of just over 1%. Fellows will spend nine months pursuing research across academic disciplines, with the institution supported through Austria’s 2025–27 funding agreement with the university.

The launch comes amid growing international competition for researchers as universities confront changing funding conditions, pressures on academic freedom and shifting patterns of scientific mobility. ViCAS represents a new Austrian investment in attracting international scholars and creating opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange.

The center’s leadership includes Barbara Prainsack, who also chairs the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, an advisory body to the European Commission.

Security Council watch — Digital threats to children and protection of medical missions

The Security Council opens Monday with a briefing on Haiti’s security crisis, including the work of the U.N. political mission and the Gang Suppression Force. Members are also scheduled to vote on a Greek-drafted resolution addressing the impact of digital technologies on violations and abuses against children.

The Council turns to the Central African Republic and Kosovo on Tuesday, followed by closed consultations Wednesday on implementation of a resolution concerning foreign forces, armed militias and government authority in Lebanon.

Council members will also continue negotiations on a Danish proposal to strengthen protection of medical missions in armed conflict, a measure with direct implications for international humanitarian law and healthcare delivery in conflict zones.

The week concludes with two meetings between Security Council members and the African Union Peace and Security Council: an informal seminar Thursday and their annual joint consultative meeting Friday. Discussions are also expected to continue on developments in the Middle East and northern Ethiopia.

Signals

Emerging weapons technologies enter disarmament discussions. The U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research holds two virtual discussions this week examining scientific developments across conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the impact of misleading information on conventional arms control.

European environmental treaties face a new round of scrutiny. The U.N. Economic Commission for Europe briefs journalists Tuesday on upcoming governing-body meetings under three international agreements covering transboundary air pollution, environmental impact assessment and industrial accidents.

Wildlife trade negotiators are progressing toward their next meeting. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora holds a Tuesday briefing ahead of its 81st Standing Committee meeting.

On the calendar

Oct. 19–30 — U.N. Biodiversity Conference, Yerevan, Armenia. COP17 and meetings of the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols consider biodiversity implementation, finance, genetic information and international cooperation.
→ Conference schedule

Oct. 19–24 — Asia-Europe Youth Summit on Science and Technology Diplomacy, Jakarta, Indonesia. Young professionals develop recommendations on scientific cooperation and international policy.
→ Summit information

Oct. 19 — Vienna Centre for Advanced Studies opening, Vienna, Austria. The University of Vienna introduces the inaugural cohort of 19 international fellows.
→ ViCAS website

Oct. 19–22 — WTO Committee on Trade Facilitation, Geneva. Governments review implementation of international measures intended to simplify and improve customs procedures. → Meeting agenda

Oct. 20 — UNIDIR discussion on science and technology developments across the disarmament spectrum, virtual. The session examines technological developments affecting conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. → Meeting agenda

Oct. 22 — Asia-Europe Youth Communiqué drafting and handover, Jakarta. Participants finalize their collective recommendations on science and technology diplomacy. → Summit program

Oct. 23 — UNESCO–ASEF Intergenerational Dialogue on Science Diplomacy, Jakarta. Young professionals present their communiqué and discuss its recommendations with diplomats, scientists and senior officials.
→ Summit program

Looking ahead — Oct. 27–28: COP17 high-level segment, Yerevan. Ministers and senior government representatives address political priorities for implementing the global biodiversity agreement.
→ Conference website

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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When a five-year international water quality project formally ends Oct. 31, Uganda will retain a national assessment, scientific models, trained specialists and new tools for monitoring the rivers and lakes on which its people and economy depend.

The Sustainable Water Quality Management Supporting Uganda’s Development Ambitions project, known as SWAQ-Uganda, brought together Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and BOKU University in Vienna.

Funded by the Austrian Development Agency and contributions from the three partner organizations, the €1.7 million initiative sought to address a fundamental obstacle to effective water management: the lack of reliable information about water quality. The project has produced a nationwide picture of river water quality.

“We can say that around 60% of the rivers are in a good state according to an assessment under the SDG framework,” said Mathew Herrnegger, a senior scientist and deputy head of the Institute of Hydrology and Water Management at BOKU. “As you know, around Kampala or cities, the river water quality is worse.”

IIASA led the project, applying water models designed to examine how climate change, land use, socioeconomic development and policy choices affect water quality and availability. BOKU and the Ugandan ministry’s Directorate of Water Resources Management were partners.

Field monitoring expanded the data available to IIASA and BOKU researchers, allowing them to set up and calibrate IIASA’s Community Water Model, known as CWatM, at the national level and the SWAT model for the Mpanga catchment.

Using new information about point and diffuse sources of pollution, they also developed and tested CWatM modules examining erosion, sediment flows and phosphorus — refining the models in a country where water quality data have been limited.

The project trained Ugandan specialists in data management, biological assessment and hydrological and water-quality modeling using R, RStudio and Python. It also strengthened relationships among IIASA, BOKU and Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment while giving researchers a better understanding of local data and water management needs.

Building on IIASA’s relationship of more than a decade with the Austrian Development Agency, the project expanded exchanges with Ugandan universities, government research institutions and the Nile Basin Initiative. Support for master’s and doctoral students, along with plans for further training, workshops and joint fieldwork, could lead to continued collaboration and co-authored research.

Those research exchanges, training programs and institutional relationships form the project’s science diplomacy dimension. For Uganda’s water managers, the partnership also produced practical tools to track pollution, assess river health and evaluate emerging risks associated with climate change, urbanization and agricultural expansion.

“The project led to the development of practical tools that strengthen the capacity of Uganda’s water experts within the ministry,” said Katja Kerschbaumer, head of the Austrian Development Agency’s development cooperation office in Uganda.

“These tools help them understand how pollution moves through rivers and lakes and how emerging threats such as climate change, urbanization and agricultural expansion can be better managed to ensure that Uganda’s water resources remain clean,” she said.

Officials and researchers presented the findings at an end-of-project national workshop hosted by Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment in Luzira, Kampala, in September.

Gilbert Kimanzi, Uganda’s commissioner for multipurpose and bulk water development, said the Mpanga work showed what restoration could accomplish. “Its findings have demonstrated the benefits of catchment restoration for the quantity and quality of water resources and for aquatic biodiversity in the Mpanga catchment,” he said.

The national and catchment-level field campaigns also produced a mapping tool, a water-quality data dashboard, methods for assessing and classifying rivers and a repository for water-quality data.

At the September workshop, Maj. Gen. Kahinda Otafiire, Uganda’s minister for water and environment, emphasized that the need for clean water would outlast the project. “Your project should not close now,” he said, UBC Television Uganda reported.

The ministry is seeking support from the Austrian Development Agency for a successor program that could sustain the monitoring system and expand lessons from the Mpanga catchment to watersheds across Uganda.

Researchers warned that pollution is worsening around Kampala and other urban centers, making continued monitoring increasingly important as cities grow and pressures from agriculture and climate change increase.

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For more than half a century, the nuclear nonproliferation regime has rested on a relatively stable bargain. Countries without nuclear weapons agreed not to acquire them. Nuclear-armed nations pledged to pursue disarmament. International inspectors verified compliance, while periodic review conferences allowed governments to adjust the regime as strategic conditions changed.

The institutions remain. The bargain has become much harder to sustain.

The 2026 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons ended without consensus for the third consecutive review cycle. Governments clashed over Iran, disarmament obligations, regional conflicts and the future of deterrence. They also struggled to incorporate questions that barely existed when the treaty entered into force in 1970: artificial intelligence, military automation and the interaction between conventional and nuclear systems.

Vietnam’s U.N. ambassador, Do Hung Viet, who served as conference president, said delegates had engaged in “honest reflection on the current situation” but could not overcome their differences.

“And in the meantime, a nuclear arms race is, I guess, on the horizon,” Viet said. “We are seeing the modernization of nuclear arsenals, we are seeing the quantitative increase in some nuclear arsenals as well.”

Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N. high representative for disarmament affairs, warned that confidence was eroding in the treaty and its Article VI, which legally binds all member nations to pursue good-faith negotiations to halt the nuclear arms race and achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

“Non-proliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin,” she said. “It is simply wrong for nuclear weapon states to assume that nonproliferation obligations will just be adhered to without nuclear weapon states’ commitment and implementation of disarmament commitment under Article VI.”

The NPT was built around an enduring bargain: prevent the spread of nuclear weapons while gradually reducing those that already exist. The principle remains the same even as the strategic environment changes.

Nuclear competition is no longer defined primarily by two superpowers, familiar delivery systems and bilateral arms control agreements. China is expanding its arsenal. North Korea is a nuclear-armed nation outside the treaty. Iran is a focus of disputes over enrichment and verification. Cyber operations, hypersonic weapons, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence affect deterrence, warning systems and the speed at which political leaders may have to make irreversible decisions.

The pressure forces governments to ask whether the assumptions that once made it workable still describe the world the treaty is expected to govern. The same question confronts the United Nations Security Council.

Its founding bargain was explicit. The victorious powers of the Second World War received permanent seats and veto authority because their participation was considered indispensable to maintaining international peace. The structure privileged agreement among the major powers over equal representation among member nations.

More than 80 years later, the Council still gives permanent seats to China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Ten rotating seats are shared among every other country. Africa and Latin America lack permanent representation.

At the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi, African leaders again called for a Council that better reflects contemporary demographics and political realities. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country holds a permanent seat, supported stronger African representation and renewed calls for permanent members to refrain from using the veto in cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and large-scale war crimes.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres argued that the imbalance now affects more than representation.

“The Security Council that today does not represent the geographical realities of the world — with three European permanent members, one North American and one Asian, and no African and no Latin American — is obviously a Security Council that has a problem of legitimacy,” he said. “And that brings with it a problem of effectiveness.”

The Council’s mandate has not changed. Nor has the underlying principle that major powers must participate in any credible collective security system. What has changed is the distribution of political, economic and demographic power beyond the countries that designed the institution in 1945.

That creates a paradox. The founding bargain preserves the Council’s authority while making meaningful reform extraordinarily difficult, because the countries whose privileges would change have the power to block those changes.

The office of the secretary-general illustrates another version of the same pressure.

For much of the United Nations’ history, the role centered on diplomacy among governments, conflict mediation, humanitarian coordination and management of the international civil service. Those responsibilities remain but many of the problems now confronting the organization emerge from scientific and technological change rather than traditional international politics.

Climate change, AI, biotechnology, quantum technologies, cybersecurity, pandemic preparedness and space governance blur the traditional boundary between technical expertise and political diplomacy.

Former U.N. Geneva Director-General Michael Møller argued that the next secretary-general will need to do more than manage today’s crises.

“You need a leader who has a very clear vision of what the future might be or what it takes to harness the system and to reform the system in such a way that for the next 20, 30, 40 years we are going to come with a structure that is actually going to help ensure that humanity has a grip on that future,” he said.

The International Science Council has made a similar argument, urging the United Nations to make scientific knowledge a permanent component of multilateral governance rather than an occasional input into political negotiations. The pressure is institutional. A position created to manage relations among governments is expected to guide decisions about scientific and technological systems that cross borders and traditional diplomatic mandates.

Climate change puts comparable pressure on international law.

For decades, governments addressed global warming mainly through political negotiations, national commitments and specialized climate agreements. In 2026, however, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice concluding that nations’ existing obligations under international law extend to protecting the climate system.

The Assembly welcomed the opinion as “an authoritative contribution to the clarification of existing international law” and urged governments to comply with those obligations.

Led by Vanuatu and other vulnerable island nations, the initiative sought to frame climate change as an environmental and economic challenge and a question of legal responsibility. The court concluded that failure to take appropriate action could constitute an internationally wrongful act and that countries harmed by climate change could, under some circumstances, be entitled to reparations.

Supporters argued that established principles of state responsibility, human rights and environmental protection already provided the necessary legal foundation. Opponents argued that the court and the General Assembly were extending obligations beyond those governments had explicitly accepted.

The disagreement reflects a broader question confronting many international institutions. One side views reinterpretation as necessary if longstanding principles are to remain meaningful under new conditions. The other sees the same process as expanding institutional authority without renewed political consent.

Pressure falls not only on rules but on the bargains that gave those rules legitimacy. The NPT must respond to technologies and strategic relationships that did not exist in 1970. The Security Council must justify a distribution of authority inherited from 1945. The secretary-general’s office must integrate scientific expertise into a role conceived around traditional diplomacy. International courts must decide whether longstanding legal principles apply to planetary challenges their authors never contemplated.

Institutions survive pressure by persuading governments that their original charters are still capable of organizing cooperation in a very different world.

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Issue No. 26 | Monday, October 12, 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 world’s leading climate science body meets in Addis Ababa this week with a consequential decision still unresolved: whether its next major assessments will be ready in time to inform international climate negotiations in 2028.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opens its 65th plenary session Monday after nearly three years of disagreement over the timetable for its Seventh Assessment Report. The dispute has divided governments over how quickly the scientific reviews should be completed and whether a faster schedule would disadvantage researchers from countries with fewer resources.

The scientists leading the IPCC’s three working groups have proposed completing their reports by September 2028, ahead of the next global stocktake under the Paris Agreement. But countries including India, China, Kenya, Russia and Saudi Arabia have pressed for more time, arguing that researchers from developing countries need sufficient opportunities to contribute.

According to a Reuters investigation published Friday, some participants believe the timetable is being used to delay findings that could increase pressure for stronger climate action. Others argue that aligning the assessments too closely with international negotiations could compromise the IPCC’s independence.

The disagreement reaches into the foundations of science diplomacy. The IPCC does not conduct original research. It brings scientists from around the world together to assess existing knowledge, with governments participating in the approval of major findings. Its authority depends on both the scientific credibility of its assessments and the legitimacy of the international process behind them.

Governments are expected to assess collective progress under the Paris Agreement in 2028, including the adequacy of emissions reductions and climate financing. Without an updated IPCC assessment, those negotiations could proceed without a comprehensive scientific review of developments since the previous assessment cycle.

The Addis Ababa agenda also includes a review of the IPCC’s principles and procedures, consideration of artificial intelligence in its assessment processes, and decisions on its budget.

Elsewhere this week, the World Health Summit examines the future of international health cooperation in Berlin, the IMF and World Bank convene in Bangkok, and Geneva hosts meetings on emerging technologies, refugee protection and sustainable cities.

Major processes to watch

Climate — The IPCC confronts its assessment timetable

The IPCC’s 65th plenary runs Monday through Friday in Addis Ababa, hosted by Ethiopia and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

The central decision concerns the work plan for the Seventh Assessment Report. The panel’s provisional annotated agenda calls for a decision on the timetable for reports from its three working groups, covering the physical science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and options for limiting emissions.

The meeting will also consider possible next steps in reviewing the IPCC’s principles and procedures and examine the role of artificial intelligence in its assessment processes.

Financial decisions are on the agenda as well. Governments will consider a revised 2026 budget and proposed 2027 budget, with forecasts for 2028 and 2029.

The outcome to watch is whether governments can settle the assessment timetable, and what any compromise would mean for the availability of scientific evidence during the 2028 climate negotiations.

Global health — Berlin examines financing, governance and pandemic preparedness

The World Health Summit continues Monday and Tuesday in Berlin, bringing together political leaders, scientists, international organizations, civil society and the private sector to examine the future of global health cooperation.

The summit’s organizers identify fragmentation, overlapping initiatives, declining development assistance and concentrated decision-making power as major weaknesses in the international health system.

They cite OECD figures showing that total official development assistance fell 23% in real terms in 2025, with 26 of 34 OECD members reducing their budgets. The decline adds pressure to discussions about the financing of international health institutions and the ability of lower-income countries to sustain essential services.

One unfinished international process is the WHO Pandemic Agreement. Its annex on pathogen access and benefit sharing remains unresolved, leaving questions about how countries will share pathogen materials and sequence information, and how benefits arising from their use will be distributed during future health emergencies.

Sunday’s program included a discussion with prospective candidates for WHO director-general and the launch of findings from the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health. Another session examined the resilience of healthcare in Ukraine and other crisis settings.

The summit’s six central themes also encompass health equity, AI and data-driven health systems, conflict-related damage to healthcare, and environmental threats including climate change and antimicrobial resistance.

The remaining discussions will examine how scientific evidence, financing and institutional reform can support international health cooperation under increasingly difficult political and economic conditions.

Science diplomacy — Geneva anticipates the next technological challenges

The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) holds its Anticipation Summit Wednesday and Thursday, with a program devoted to scientific breakthroughs and their implications for international governance.

The summit opens with the launch of the 2027 Science Breakthrough Radar, which maps advances expected to shape societies over the next five, 10 and 25 years.

Wednesday’s sessions address the geopolitics of science, the engineering of living systems, neurotechnology and increasingly autonomous AI-enabled machines.

The program includes the first meeting of a collaborative global network to address the security risks of advanced AI that has both civilian and military uses. Workshops will examine quantum diplomacy, responsible brain-computer interfaces and new foundations for global AI governance.

Thursday brings discussions of commercial activity in space, quantum biology, emerging therapeutics, and AI’s implications for science and society.

The World Intellectual Property Organization and GESDA will also examine future scenarios for quantum computing and intellectual property rights. Other workshops address how governments can anticipate scientific breakthroughs and the use of foresight in bioethics.

GESDA says its Science Breakthrough Radar draws on the cumulative contributions of more than 2,400 scientists in over 90 countries starting with the 2021 edition. The summit’s central challenge is to turn those assessments of emerging technologies into practical cooperation among governments, research institutions and industry.

The meeting takes place as Switzerland prepares to host the AI Summit Geneva 2027. The developments to watch are the priorities identified in the new Radar and whether the summit’s institutional initiatives produce concrete plans for international action.

Global economy — AI, energy and debt dominate the Bangkok meetings

The IMF and World Bank hold their Annual Meetings October 12–18 in Bangkok, bringing finance ministers and central bank governors together amid economic pressures from technological change, energy prices and public debt.

In an October 7 speech ahead of the meetings, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva identified the rapid expansion of AI, persistently high energy prices and record public debt as three major forces affecting the global economy.

She said AI hardware and related technology products now account for more than one-tenth of global goods trade, with investment concentrated in countries that produce or deploy advanced computing infrastructure.

Georgieva warned that this concentration could widen economic disparities between countries benefiting from the AI investment boom and those with limited access to the necessary infrastructure, capital and skills.

AI is also increasing demand for energy at a time when high prices are already putting pressure on households, businesses and government budgets.

Tuesday’s program includes publication of the October 2026 World Economic Outlook, titled Resilience under Strain, Urgent Choices, and the Global Financial Stability Report, titled Resilience, Risk, and Transformation.

Other sessions examine AI’s effects on Asian labor markets and the use of digitally connected public finance systems.

The meetings offer an opportunity to see how international financial institutions are incorporating technological access, AI-related investment risks and energy constraints into their economic assessments and policy recommendations.

Refugees — UNHCR considers its next budget and protection priorities

The UN Refugee Agency’s Executive Committee meets Monday through Friday in Geneva for its 77th session.

The agenda includes consideration and adoption of UNHCR’s 2027 program budget, reports on administrative oversight and evaluation, and discussions of refugee protection across major regions.

Side events address the evidence supporting protection policies, statelessness, the Sudan regional crisis, and the integration of education, health, social protection and economic inclusion into national systems.

One session, “50 by 35: Sustaining the evidence for action,” places evidence directly on the agenda of an international humanitarian institution confronting major operational and financing demands.

The budget deliberations and discussions of national systems will help determine how UNHCR approaches its protection responsibilities in the coming year.

Security Council watch — Healthcare protection and U.N. leadership

The Security Council opens its week Monday with briefings on Colombia and Syria, followed Tuesday by discussions of the Great Lakes region and closed consultations on escalating hostilities in northern Ethiopia.

Council members are also continuing negotiations on two draft resolutions with direct implications for science and health diplomacy: a Danish proposal to strengthen protection of medical missions during armed conflict and a Greek initiative addressing the impact of digital technologies on violations against children in armed conflict.

Wednesday brings a vote on renewing Haiti’s sanctions regime, a briefing on Libya and an Arria-formula meeting on Ukraine organized by Russia. The Council holds its quarterly open debate on the Middle East Thursday, followed by a briefing on Sudan Friday.

Friday also brings the sixth straw poll in the selection of the next U.N. secretary-general, an important step in determining the future leadership of the international organization.

Signals

• The IPCC examines AI in scientific assessment. Governments meeting in Addis Ababa will consider a document on the role of artificial intelligence in IPCC work, bringing questions about emerging technology directly into the governance of international scientific assessment.

  The U.N. Forum of Mayors faces a mandate review. Mayors meeting in Geneva are expected to adopt an outcome document on sustainable urban development while UNECE bodies separately review the forum’s terms of reference. The review concerns the future institutional role of local governments within this U.N. process.

  Geneva wins the 2029 global space congress. The International Astronautical Federation has selected Geneva over Houston and Barcelona to host the 80th International Astronautical Congress in 2029 at Palexpo. The decision brings a major international gathering of space agencies, researchers and industry leaders to Geneva during the 60th anniversary year of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

On the calendar

Oct. 11–13 — World Health Summit, Berlin. Global health governance, pandemic preparedness, health financing, scientific evidence and the future of international health cooperation. → Program

Oct. 12–16 — IPCC 65th Plenary Session, Addis Ababa. Governments consider the Seventh Assessment Report timetable, institutional procedures, AI in scientific assessment and the panel’s budget. → Agenda

Oct. 12–18 — IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings, Bangkok. Global economic prospects, financial stability, AI, energy prices and public debt. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook and Global Financial Stability Report are scheduled for Tuesday. → Schedule

Oct. 12–16 — UNHCR Executive Committee, Geneva. The agency’s 77th session considers its 2027 program budget, oversight and refugee protection priorities. → Schedule

Oct. 12–13 — U.N. Forum of Mayors, Geneva. Mayors meet under the theme “Cities Delivering for a Sustainable Future,” with an outcome document on sustainable urban development expected. → Program

Oct. 14–15 — GESDA Anticipation Summit, Geneva. Launch of the 2027 Science Breakthrough Radar and discussions on the geopolitics of science, AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, neurotechnology and space governance. → Program

Oct. 15 — Les Nocturnes de GESDA, Geneva. A public evening of science, art and debate following the Anticipation Summit. → Program

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Rhiannon Van Vliet works at the intersection of research and policymaking. In the Policy Impact Unit at University College London, she helps academics and researchers across UCL and its Faculty of Engineering turn research into something policymakers can use.

Originally from Melbourne, Van Vliet moved to London two and a half years ago. Her work spans science diplomacy, local government and space policy — three areas connected by a recurring question: how researchers can engage with policymakers and have an impact.

When we spoke, the conversation kept returning to people, and whether the right ones were in the room together.

1. You’ve worked across science diplomacy, local government and space policy. What actually carries over between them, and what doesn’t?

“The connecting threads across all three, particularly for my work, are related to policy engagement and impact,” Van Vliet said.

The three fields “might not share an exact playbook or common policy area,” she said, but her role across them is similar: identifying where research can influence policy and helping researchers engage with the people making those decisions.

Science diplomacy and space policy also overlap substantively. Van Vliet describes science diplomacy as a broad process encompassing the ways science and diplomacy interact, whether through cooperation or competition.

Space makes that tension particularly visible. International and multilateral bodies help govern activity beyond national borders, while nations decide when to collaborate and when to protect their own strategic interests.

Local government operates at a different level, but Van Vliet sees connections between local, national and international policymaking. Climate diplomacy offers one example: decisions made internationally can eventually affect electricity bills, infrastructure or flood risk locally.

“When you kind of tease them out and peel back the layers, there are lots of different policy issues, challenges and opportunities that connect all three,” she said.

2. Research security has become a major challenge for science diplomacy. Where do you see the U.K. positioned in balancing openness to international collaboration against protecting sensitive research?

“It’s a core issue for science diplomacy, research and practice,” Van Vliet said.

She describes the U.K. approach as one of “critical engagement,” similar to the European Union’s principle of remaining as open as possible while being as closed as necessary. Where research falls on that spectrum depends partly on the field, a calculation made more difficult by technologies with potential dual uses.

The U.K.’s Research Collaboration Advice Team is one mechanism for navigating that problem, advising universities and researchers on protecting national security interests and intellectual property while maintaining international collaboration.

But research security cannot be understood solely as a national issue.

Van Vliet pointed to restrictions on scientific collaboration with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions were foreign-policy decisions, she said, but they also disrupted scientific relationships and access to research, including climate data that matters internationally because of Russia’s geography.

Her answer ultimately comes back to communication between two professional communities.

“The key thing that we’re trying to suggest through science diplomacy is you need to have scientists and diplomats together in a room having a conversation about the implications,” she said.

Scientists need to understand the geopolitical environment surrounding their research, she said, while diplomats need researchers who can explain what their work involves and how foreign-policy decisions may affect it.

3. There are a lot of competing definitions of science diplomacy. In your own words, how would you define it?

“I would say science diplomacy is a broad umbrella term for processes, research, practice that seeks to understand how science and diplomacy and foreign policy interact,” Van Vliet said.

For her, the important point is that the term itself is neutral.

“You can have international science collaboration, net positive relationships. You can also have strategic and more competitive relationships.”

That includes climate negotiations as well as how nations approach emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

“It captures a lot, which I think is not confusing, but it makes the concept a bit harder to grasp,” she said. “But if you see it as a broad umbrella, that really helps break down why we need to be talking about science and diplomacy in the same conversation.”

4. You recently helped build an AI toolkit for knowledge exchange. What prompted that, and what does it actually do?

The problem was practical. After a knowledge-exchange workshop brings academics and policymakers together, producing a report can take two or three weeks.

“By that stage, the policymaker’s moved on to the next big issue,” Van Vliet said.

Her team developed a process using AI to produce a workshop report the following day. In one case, she said, a participant took the report into a meeting with other stakeholders the next morning and used it.

Van Vliet draws a boundary around the technology’s role.

“We adopt an approach to AI to help innovate our work, not do the work for us, but enhance how we connect with policymakers,” she said.

Academic policy engagement depends on relationships and trust, she said, regardless of how efficiently technology can process information.

“There are actual people involved, and humans are at the centre of it, because at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships.”

That requires maintaining “that kind of human in the loop aspect to our work,” she said.

5. You’ve moved from Melbourne to London. How has working across the two countries’ policy systems shaped how you think about the science-policy interface?

Australia and the U.K. share similar governmental traditions, Van Vliet said, but their research and policy ecosystems operate at different scales.

The biggest difference she has noticed is the infrastructure connecting universities and policymakers.

“Since I’ve been in the U.K. for two and a half years, we have a much more established academic policy engagement community in the U.K.,” she said. “I think Australia is moving in that direction, but it’s not as established as the U.K.”

She does not see that as a difference in the quality of research. Australian universities produce strong research and many have substantial relationships with government. Rather, the U.K. has developed a larger professional community specifically devoted to translating academic research into policy engagement.

Each country also brings different pressures to the relationship between research and government, she said, including Australia’s exposure to climate change and geopolitical position.

Her experience in both systems has convinced her of the value of creating permanent positions between researchers and policymakers.

“I would love to see policy engagement specialists embedded in universities,” Van Vliet said. “I’ve only seen the net positive of what that can do in universities across the U.K.”

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. 5
The Science Diplomat
October 2026

The future before it happens

How foresight and anticipatory governance prepare institutions for emerging risks.

No institution can predict the future. Yet governments, international organizations, businesses and research institutions make decisions every day that depend on assumptions about what the future may hold.

Technological, political, environmental and economic changes often begin before their consequences are clear. Institutions may have years to respond, or discover only later that important choices have already narrowed.

Foresight addresses that challenge by providing structured methods for exploring multiple possibilities, identifying emerging risks and opportunities, testing assumptions, and improving decisions before choices become urgent. Its value lies in what institutions do differently after considering what may lie ahead.

This Brief examines how strategic foresight is used by governments, international organizations, research institutes, and businesses. It explores the methods, institutions, and practices that help decision-makers look beyond immediate pressures, anticipate possible change, and make better decisions about futures they cannot reliably predict.

Strategic outlook

Several trends affect how institutions prepare for the future.

Foresight is becoming part of how institutions work.

Governments, international organizations, research institutes, and businesses are creating dedicated foresight programs and units. Their work informs long-term planning, policy, investment, and assessments of emerging risks.

Preparation matters more than prediction.

Forecasts remain useful, but their reliability declines when the conditions on which they depend begin to change. Foresight examines possible futures and asks how decisions made now might fare under each of them.

Institutions need to change course when the world changes.

A strategy built around one set of assumptions can fail when those assumptions change. Scenario exercises allow institutions to examine how policies, investments, and plans might hold up under different conditions and where they may need room to adjust.

Why this Brief matters

Many significant policy failures begin when institutions recognize change too late, underestimate its consequences, or fail to act on what they already know.

Artificial intelligence, pandemics, climate risks, geopolitical competition, demographic change, and technological disruption develop over time. Decisions made today can shape outcomes years or decades into the future. Institutions, however, operate under immediate political pressures, budget cycles, and operational demands that can make longer-term thinking difficult.

Strategic foresight gives decision-makers a way to examine an emerging issue before a response is needed. It can expose assumptions, explore different futures, and show how a choice made today might fare under changing conditions.

This Brief examines what happens when institutions try to put that thinking into practice, from the ICRC’s work on a digital humanitarian emblem and the Open Quantum Institute at CERN to emerging approaches to technology governance at the OSCE and United Nations.

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

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Only a week after governments met in Geneva for the United Nations’ first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in early July, representatives of 29 countries gathered in Shanghai to launch the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.

The two meetings addressed many of the same technologies and global risks but reflect differing political traditions, institutional cultures and assumptions about how international governance should develop. As a result, their approaches diverged sharply.

The U.N.'s discussions centered on scientific assessment, international coordination and capacity building. It emphasized broad multilateral coordination through the U.N. system.

The Chinese-led organization focused instead on its own membership, governance structure and vision for how artificial intelligence should be governed. It created a new intergovernmental organization built around sovereignty, development, technology cooperation and stronger representation for countries in the Global South.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called the organization an “important milestone” in the history of AI development, which, he said, “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.”

The immediate question became what happens when different systems begin governing the same technology at the same time.

International governance has often responded to pressure by creating new institutions rather than replacing old ones. Existing organizations remain in place while new coalitions, partnerships, technical bodies and regional arrangements emerge alongside them. The result is less a single system than an expanding ecosystem of institutions with overlapping mandates.

Artificial intelligence may become the clearest example yet. At the Global Dialogue in Geneva, participants repeatedly rejected the idea that every country should adopt a single global regulatory model. Instead, discussions focused on interoperability: ensuring that different national and regional systems remain capable of working together despite different legal traditions and political priorities.

“The scientific panel emphasized the shift from static to dynamic system governance,” U.N. technology envoy Amandeep Singh Gill said. 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.

Paula Bogantes Zamora, Costa Rica’s minister of science, innovation, technology and telecommunications, framed the issue in terms of influence and argued that technical concentration 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.

That approach accepts institutional diversity while trying to prevent fragmentation. The challenge is practical as much as political. Divergent standards can create regulatory arbitrage, encourage companies to move activity toward less restrictive jurisdictions, increase compliance costs and leave lower-capacity countries dependent on systems they had little role in shaping.

Multiple institutions can expand experimentation, distribute expertise and allow governments to cooperate in different political configurations. The difficulty begins when institutional diversity becomes institutional rivalry.

Not every response to pressure creates a new institution. Sometimes governments connect institutions that previously operated separately. Rather than creating a new climate institution, governments are beginning to connect existing ones. Kenya, Germany, the U.N. Development Program and the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund launched the Nairobi Toolkit to help governments integrate climate risks into efforts to prevent violent extremism.

The initiative grew out of the Global Counterterrorism Forum rather than the U.N. climate process, bringing together climate, development and security communities that traditionally operated separately.

Ghana's U.N. Ambassador Samuel Liao Kuma emphasized that climate change does not directly cause terrorism but can deepen hardship, displacement and instability that extremist groups exploit. UNDP's Catherine Wong noted that communities most affected by violent extremism “are the same communities that are affected by climate change as well."

Instead of creating another institution, the initiative linked several existing governance systems around a problem that no longer fit neatly within any one of them.

Elsewhere, pressure is playing out inside existing institutions rather than creating new ones. During the Human Rights Council’s emergency session on Sudan, nations were divided over the purpose the institution should serve: whether it should primarily reinforce state sovereignty or strengthen international accountability.

European countries argued for expanding the International Criminal Court’s mandate and extending the U.N. arms embargo to all of Sudan. China opposed those proposals, arguing that the Council’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission had been established without Sudan’s consent. Russia and several other delegations likewise emphasized sovereignty over additional international scrutiny.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime illustrates yet another outcome. The institution remains intact, but governments disagree about what it should accomplish. The 2026 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ended without consensus for the third consecutive review cycle, exposing deep divisions over Iran, disarmament and the future of nuclear deterrence. The treaty itself remains the foundation of the global nonproliferation system, but governments could no longer agree on a common political roadmap for strengthening it.

Conference president Do Hung Viet described delegates as having engaged in “very honest reflection on the current situation,” but acknowledged they could not bridge widening geopolitical differences. U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu warned that governments must “take this third time failure very seriously if they want to preserve this regime.”

At an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference in Geneva, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis argued that multilateral institutions could no longer afford to remain reactive.

For OSCE, the meeting also pointed to a broader institutional question: how a security organization created during the Cold War adapts to an environment shaped by military competition and territorial conflict along with algorithmic systems, cyber operations and technologies developed largely outside traditional state structures.

"Technology will not wait for us. Geopolitics will not slow down," Cassis said. "If we want to remain relevant, we must anticipate, not react."

Institutions are multiplying because governments are searching for forums capable of responding to different kinds of problems at different speeds. The challenge is whether those institutions remain connected closely enough to exchange evidence, coordinate standards and avoid hardening into competing systems.

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Issue No. 25 | Monday, October 5, 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 future of international scientific cooperation is on the agenda in Kyoto this week, as governments, scientists, research institutions and companies meet amid growing geopolitical pressure on the relationships that underpin global science.

The annual Science and Technology in Society Forum runs through Tuesday under the theme “Navigating Tectonic Shifts in Science, Technology, and Society.” Discussions range across artificial intelligence, energy and biomedical science, but also address digital sovereignty, trust in science, international scientific cooperation and the future of science diplomacy.

The meeting has already produced a diplomatic initiative. The United States and 16 other countries on Sunday endorsed the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science, a joint declaration calling for changes in how research is funded and organized, greater investment in scientific talent and expanded use of what the declaration calls “super intelligence” in scientific research.

The terminology, introduced by President Trump at the U.N. General Assembly last month as a replacement for “artificial intelligence,” has since been adopted across the U.S. executive branch.

The declaration encourages governments to experiment with funding mechanisms including long-duration awards, rapid grants, prizes and challenges, as well as new institutional models for research. It also calls for wider researcher access to AI tools, scientific data, computing infrastructure and experimental facilities.

The stakes for international science are considerably less abstract in Kyiv.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the badly damaged headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on Sunday, a week after a Russian drone strike killed at least two people there.

The academy has said it has no connection to military activities and called the strike “an attack on science.” It went further in its response last week: “There can be no ‘science is above politics’ when science is under armed attacks.”

Merz’s visit puts the damaged academy directly into the diplomacy surrounding the war, as questions about protecting Ukrainian science move beyond the scientific community and into relations between governments.

Elsewhere this week, the global space community gathers in Antalya; sustainable finance takes over several days of the Geneva calendar; the Human Rights Council concludes its 63rd session; and the Security Council begins work under the Greek presidency.

Major processes to watch

Ukraine — An attack on science enters wartime diplomacy

The response to last week’s Russian strike on the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine has moved beyond the scientific community.

Merz and Zelenskyy visited the damaged academy Sunday during the German chancellor’s trip to Kyiv, as Russian strikes continued across the capital. Merz used the visit to call on Russia to end the war and halt attacks on civilians.

The stop was part of a visit that also included German commitments of additional military and energy support. Ukraine’s principal scientific institution has spent years trying to sustain research through war, displacement and damage to scientific infrastructure.

Last week, the academy argued that the attack challenged the idea that science could remain separate from the conflict. European scientific organizations and governments condemned the strike. This week, the visit by Merz puts the protection of Ukraine’s scientific institutions more visibly into high-level diplomacy.

The question extends beyond repairing one building. Ukraine has spent years trying to preserve researchers, laboratories, institutions and international research relationships during the war, while confronting the longer-term task of rebuilding what has been lost.

Space — Antalya puts international cooperation alongside an expanding space economy

The International Astronautical Congress opens Monday in Antalya, bringing space agencies, government officials, scientists, astronauts and companies together for five days of scientific, commercial and policy discussions.

This year’s theme, “The World Needs More Space,” addresses both the expansion of activity beyond Earth and the rules needed to keep space secure, sustainable and accessible as more countries and private companies participate.

International cooperation runs through the program. Discussions include new models for Earth-observation cooperation involving government and commercial satellite fleets, priorities and partnerships for lunar science, and the use of satellite observations in decision-making.

The meetings around the congress broaden that agenda. A U.N.-International Astronautical Federation workshop focuses on using space technologies to strengthen economic resilience in emerging nations, while ministers and parliamentarians meet alongside space agencies, researchers and industry.

There will also be institutional business to watch. On Wednesday, the International Astronautical Federation and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are expected to sign an agreement and present the initial framework for the 2028 Global Space Exploration Conference.

Friday is reserved in part for late breaking news: major missions, discoveries and other significant developments emerging close enough to the congress that they could not be incorporated into the regular program.

Kyoto — Science diplomacy examines its operating environment

The STS Forum continues Monday and Tuesday with science diplomacy itself among the subjects under discussion.

Sessions on digital sovereignty, trust in science and international science and technology cooperation run alongside discussions of artificial intelligence, energy and health. The Kyoto Vision announced Sunday gives those discussions a governmental counterpart, with 17 countries endorsing changes in research funding, institutions, AI access and scientific training.

Other discussions address cooperation across political divisions and how international scientific relationships function as governments place greater emphasis on technological sovereignty and security.

Security Council watch — Africa leads the Council’s week

The Security Council opens its substantive work Tuesday with its annual briefing on cooperation with the African Union, against the backdrop of renewed fighting in northern Ethiopia.

Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, the U.N. special representative to the African Union, and A.U. Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security Bankole Adeoye are expected to brief. Council members are also monitoring Ethiopia after large-scale hostilities resumed in September across Tigray, Afar and Amhara.

Western Sahara follows Wednesday and Thursday, including consultations with U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura, while the Council votes Thursday on extending the Sudan sanctions regime. Yemen is on the agenda Friday.

Council members are also expected to continue negotiating a Danish draft resolution on protecting medical missions during conflict.

Friday, the Council’s Military Staff Committee is expected to discuss Lebanon and preparations for the transition associated with the closure of UNIFIL by Dec. 31.

Signals

• Digital technology is entering the Security Council’s children-and-war agenda. Greece has introduced a draft resolution on the impact of digital technologies on violations against children in armed conflict, with Council members expected to continue negotiations.

• Satellite data are moving onto financial balance sheets. Building Bridges will examine how Earth observations and analytics can be turned into rapid agricultural-risk information for insurers, lenders and investors after droughts, conflicts and market shocks.

• Banks are starting to scrutinize the AI supply chain. A Geneva discussion this week asks how lenders should assess human-rights risks among data-center and AI clients, extending scrutiny from the minerals used in servers through to banks’ own use of AI.

On the calendar

Oct. 4–6 — Science and Technology in Society Forum, Kyoto. Government officials, scientists, research institutions and companies meet on the international implications of scientific and technological change, including the future of science diplomacy. → Program

Oct. 4–10 — International School on Science Diplomacy, Erice, Italy. Diplomats, international officials, academics and researchers gather for the second edition of a week-long program on the foundations, actors and future practice of science diplomacy. → Program

Sept. 7–Oct. 7 — Human Rights Council, 63rd session, Geneva. The Council concludes its month-long session Wednesday. → Meeting information

Oct. 5 — Protecting Human Rights of Seafarers, Geneva. OHCHR, ILO, IMO, governments, employers and seafarer representatives discuss protections for seafarers stranded, abandoned or detained during armed conflicts and crises. → Overview

Oct. 5–6 — Water Convention Bureau, Geneva. The Bureau of the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes meets. → Members

Oct. 5 — Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions briefing, Geneva. The conventions’ secretariat begins preparations for the 2027 chemicals and waste COPs, scheduled for April 19–30 in Panama. → Meeting

Oct. 5–9 — International Astronautical Congress, Antalya, Turkey. Space agencies, governments, researchers and companies meet for the 77th IAC, with international cooperation, space sustainability and an expanding global space economy among the issues in focus. → Program

Oct. 6–8 — Building Bridges 2026, Geneva. Sustainable finance discussions cover climate and disaster resilience, nature, emerging markets and the use of technologies including Earth observation and AI in investment decisions. The program includes sessions on converting satellite observations into agricultural risk information and using AI to assess nature-related risks at the asset level. → Program

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The Russian drone strike that severely damaged the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine has drawn condemnation from the French government and scientific organizations across Europe, raising fresh concerns about the protection of scientific institutions during armed conflict.

Anatoly Zagorodny, president of the academy, said Tuesday that it had no connection to military activities and described the strike as “an attack on science.”

The academy condemned the attack in unusually stark terms, challenging the idea that scientific cooperation can remain separate from war. “Science has become a target. And the world has seen it,” the academy said. “There can be no ‘science is above politics’ when science is under armed attacks.”

Monday’s attack in Kyiv killed at least two people and injured several others, according to Ukrainian officials and international scientific organizations. Rescue operations continued after the strike amid ongoing aerial threats.

France’s ministers for foreign affairs and for higher education, research and space issued a joint statement condemning the attack and reaffirming their support for Ukraine’s scientific community.

Germany’s National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina expressed solidarity with its Ukrainian counterpart, saying it condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms.”

“This attack is part of a series of Russian strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine, intended to terrorize the population. Since the start of the war, numerous scientific, university and cultural institutions have been hit by Russian missile and drone attacks,” it said. “Attacks on such institutions are attacks on the foundations of society and constitute a clear violation of international law.”

ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, also described the strike as an attack on a place of learning and research.

A Western European science diplomacy official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity because of possible professional repercussions, said the strike is likely to deepen concern about the vulnerability of scientific institutions during war. Attacks on academies, universities and research facilities can damage national research capacity and disrupt the international networks connecting scientists across borders, the official said.

The statements pose a dilemma for a science diplomacy community that often presents scientific cooperation as a way to maintain dialogue during political conflict. Continued engagement may protect researchers, knowledge and communication across borders. But scientific institutions under attack may reject calls to place cooperation above the political and military circumstances threatening their work.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, universities, laboratories, museums and other institutions of research, education and culture across Ukraine have suffered extensive damage.

Ukraine’s academy has remained involved in international research partnerships throughout the war, working with scientific institutions across Europe and beyond. Governments, academies and research funders have created support programs intended to preserve Ukraine’s research capacity, maintain collaborations and assist displaced scientists.

The Sept. 28 strike has focused attention on scientific institutions not only as centers of research and international exchange, but also as potential targets during war. The academy’s declaration that science can no longer stand “above politics” leaves scientific organizations with a difficult question: What does continued cooperation mean when one national scientific community says it is under attack?

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When the International Committee of the Red Cross unveiled the second phase of its Digital Emblem Project at CERN in July, its challenge was to make humanitarian protections visible in cyberspace rather than rewrite international humanitarian law.

The digital solution the ICRC is pursuing depends on a remarkably broad coalition. Microsoft is helping develop the project. The International Telecommunication Union supports its technical evolution. The Internet Engineering Task Force, Cloudflare, cybersecurity specialists, governments and humanitarian organizations are all expected to contribute to standards, testing and implementation.

The ICRC provides the legal legitimacy and humanitarian mandate. International humanitarian law already protects hospitals, medical workers and humanitarian organizations during armed conflict, and for more than 160 years the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Crystal emblems have made those protections visible on battlefields around the world. The challenge was translating that authority into an operational system capable of functioning across the global internet.

The problem extends beyond the Digital Emblem. International institutions can set rules, establish legitimacy and coordinate governments. Scientists and standards bodies have technical expertise; private companies have digital infrastructure. The result is a separation between those with authority and those with the capacity to act.

"We are not here to announce a finished solution. We are here to launch a collaborative process,” ICRC Director General Pierre Krähenbühl told participants, explaining that humanitarian protection in the digital age "must be built collectively."

Achieving that goal, he said, requires cooperation among "states, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, armed forces, humanitarian and medical organizations, technology companies, cybersecurity experts, standards bodies, academic institutions, and others."

Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton described the relationship differently. "States, humanitarian organizations, and international humanitarian law provide the foundation," she said. "Industry can help translate that foundation into practice through technical dialogue, standards development, and adoption pathways that work across complex digital ecosystems."

The International Telecommunication Union’s work on submarine cable resilience offers another example. Nearly all internet traffic passes through cables crossing the ocean floor that underpin financial markets, scientific collaboration, diplomacy, military communications and cloud computing, but most are privately financed, owned and operated across jurisdictions. Governments regulate aspects of the system.

The ITU coordinates international cooperation. Engineers, shipping companies, insurers, telecommunications firms and navies all share responsibility for keeping the network functioning.

“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 International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience’s co-chairs Bosun Tijani and Sandra Maximiano, officials in Nigeria and Portugal respectively, wrote in the report.

Public institutions continue to provide legitimacy, accountability and political representation. Private companies control much of the computing infrastructure and engineering expertise on which modern governance depends. Standards bodies shape interoperability. Scientific communities evaluate rapidly changing technologies.

The same separation between authority and capability also shapes one of the world’s oldest systems of international verification.

When the United States and Saudi Arabia announced a new civilian nuclear cooperation agreement in July, attention quickly turned to what role the International Atomic Energy Agency would ultimately play. The IAEA has the inspectors, laboratories and technical expertise needed to verify that civilian nuclear programs remain peaceful, but it is unable to make use of them on its own. Governments determine which safeguards they will accept, when inspectors are admitted, and what access the agency receives.

The agreement immediately raised questions because published reports indicated Saudi Arabia would not be required to adopt the IAEA's Additional Protocol, the agency’s enhanced inspection framework for detecting undeclared nuclear activities. At the same time, the administration had not released the text of either the cooperation agreement or the bilateral safeguards accord, leaving unresolved how U.S. oversight would relate to the IAEA’s multilateral verification system.

The episode illustrated a recurring feature of international governance. The IAEA’s authority derives from decades of technical expertise and international confidence in its verification system. Whether that capability can be exercised depends on political decisions made by countries.

If the Digital Emblem and submarine cables illustrate institutions depending on outside capabilities, humanitarian organizations demonstrate how those capabilities can be incorporated without surrendering institutional responsibility.

The World Food Program showed how satellite imagery and machine learning can assess earthquake damage across an area the size of Greece within a day, allowing relief agencies to identify the hardest-hit communities far faster than traditional surveys.

In partnership with the German Aerospace Center, it is adapting technology originally developed for planetary exploration into remotely operated vehicles capable of delivering aid through minefields, floodwaters and other environments too dangerous for humanitarian workers.

Also at the summit, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees described how AI helps monitor displacement and assess damage after crises. The U.N. Population Fund showed how it uses AI to identify communities vulnerable to female genital mutilation and to track online narratives that influence public attitudes.

Across the humanitarian system, artificial intelligence is becoming part of the operational infrastructure that supports decisions. None of the organizations presented the technology as a substitute for their own authority or responsibility.

“Local authorities, humanitarian partners, and displaced communities provide context that technology alone cannot capture,” said Hovig Etyemezian, UNHCR’s head of innovation. “Refugees themselves often identify needs, risks, and practical solutions that may not be visible through remote analysis.”

As humanitarian organizations adopting sophisticated digital tools, they insist that operational decisions be held accountable to people and not algorithms. Technology expands institutional capacity, but it does not replace institutional judgment.

The same principle underlies the Digital Emblem. “No single institution can do it alone,” ITU Deputy Secretary-General Tomas Lamanauskas said at the CERN launch. The ICRC brings its humanitarian mandate and operational experience, he said; the Internet Engineering Task Force develops the underlying protocols and technical mechanisms; and the ITU contributes international standardization, interoperability and a platform connecting governments, regulators, industry and technical actors.

"Protection has always evolved alongside the changing realities of conflict,” Krähenbühl said while describing the project as sitting “at the intersection of law, humanitarian action, security, diplomacy, and technology.” Its success, he said, “will depend on each of the communities representing these fields and on our ability to create the synergies and trust among them.”

Science diplomacy has long been understood as cooperation between governments and scientific communities, but it now operates under a different kind of pressure. The expertise, infrastructure and operational capacity needed to solve global problems are spread among public institutions, private companies, technical organizations and civil society. The question is how governance functions when the authority to make decisions and the capacity to implement them are dispersed.

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Issue No. 24 | Monday, September 28, 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

Weather satellites, radar and other observing systems depend on radio frequencies to transmit data and, in some cases, to make the observations themselves. Those frequencies are getting more crowded.

The World Meteorological Organization and International Telecommunication Union bring meteorologists, spectrum regulators and telecommunications experts together in Geneva this week to examine growing pressure on the radio spectrum used for weather, climate and water observations. The three-day meeting begins Monday at ITU headquarters.

Demand for usable radio frequencies is increasing from mobile communications, satellite services and other technologies. Some of the frequencies involved are particularly important to meteorology. Passive satellite sensors measure naturally occurring radiation at specific frequencies to determine atmospheric temperature, water vapor and other conditions. Radar and other systems use spectrum to monitor precipitation, storms and the wider Earth system.

Interference can degrade those observations. That can affect the data used for weather forecasting, climate monitoring and early-warning systems.

The rules are negotiated internationally. Governments allocate spectrum through the ITU, while WMO represents the operational requirements of weather and climate services. This week’s seminar will examine interference, evolving requirements and preparations for the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, where governments will again negotiate international rules governing spectrum use.

WMO and ITU will also introduce an updated joint handbook on spectrum use for weather, climate, water and other environmental applications.

The issue rarely attracts the attention given to climate negotiations or extreme weather. But the ability to forecast a storm or track a changing climate depends partly on countries agreeing to protect the frequencies used to observe them.

Elsewhere this week: the U.N. General Assembly concludes its General Debate and turns to nuclear disarmament; the Science Summit moves to Nairobi; WIPO releases its Global Innovation Index; and UNECE convenes Sustainable Energy Week.

Major processes to watch

Nairobi — Science Summit turns to African science systems

After two weeks of online programming and last week’s meetings alongside the U.N. General Assembly in New York, the Science Summit opens its final in-person program Monday in Nairobi.

The three-day agenda covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, agriculture, health, research infrastructure and science diplomacy. Running through many of those discussions is a more basic question: how to build and finance scientific capacity.

Monday includes sessions on AI governance and investment, cybersecurity and digital resilience, and financing science and innovation. Tuesday turns to agriculture, food security and science diplomacy. Wednesday includes One Health, genomics and precision medicine, research infrastructure and evidence-informed policymaking.

One session examines how governments, development finance institutions, investors and industry can mobilize capital for research, innovation and commercialization. Another focuses on science diplomacy, research partnerships and financing.

The Nairobi program puts those questions in an African context: scientific capacity, access to capital, research infrastructure and the ability of institutions to participate in international scientific and technological cooperation.

Energy — Geneva puts resilience, technology and finance on the same agenda

UNECE Sustainable Energy Week begins Monday at the Palais des Nations, bringing together expert groups on energy efficiency, renewable energy and cleaner electricity systems before the Committee on Sustainable Energy holds its 35th session.

The first discussion is on resilient energy infrastructure. The week’s agenda then covers data centers and grid resilience, biofuel quality and sustainability standards, renewable-energy integration, industry and buildings, digitalization, electric mobility and financing.

On Wednesday, the Committee on Sustainable Energy begins with a high-level segment on energy security, affordability and sustainability. Its formal work includes the future program of the committee and its expert groups.

Electricity grids must absorb new sources of generation and new sources of demand, including data centers and electric vehicles, while governments confront questions of affordability, infrastructure resilience and financing.

Innovation — WIPO measures the geography of scientific entrepreneurship

WIPO releases its 2026 Global Innovation Index on Tuesday, covering the innovation performance of nearly 140 economies and the world’s top 100 innovation clusters.

This year’s theme, “Powering entrepreneurs at the frontier of science,” examines how scientific research produces deep-science startups and spinouts. AI, quantum computing, synthetic biology and advanced materials are among the technologies WIPO identifies as moving from research toward commercial application.

The report also looks at the obstacles: long development timelines, capital gaps and the emergence of deep-science hubs outside established innovation centers. Governments, companies, universities and research institutions all figure in that ecosystem.

UNGA watch

High-Level Week ends. The General Assembly does not.

The General Assembly concludes its annual General Debate on Monday. The same day, governments mark 25 years since the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action and are expected to endorse a political declaration renewing commitments to its implementation.

On Tuesday, the General Assembly turns to nuclear disarmament.

Its annual high-level meeting on the total elimination of nuclear weapons takes place this year after the expiration of New START. The U.S.-Russian treaty expired in February without a successor, leaving no agreed limits on the two countries’ strategic nuclear arsenals. The U.N. says no nuclear-disarmament negotiations are currently under way.

The NPT Review Conference took place in April and May, while the first Review Conference of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is scheduled for Nov. 30–Dec. 4.

On Thursday, the General Assembly’s Second Committee begins its work on economic, development and environmental issues.

Security Council watch — Middle East opens the week

The Security Council holds a briefing Monday on the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. Ramiz Alakbarov, acting special coordinator and resident coordinator at UNSCO, is expected to brief alongside two civil society representatives.

Tuesday brings a scheduled vote on reauthorizing the Gang Suppression Force in Haiti and a briefing on the U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Council members also conduct their fourth straw poll Tuesday in the selection of the next U.N. secretary-general. The previous round did not produce a conclusive result.

Signals

• Data centers have become an energy security issue. UNECE puts their impact on electricity grids alongside resilience, electric mobility and energy-system planning this week.

• New deep-science hubs appear on WIPO's map. This year's Global Innovation Index examines emerging concentrations of frontier science entrepreneurship outside established innovation centers.

• Development finance is entering the science financing conversation. Nairobi brings development finance institutions together with governments, investors and industry to discuss financing research, innovation and commercialization.

On the calendar

Sept. 7–Oct. 7 — Human Rights Council, 63rd session, Geneva. The month-long session continues. → Meeting information

Sept. 28 — U.N. General Debate concludes, New York. The General Assembly finishes its annual General Debate. → Daily schedule

Sept. 28 — U.N. High-Level Meeting on the Durban Declaration, New York. Governments mark the 25th anniversary of the international framework against racism and are expected to endorse a political declaration renewing commitments to its implementation. → Concept note

Sept. 28–30 — Science Summit 2026, Nairobi. The final in-person program covers AI, cybersecurity, science financing, agriculture, health, research infrastructure and science diplomacy. → Program

Sept. 28–30 — WMO–ITU Global Seminar on Spectrum Use for Meteorology, Geneva. Experts examine spectrum requirements, interference and preparations for future international spectrum negotiations. → Program

Sept. 28–Oct. 1 — UNECE Sustainable Energy Week, Geneva. Expert groups on energy efficiency, renewable energy and cleaner electricity systems meet alongside the Committee on Sustainable Energy. → Program

Sept. 28–Oct. 2 — FAO Committee on Forestry, Rome. The committee holds its 28th session. → Agenda

Sept. 29 — WIPO Global Innovation Index 2026, Geneva. WIPO releases its annual innovation index with a special focus on entrepreneurship at the frontier of science. The public launch runs from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. → Background

Sept. 29 — U.N. High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, New York. The General Assembly holds its annual meeting promoting the total elimination of nuclear weapons. → Background

Sept. 29 — U.N. secretary-general selection, New York. Security Council members conduct their fourth straw poll to gauge support for candidates to succeed António Guterres. → Process

Sept. 30 — Science Diplomacy Journalism: Communicating Beyond the Expert Community, online. The EU Science Diplomacy Alliance holds a public seminar on communicating science diplomacy to broader audiences, featuring The Science Diplomat’s editors. → Program

Closing

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The next phase of the global debate over powerful artificial intelligence is taking shape as a struggle over regulatory power: Who sets safety thresholds? Who tests frontier models? And what happens when a company or country crosses an agreed line?

A high-level U.N. Security Council debate revealed growing support for independent testing, common evaluation standards, incident reporting and stronger government oversight. But it also exposed the dispute likely to define the negotiations ahead: whether those safeguards should become internationally agreed rules or remain primarily under national control.

Scientists, technology executives and several governments are no longer speaking only in broad terms about the risks of AI. They are proposing institutions and mechanisms intended to manage them.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the U.N.’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, offered one of the most detailed regulatory prescriptions: licensing frontier AI systems, requiring liability insurance and subjecting developers to independent safety assessments before training and deployment.

The central question is whether governments can agree on common safeguards without agreeing on who has authority to enforce them — and what happens when a company or country refuses to comply.

“Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies — medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy — to incentivize safe development,” Bengio said. “As in these domains, liability insurance should be required.”

Bengio also called for mandatory reporting of security incidents, greater scientific independence from AI companies and international agreements aimed at making the technology safe by design.

“We must agree collectively that no one — no company and no country — should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm,” he said. “Developers must demonstrate to independent experts that a system is safe to train and safe to deploy.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did not go as far as Bengio’s call for licensing. But both argued that consequential decisions cannot remain solely with the companies building the most powerful systems.

“If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone,” Altman said. “They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve.”

Amodei proposed international agreements to prevent AI from being used to develop biological weapons, standards for evaluating and verifying advanced model capabilities, common testing for loss-of-control risks and a notification system for serious misuse.

“No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone,” Amodei said.

The differences become sharper over how far international oversight should extend. Britain advocated global principles and standards, while France explicitly called for international regulation.

“The companies building the models cannot simply be left to their own devices,” British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said. Britain plans to put AI at the center of its Group of 20 presidency next year and work toward “a single set of global principles and standards.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the case more explicitly. “Just as with the atom back then, the international community must now regulate AI in order to make the most of its potential and avoid the worst,” he said.

The dispute over international authority extends beyond the Security Council to the U.N.’s emerging AI institutions and Britain’s Group of 20 presidency next year. Those forums may be able to develop common assessments, testing methods and reporting standards without becoming the global regulator Washington opposes.

China supported international cooperation while warning against technological monopolies. Chinese Ambassador Fu Cong said companies, “especially tech giants,” should subject themselves to legal regulation and public oversight.

“AI is a shared asset for all humanity, and should not become rich countries’ and rich people’s game,” Fu said.

The United States drew the clearest boundary around international action. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said international institutions should help countries develop their own technological and regulatory capacity, not establish rules above the national level.

“International dialogue, in this forum and in others, cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance,” Kratsios said. “This body and others like it should focus on sharing best practices to build domestic capacity, not establishing a global regulatory regime.”

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Nearly every major international meeting on science and technology in Geneva this summer arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction.

The International Labor Organization adopted the first global convention on platform work, extending international labor standards into an economy shaped by algorithms rather than traditional employers. The incoming secretary general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union argued that national legislatures could no longer leave artificial intelligence to technical specialists because it was starting to reshape democratic participation itself.

The United Nations convened its first Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance as governments, researchers, companies and civil society groups debated how AI should be governed. At the AI for Good Global Summit, humanitarian agencies demonstrated how machine learning and satellite imagery were helping assess disasters, monitor displacement and improve emergency response.

Leonardo Cervera Navas, secretary general of the European Data Protection Supervisor, argued that governance should ultimately serve to protect 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.”

More than 200 economists, technology executives and researchers warned days later that artificial intelligence could transform the global economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a far shorter period.

All these conversations, held in different institutions for different purposes, pointed to the same conclusion: International organizations are confronting technologies with scientific capabilities, economic consequences and political effects that are changing faster than the institutions built to understand and govern them.

The challenge is as much about time as it is about artificial intelligence.

Opening the Global Dialogue, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said AI is advancing at “runaway speed” and asked whether governments would shape the technology or allow it to shape them.

"A technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections, and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it, can keep up,” he told delegates in Geneva.

The Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence reached a similar conclusion in different language. Its report argued that evaluation methods, oversight mechanisms and governance frameworks were failing to keep pace with the systems they were intended to assess. But the observation extends beyond AI.

International institutions have always operated on the assumption that evidence could be gathered, experts could evaluate it, governments could negotiate, and implementation would follow. That assumption rarely attracted much attention because scientific discovery, political negotiation and institutional adaptation generally moved at compatible speeds. The sequence was often messy and political, but it generally unfolded over years rather than months.

Scientific advances now routinely enter society before regulatory systems are fully formed. Legislatures debate technologies already deployed at scale. International negotiations begin after commercial markets have moved ahead.

Several of the institutions meeting in Geneva offered different responses to that pressure. The ILO chose to adapt existing principles rather than invent an entirely new system. Its platform work convention does not settle every legal question surrounding gig work, but it establishes international standards for employment relationships that did not exist when many labor conventions were written.

The issue was not simply digital technology but whether institutions created for one economy could respond quickly enough to another. “Platform companies have built a business model that sidesteps labor protections and shifts risks and costs onto the workers,” said Lena Simet, a senior economic justice advisor at Human Rights Watch. “The ILO negotiations are the first global effort to get governments to course correct and ensure that using this model does not come at the expense of workers’ rights.”

The Inter-Parliamentary Union approached the same issue in terms of democratic governance. Incoming IPU chief Anda Filip argued that parliaments must become more active participants in AI governance because decisions about artificial intelligence now affect representation, elections and public trust as much as they affect software engineering.

“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.

Her argument suggested that legislatures were being asked to develop expertise in fields that barely existed when many parliamentary procedures were established.

Humanitarian organizations confronted the same problem from an operational perspective. The World Food Program and the U.N. refugee agency demonstrated how AI can shorten the time needed to assess damage after disasters or identify emerging humanitarian needs. Neither organization suggested that algorithms should replace human judgment. Instead, they treated AI as a way to accelerate information while preserving responsibility for the decisions that follow.

Their work suggests that pressure on global governance no longer comes only from geopolitics or financial constraints but also from the pace at which scientific and technological change now unfolds.

Those questions are beginning to shape how institutions think about governance itself. For the Inter-Parliamentary Union, they point toward a larger role for national legislatures as governments develop new regulatory frameworks.

That was reflected in Filip’s conclusions as the IPU geared up to participate in the unusual series of international AI meetings in Geneva over the summer, where governments, international organizations, researchers and technology companies debated 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.

“We have regulations on tobacco, on alcohol consumption,” she said. “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.”

The issue goes well beyond artificial intelligence. International institutions always balanced speed against legitimacy, scientific evidence against political negotiation, and technical expertise against democratic accountability. Those tradeoffs have become more difficult as technological change compresses the time available for each stage of governance.

Governance cannot solve that problem simply by moving faster. Some decisions demand speed; others require consultation, evidence and political legitimacy. The challenge is deciding which processes can be accelerated, which must remain deliberate, and where human judgment cannot be delegated.

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Issue No. 23 | Monday, September 21, 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

World leaders arrive in New York this week for the United Nations’ largest annual diplomatic gathering. Along with wars, economic pressures and strains on the multilateral system, they will confront a set of problems that depend heavily on science and technology to find solutions.

The General Debate begins Tuesday under the theme, “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations That Delivers for All.” Artificial intelligence, climate change, sea level rise and pandemic preparedness feature across the week’s formal meetings and the wider network of ministerial gatherings and side events.

On Monday, the U.N. Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies convenes Digital Cooperation Day, with discussions on AI governance, scientific assessment, digital infrastructure, financing and national capacity. Wednesday brings a high-level event on climate action and a just transition. On Thursday, governments are expected to adopt a declaration on sea level rise covering science and data, infrastructure, finance, maritime boundaries and statehood. Friday brings the second U.N. high-level meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

Running alongside the official U.N. program is the New York portion of the Science Summit, with sessions on science diplomacy, food security, AI, research financing, One Health, climate resilience, geoengineering, environmental governance, open science and Earth observation. Monday includes a high-level dialogue devoted specifically to science diplomacy and global cooperation amid geopolitical divisions.

The subjects differ, but they raise some of the same practical questions. Who produces the evidence governments rely on? Who has the technical capacity to participate? Who pays? What happens when scientific cooperation runs into disputes over sovereignty, security or access?

Those questions are particularly visible this week. AI discussions will address the capacity of countries outside the major technology powers to help write the rules. The sea level declaration relies on global observation systems while addressing maritime zones and the survival of nations. Pandemic negotiators are still trying to reconcile rapid sharing of pathogen information with equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.

High-Level Week offers a concentrated view of science diplomacy in practice: governments using scientific evidence, institutions and technical cooperation to negotiate problems they cannot manage alone.

Elsewhere this week: WTO members begin a new round of fisheries subsidy discussions in Geneva; the Geneva Center for Multilateral Journalism launches a new index measuring global governance reporting; candidates for the next ILO director-general appear together publicly; and a proposal for an international scientific panel on inequality gets a hearing in New York.

Major processes to watch

AI — The U.N. takes up the machinery of global AI governance

The U.N. Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies convenes its second Digital Cooperation Day on Monday with a practical agenda: implementing the Global Digital Compact, narrowing gaps in AI capacity and strengthening international cooperation on artificial intelligence.

This year’s theme, “Shaping A Global AI Future Through Science, Policy, and Capacity,” divides the work into three areas. Scientific research is meant to inform governance; governments will discuss policy, interoperability and digital public infrastructure; and capacity building sessions will cover national AI strategies, skills, financing, disaster resilience and international partnerships.

The political issue underneath that agenda is participation. Countries without large AI industries still need infrastructure, expertise and regulatory capacity if they are to have a meaningful role in writing international rules for the technologies they use.

The program also features the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, alongside governments, industry, academia, civil society and technical experts. Organizers say partnership announcements are expected during the day.

Sea level rise — A declaration reaches beyond the shoreline

Governments are expected to adopt a U.N. Declaration on Sea Level Rise on Thursday covering scientific observation, infrastructure, finance, maritime boundaries and the continuity of nations threatened by rising seas. The provisional program includes its expected approval during the opening segment.

The declaration begins with science. Governments commit to stronger research collaboration and national scientific capacity, better data sharing and coordinated observations, and the text specifically recognizes WMO and UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and calls for interoperable global systems.

The declaration also calls for sea level projections to be incorporated into ports, energy and water systems, health facilities, telecommunications and other coastal infrastructure. Developing countries, particularly small island developing nations and least developed countries, are promised greater financial, technical and policy support.

The legal provisions go further. Governments would affirm that maritime zones established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea can be maintained despite physical changes caused by sea level rise. The text also states a presumption in favor of continued statehood and calls for support to countries that lose territory but must continue to maintain governmental functions.

The declaration calls for another high-level meeting before the end of the General Assembly’s 84th session, giving governments a mechanism for returning to the issue.

Pandemics — PABS remains unfinished as leaders meet in New York

WHO members ended five days of negotiations in Geneva on Friday without completing the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system at the center of the Pandemic Agreement.

The proposed system would pair rapid sharing of materials and sequence information from pathogens with pandemic potential with fair and timely access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics developed from their use. WHO said governments made progress toward an equitable and workable system, but negotiations continue.

That unfinished business now follows governments to New York. Heads of state and government meet Friday for the second U.N. high-level meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. Its expected political declaration calls for timely completion of the PABS annex. Finalizing the annex is also needed so countries can proceed to signing and considering ratification of the Pandemic Agreement.

The high-level meeting has a broader agenda as well: surveillance and early warning, access to vaccines and diagnostics, financing, resilient health systems and One Health. Since the first such meeting in 2023, governments have adopted the Pandemic Agreement, strengthened the International Health Regulations and established or expanded several preparedness institutions. WHO nevertheless says gaps persist in financing, surveillance, laboratory capacity and equitable access to health products.

The PABS dispute remains the clearest test. Countries agree that pathogens and sequence information must travel quickly during an emergency. The harder negotiation concerns what countries receive in return when shared pathogen materials and sequence information contribute to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.

UNGA watch

This is António Guterres’s final General Assembly High-Level Week as U.N. secretary-general. His second five-year term ends Dec. 31, and the process to choose his successor is under way.

Several declared candidates are scheduled to appear Wednesday at an Open Society Foundations event on democracy and human rights. The next secretary-general will inherit an institution under financial pressure while governments ask the U.N. to handle a widening range of technological, environmental and health problems.

Security Council watch — AI returns to the Security Council

The Security Council holds a high-level briefing Wednesday on artificial intelligence and international security, one of several meetings scheduled alongside the General Assembly’s General Debate.

France, which holds the Council presidency this month, is organizing the meeting. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot will chair, with Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the U.N.’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, expected to brief alongside private sector representatives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The Council has discussed AI before, but its role is unsettled. Diplomats have considered its potential uses in conflict prevention, mediation, peace operations and sanctions monitoring alongside risks from cyber operations, disinformation and increasingly autonomous systems. They differ over how the Council should fit into the wider international architecture for AI governance.

The meeting follows Monday’s Digital Cooperation Day, which addresses AI governance, capacity and implementation across the wider U.N. system. The Council’s discussion will focus on international peace and security.

Signals

• A new index measures how the media cover global governance. The Geneva Center for Multilateral Journalism launches its Multilateral Journalism Index on Monday, based on a six-week pilot covering 247 records from 71 media outlets and 27 multilateral events. Reporting scored highest for substantive information and lowest for source diversity, while the study found that technically important negotiations and governance processes did not always receive attention proportional to their institutional significance. Future editions are expected to expand the observation period and examine additional institutions and centers of multilateral governance.

• An IPCC for inequality? Advocates will use a Thursday UNGA side event to make the case for an International Panel on Inequality, modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The proposal came from an inequality report commissioned by South Africa’s G20 presidency. Its backers argue that a standing international expert body could provide governments with a common evidence base for inequality policy.

• The ILO leadership contest goes public. All three candidates for the next director-general appear Wednesday in Geneva before representatives of governments, employers and workers. The candidates are incumbent Gilbert F. Houngbo of Togo, Yolanda Díaz Pérez of Spain and Javier González-Olaechea Franco of Peru. Private hearings follow Nov. 9, with the election slated for Nov. 16.

On the calendar

Sept. 7–Oct. 7 — Human Rights Council, 63rd session, Geneva. The month-long session continues. → Meeting information

Sept. 21 — Multilateral Journalism Index launched, Geneva. The Geneva Center for Multilateral Journalism publishes the first MJI pilot, measuring substance, public understanding, governance literacy and source diversity in coverage of international organizations. → News and New Index

Sept. 21 — Digital Cooperation Day, New York. The U.N. Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies convenes governments and other stakeholders on AI science, governance, capacity, infrastructure and financing. → Program

Sept. 21–25 — Science Summit 2026, New York. The New York program runs alongside High-Level Week, with sessions spanning science diplomacy, AI, health, food systems, research financing and environmental governance. → Program

Sept. 21–25 — WTO fisheries subsidies “Fish Week,” Geneva. Members begin the first of three planned negotiating weeks intended to identify common ground for additional fisheries-subsidy disciplines. The chair has explicitly said this round is for discussion rather than decisions. → Meeting information

Sept. 22 — U.N. General Debate begins, New York. Heads of state and government begin the annual General Assembly debate. → Meeting information

Sept. 22 — AU–EU–Med Innovation Fair application deadline. Science-based and deep-tech startups and SMEs working on food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture have until Tuesday to apply for the Nov. 25 fair in Bari. → Registration

Sept. 23 — High-Level Event on Climate Action and the Just Transition, New York. Leaders address climate action, transition and financing during High-Level Week. → Overview

Sept. 23 — ILO Director-General candidate dialogue, Geneva. The three candidates appear publicly before the organization’s tripartite constituency ahead of private hearings and the November election. → Program

Sept. 24 — U.N. High-Level Meeting on Sea Level Rise, New York. Governments are scheduled to approve the political declaration during the opening segment. → Documents

Sept. 25 — U.N. High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, New York. Governments review progress since 2023 and are expected to renew commitments on preparedness, financing, equitable access and completion of the PABS annex. → Program

Closing

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Issue No. 22 | Monday, September 14, 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 world’s nuclear agency confronts the widening demands on its mandate.

Representatives of 181 countries gather in Vienna on Monday for the 70th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, opening a week that brings some of the most consequential uses — and risks — of nuclear science under the same roof.

The IAEA is best known internationally for its role in nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation. But its mandate extends much further, encompassing nuclear energy, safety and security, cancer treatment, food security, water management and other peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology.

The General Conference is where countries collectively set priorities across that unusually broad mandate. Representatives review the agency’s work and consider resolutions covering nuclear science and applications, technical cooperation, safeguards, safety, security and nonproliferation. Decisions taken during the week help shape the IAEA’s program of work for the year ahead.

This year’s meeting opens against a difficult geopolitical backdrop. Iran is scheduled to be the first country to address Monday’s general debate, with Russia, the United States and China also speaking during the opening session. The European Union, Japan and France are among the other speakers scheduled for the first morning.

That lineup puts nuclear diplomacy immediately alongside the agency’s technical work. The IAEA’s ability to verify nuclear activities depends on access, scientific measurement and cooperation from governments — conditions that become harder to sustain when the countries whose activities it monitors are themselves locked in wider geopolitical disputes.

At the same time, governments are asking nuclear science to do more. Interest in nuclear power is growing alongside efforts to decarbonize energy systems, while nuclear technologies are being deployed in medicine, agriculture, food security and water management.

That second side of the agency’s mandate will be prominent Tuesday and Wednesday, when the IAEA’s annual Scientific Forum focuses on Rays of Hope, its initiative to expand access to cancer care. Scientists, policymakers and ministers will examine partnerships, financing and ways to make radiotherapy and other nuclear-medicine capabilities available where access remains limited.

The juxtaposition captures something fundamental about nuclear diplomacy. The same international institution is expected to verify nuclear materials, reduce proliferation risks and strengthen nuclear safety while helping countries use nuclear science to produce electricity, manage water, improve food security and treat cancer.

As the IAEA enters its 70th General Conference, the question is how an institution built to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear science while guarding against its misuse adapts as both sides of that mandate become more demanding.

Elsewhere, the Science Summit 2026 opens Monday, beginning an online program that will move to New York during U.N. high-level week and then Nairobi at the end of the month.

Countries also return to Geneva for another round of negotiations on the unfinished Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system under the WHO Pandemic Agreement, while UNESCO brings governments and experts to Riyadh to examine how international AI ethics principles can be turned into functioning national governance systems.

The U.N. Human Rights Council continues its month-long session in Geneva, while experts worldwide remain engaged in the first review of the physical-science contribution to the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report.

Major processes to watch

Global — Science Summit connects research with international decision-making

The Science Summit 2026 opens Monday, beginning more than two weeks of discussions intended to connect science, technology and innovation more directly with international policymaking, financing and implementation.

Running online from Sept. 14–30, the summit moves into an in-person New York program Sept. 21–25 alongside U.N. high-level week before concluding with its first Nairobi program Sept. 28–30.

The agenda spans artificial intelligence, health, food security, climate, biodiversity, sustainable finance and science diplomacy. Organizers are also seeking to connect researchers with development banks, philanthropies, technology companies and investors — actors that increasingly influence which scientific work is financed and whether emerging technologies move from research into deployment.

The geographic expansion is also significant. Taking part of the summit to Nairobi explicitly seeks to give African scientific leadership a larger role in discussions that have historically concentrated around New York and other established centers of international policymaking.

The process is therefore testing a broader proposition: whether international science diplomacy can build stronger connections not only between science and government, but among research, policy and the institutions that finance implementation.

WHO — Countries return to the unfinished business of the Pandemic Agreement

Countries meet in Geneva through Friday for another round of negotiations on the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system, the major component of the WHO Pandemic Agreement that remained unfinished when governments adopted the agreement in 2025.

The proposed system is intended to establish how participating laboratories and manufacturers share pathogens and related information while ensuring that benefits derived from their use — including vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics — are distributed more equitably.

This week’s negotiations move directly into the architecture of that system. Governments discuss implementation Monday and Tuesday, scope and definitions Wednesday, and governance and review Thursday before returning to implementation Friday. The program also includes discussions of a coordinating financial mechanism and lessons from COVID-19 procurement.

The question is whether countries can narrow the remaining differences sufficiently to put PABS on a path toward agreement. The draft annex is the central substantive item on the formal agenda.

Riyadh — AI governance moves from principles toward implementation

Governments and experts gather in Riyadh for UNESCO’s fourth Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, with this year’s meeting focused less on establishing new principles than on putting existing ones into practice.

Five years after UNESCO adopted its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, more than 75 countries have engaged with its Readiness Assessment Methodology, which examines national institutions and policies for governing AI. The forum will take stock of that implementation and launch a meta-analysis of more than 55 national assessments alongside a new version of the methodology intended to move countries from diagnosis toward policy action.

The agenda also moves into the institutional machinery required for AI oversight: cross-border cooperation among supervisory authorities, government capacity to procure and use AI responsibly, and financing for regulatory systems and public-sector preparedness. Ministers and regulators will separately examine how multilateral processes can bridge increasingly fragmented approaches to AI governance.

The question to watch is whether UNESCO’s global ethics framework is beginning to develop an implementation architecture capable of influencing how governments actually regulate and deploy AI.

Global — New survey finds demand for economic change outpacing trust in governments

A new multinational survey released Monday finds broad agreement that economic systems need substantial change — alongside declining confidence that governments can deliver it.

Across 17 major economies surveyed by Ipsos for Earth4All, 70% of respondents say inequality in their country is too high, 65% believe the economic system is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful, and 69% want major changes to that system. But only 31% believe their government will make decisions benefiting the majority 20 or 30 years from now, down from 39% in 2024.

The survey also finds 67% believe their country is more divided than a decade ago. Support for democracy remains substantial, with 68% calling it the best way to govern, but 40% say their country would be better off with a strong leader unconstrained by parliament and elections.

Released as governments prepare for U.N. high-level week, the findings expose a governance problem extending across many issues on the international agenda: public demand for large-scale change is running well ahead of confidence in the institutions expected to deliver it.

UNGA watch — High-level week begins to take shape

The General Assembly moves closer to its annual high-level meetings this week, with the U.N. beginning the transition from the opening of its 81st session toward the arrival of world leaders in New York.

On Friday, the General Assembly holds its annual SDG Moment, intended to focus political attention on progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals ahead of high-level week. Secretary-General António Guterres is expected to address the meeting.

The general debate begins Sept. 22, alongside a series of high-level meetings addressing climate action and the just transition, sea-level rise, pandemic preparedness and other international priorities.

The timing also overlaps with the Science Summit’s transition from its online program to its in-person New York meetings beginning Sept. 21, bringing the science-policy community into the same institutional ecosystem as the year’s most concentrated period of global diplomacy.

Security Council watch — Iran sanctions dispute moves to a vote

The Security Council is scheduled to vote Thursday on extending the mandate of the Panel of Experts supporting the 1737 sanctions committee on Iran.

The vote brings the institutional dispute surrounding Iran’s nuclear file back before the Council one week after members publicly disagreed over whether the sanctions committee itself legally exists. Western members maintain that U.N. sanctions were restored through the JCPOA’s snapback mechanism, while China and Russia reject that interpretation.

That disagreement has prevented the committee from functioning normally, making the vote a test of whether Council members can maintain an expert-monitoring mechanism even while disputing the legal foundation on which it operates.

The Council also turns to the security of international shipping on Thursday in an informal meeting on protecting freedom of navigation, as members continue to follow disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. On Friday, members hold a debate on peacekeeping reform and conduct their third straw poll on candidates for the next U.N. secretary-general.

Signals

• The IAEA’s dual mandate is becoming more demanding in both directions as geopolitical tensions complicate nuclear verification while governments seek wider access to peaceful nuclear technologies.

• AI governance is moving beyond general principles toward the institutional machinery of implementation, including national assessments, supervisory cooperation, regulatory capacity and financing.

• The PABS negotiations show that scientific cooperation and equity are increasingly inseparable: access to biological materials is being negotiated alongside access to the products and benefits that science produces from them.

• Public demand for large-scale economic change is running well ahead of confidence that governments can deliver it, creating a trust problem for institutions trying to manage long-term challenges.

On the calendar

Aug. 10–Oct. 2 — IPCC Working Group I First Order Draft expert review (Global)
Experts continue reviewing the first draft of the physical science contribution to the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. → Review information

Sept. 7–Oct. 7 — U.N. Human Rights Council, 63rd session (Geneva)
The Council continues its month-long session spanning global human rights crises alongside issues including hazardous substances and wastes, water and sanitation, climate finance and the human rights consequences of nuclear legacies. → Meeting information

Sept. 8 onward — U.N. General Assembly 81st session (New York)
The General Assembly continues its annual session, with Friday’s SDG Moment beginning the transition toward high-level week and the general debate starting Sept. 22. → Meeting information

Sept. 14 — Earth4All Global Survey 2026 released (Global)
A 17-country survey examines attitudes toward inequality, economic-system change, political trust and social cohesion. → Report

Sept. 14–17 — UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of AI (Riyadh)
Governments and experts meet on international approaches to ethical AI governance and implementation. → Forum

Sept. 14–18 — IAEA General Conference, 70th session (Vienna)
Representatives of 181 countries set priorities across nuclear safeguards, safety, security, technical cooperation and the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology. → Conference

Sept. 14–18 — Convention on Cluster Munitions Third Review Conference (Vientiane)
Countries review implementation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions and consider priorities for the next review cycle. → Conference

Sept. 14–18 — WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations (Geneva)
Countries continue negotiating the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing annex, including its scope, implementation, governance and financing. → Agenda

Sept. 14–30 — Science Summit 2026 (Online; New York; Nairobi)
Scientists, policymakers, international organizations, funders and industry examine how science and technology can support global governance, sustainable development and international cooperation. The summit begins online before moving to New York and Nairobi. → Program

Sept. 15 — WMO State of Global Water Resources 2025 released (Geneva)
The World Meteorological Organization releases its latest assessment of global water resources, with senior officials briefing on hydrology and the cryosphere. → Reports

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Laurie Smith spends his working life trying to see around corners. As Head of Mission Discovery at Nesta, the U.K.'s innovation agency, he helps governments and institutions tackle long-term challenges, from mission-driven policy to emerging technologies.

When we spoke, one tension kept resurfacing: institutions say they want to think long-term, but almost everything about how they are organized rewards the opposite.

1. Why do institutions struggle to operationalize long-term strategic thinking, even when they know foresight matters?

For Smith, the problem is less about political will than institutional incentives. “The incentives often point in a different direction,” he said.

“Electoral cycles are quite quick, media cycles are quite quick. You’ve got a politician who may genuinely intend to think long-term, but if the pressure is that you get rewarded for being short-term, not for long-term, people end up behaving accordingly. You’ve got a systemic problem.”

Yet Smith does not think democratic systems are condemned to short-termism. Countries like China may be able to plan further ahead because they face less electoral pressure, he said, but democratic governments have their own tools, from future generations acts to climate legislation and other long-term policy instruments.

Institutional design is only part of the story.

“I’m not a psychologist,” he said, before suggesting that human decision-making may also reinforce short-term thinking. Rationally, he said, gains and losses should carry equal weight, yet people experience them differently.

“If you die, that’s the biggest loss. You cannot do anything else.”

That instinct, combined with institutions that reward immediate results, makes long-term thinking difficult even for leaders who genuinely want to do it.

2. How do you distinguish real transformative signals from hyped-up innovation noise?

Policymakers often want a formula for recognizing the next transformative technology. Smith’s experience has convinced him that one doesn’t exist.

“There isn’t an algorithm,” he said. “A lot of it’s built-up experience. Some of it’s just like muscle memory.”

Instead, he looks for recurring patterns. General-purpose technologies tend to matter more because they reshape multiple sectors rather than solving a single problem.

“If a technology affects lots of things, the more general-purpose it is, I think that’s one thing that makes it more important.”

He also pays attention to technologies that accelerate further discovery.

“AI probably increases your ability to find other technologies, and also improve the subsequent ones recursively.”

Even then, timing can matter as much as the technology itself.

“It’s not that the technology exists,” he said. “It’s: when does it become useful?”

For Smith, foresight is less about following a prescribed method than developing the judgment to recognize when those moments arrive. As he put it, “the least worst way of thinking about the future.”

3. What separates effective mission-driven governance from aspirational branding?

A mission only becomes meaningful when success can be measured, according to Smith.

“Our missions are measurable and specific,” he said, pointing to Nesta’s own approach. A goal such as reducing emissions by fifty percent by 2030 works because “it’s a specific measure, you know you’ve done it.”

But defining the destination does not mean prescribing the route. “Be firm about your goal, but give people freedom in how to achieve it.”

Rather than trying to design every step in advance, Smith favors an iterative approach.

“You start small, do practical experiments, de-risk your assumptions fast, and then get bigger.”

4. Are large institutions actually capable of embracing uncertainty and experimentation, or are they just built for stability?

Large institutions, Smith argued, are fully capable of experimentation.

“It depends on the institution,” he said. “Institutions are, in principle, capable of doing it, because there are institutions that do do it.”

He pointed to technology companies and test-and-learn units within government as evidence that experimentation can become part of institutional culture.

Just as important, he said, is recognizing that different disciplines often use the same language differently. Even a word like “experiment” can mean one thing to a designer and something quite different to a scientist, creating misunderstandings before substantive work even begins.

His solution is simple: bring people together, surface those differences early, and make terminology explicit rather than assuming everyone means the same thing.

5. How has your view of the science-policy-society relationship evolved as tech outpaces government?

“Everything needs to be more agile,” he said. “You can’t have these rigid, fixed systems. You need really flexible systems. It’s imperfect, but it’s the best solution.”

He illustrated the point with regulation of genetically modified organisms, arguing that rules built around specific technological processes can quickly become obsolete as science evolves.

His preference is to regulate outcomes instead, while involving policymakers and the public earlier in the development of emerging technologies.

That flexibility matters because technologies often end up having their greatest impact in places no one anticipated. GLP-1 drugs, he noted, were originally developed for blood pressure or diabetes before becoming significant for entirely different uses.

That unpredictability, Smith said, is why institutions need governance systems that can adapt as technology does.

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Issue No. 21 | Monday, September 7, 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

Governments and experts gather in Kunming, China, on Monday for three days of discussions examining collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, beginning a new stage in the first global review of the agreement adopted in 2022.

The framework established 23 targets for 2030, covering everything from ecosystem restoration and protected areas to pollution, finance and the sustainable use of biodiversity. But setting global targets was only the beginning. Governments now have to determine collectively how much progress has been made and where efforts remain insufficient.

The Kunming Dialogue is part of that process. Countries agreed at COP16, held at Cali, Colombia, in 2024, that the global review would be led by governments, supported by an informal technical dialogue bringing together national representatives with Indigenous peoples and local communities, scientists, women and youth representatives, businesses, financial institutions and other experts.

Delegates will also confront the lagging progress of the Cali Fund, which was created at COP16 to convert private corporate profits into public conservation projects in developing countries. Its certified financial statement shows that in 2025 it received just $1,000, from the U.K.-based startup TierraViva AI.

That makes the meeting an important interface between evidence and diplomacy. Scientific assessments and national reports can show changes in ecosystems, financing or conservation efforts, but governments must decide how that evidence should be interpreted collectively and what it means for the commitments they made.

The dialogue also brings the biodiversity framework back to the city where its political architecture began taking shape. The first part of COP15 was held in Kunming in 2021 before negotiations concluded the following year in Montreal with adoption of the Kunming-Montreal framework.

The meeting follows biodiversity negotiations in Nairobi this summer that examined the first global assessment of progress and warned that current efforts remain insufficient to achieve the framework’s 2030 mission.

Kunming now moves that process forward: from establishing what the evidence says toward determining what countries should collectively make of it.

Elsewhere this week, governments and other participants gather in Baku for a U.N. Climate Week intended to build momentum toward COP31, while the IPCC convenes its first expert meeting specifically devoted to water and climate change.

The U.N. Human Rights Council opens a month-long session in Geneva on Monday, with environmental health, water, climate finance and nuclear legacies among the issues that will intersect with its broader human rights agenda.

The 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly opens in New York on Tuesday, beginning a month that will culminate in high-level meetings on climate action, sea-level rise and pandemic preparedness alongside the annual general debate. The general debate begins Sept. 22.

And toward the end of the week, leaders of the expanded BRICS grouping are expected to meet in New Delhi, with innovation, resilience and sustainability among the priorities.

Major processes to watch

China — Kunming Dialogue examines collective progress on biodiversity

Countries meet in Kunming through Wednesday for an informal technical dialogue supporting the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The process brings governments together with scientists, Indigenous peoples and local communities, businesses, finance and other participants to consider collective progress toward the framework’s 2030 targets.

The important question is what the accumulated evidence says about progress at the global level — and how that assessment should shape the next stage of international biodiversity policy.

Azerbaijan — Climate Week builds toward COP31

Governments, international organizations, businesses and other participants gather in Baku for the second U.N. Climate Week of 2026, intended to connect decisions taken through the formal climate negotiations with action on the ground.

The Sept. 7–11 meeting will focus on turning international climate decisions into practical action while generating targeted input for COP31, which opens in Antalya, Turkey, in November.

The meeting provides an intermediate stage between formal negotiating sessions: a place to identify obstacles involving finance, capacity, data and implementation before governments return to the negotiating table later this year.

Geneva — Space security moves from threats to verification

UNIDIR brings governments, researchers, industry and defense experts together on Tuesday and Wednesday as a growing reliance on satellites and the blurred boundary between civilian and military space systems raises new questions about stability in orbit.

Discussions range from threats to space infrastructure and strategic orbital capabilities to current negotiations on preventing an arms race in outer space. One particularly important question is whether sophisticated space-surveillance technologies can do more than prevent collisions: could they eventually help governments verify agreements or monitor compliance with norms of behavior?

The meeting also examines another emerging governance problem: private companies now operate infrastructure and generate data with strategic significance, complicating traditional assumptions about responsibility, neutrality and targetability in conflict.

Sri Lanka — IPCC turns to water in shaping its next climate assessment

The IPCC and International Water Management Institute convene about 60 experts in Colombo for the first IPCC expert meeting specifically devoted to advancing the science of water and climate change.

The Sept. 8–10 meeting will examine the current state of knowledge, identify research priorities and gaps, and generate evidence that could inform the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. The discussions will consider water’s role in climate adaptation, resilience and risk, including the cascading and transboundary consequences of changes in water availability and distribution.

Participants will also develop a synthesis report on water, climate resilience, adaptation and equity. The work connects preparation of the next global climate assessment with wider international discussions over water security and governance.

UNGA watch — The 81st session opens

The 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly opens Tuesday, beginning the institutional run-up to high-level week.

The major political activity comes later: the general debate begins Sept. 22, alongside high-level meetings later that month on climate action, sea-level rise, pandemic preparedness and nuclear weapons.

Plastics treaty watch — Informal consultations continue

Heads of delegation to the negotiations for a global agreement on plastic pollution meet virtually Tuesday and Wednesday as efforts continue to find a path through unresolved differences in the treaty process.

The discussions are part of a series of informal meetings leading toward INC-5.4, scheduled for March 2027. The negotiating committee’s chair has proposed consultations every four to six weeks on priority areas, the roadmap and how the process should proceed.

The meeting does not represent a return to formal negotiations, but it provides another indication of whether governments can narrow differences before they do.

Security Council watch — Iran dispute leaves nuclear oversight in limbo

The Security Council returns to Iran’s nuclear program Thursday amid a deeper dispute over whether the sanctions committee it is scheduled to discuss legally exists.

France, the U.K., the U.S. and other Council members maintain that U.N. sanctions and the 1737 Committee were restored after European countries invoked the JCPOA’s snapback mechanism last year. China and Russia reject that interpretation and argue that the sanctions expired in October 2025. The disagreement has left the committee without an agreed chair and prevented its Panel of Experts from becoming operational.

The institutional paralysis comes as international nuclear monitoring has also been impaired. The International Atomic Energy Agency says it has lost continuity of knowledge across Iran’s declared nuclear facilities and cannot account for the size or whereabouts of the country’s enriched-uranium stockpile.

The dispute has spread beyond the Iran file, contributing to an unprecedented delay in appointing chairs for Security Council subsidiary bodies and constraining the work of sanctions committees and other oversight mechanisms.

Separately, members are expected to continue discussing a Greek-drafted resolution on the impact of digital technologies on violations against children in armed conflict, bringing questions of technology governance into the Council’s established children-and-armed-conflict agenda.

Signals

• The biodiversity framework is moving into a different test: not setting global targets, but determining collectively whether the evidence shows countries are on course to meet them.

• Water is moving closer to the center of the next IPCC assessment as scientists examine how changes in the hydrological cycle cascade through food, ecosystems, economies and adaptation.

• Climate diplomacy between COPs includes meetings designed to connect negotiated decisions with the practical obstacles governments face in carrying them out.

• Improved space surveillance could become part of the verification architecture for future international rules governing activity in orbit.

On the calendar

Sept. 7–8 — Minamata Convention Implementation and Compliance Committee (Virtual)
The treaty’s compliance body reviews implementation issues as new national reporting feeds into the first evaluation of whether the Minamata Convention is proving effective. → Meeting information

Sept. 7–9 — Kunming Dialogue 2026 (Kunming, China)
Countries and other participants examine collective progress toward the 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as part of preparations for its global review. → Meeting information

Sept. 7–11 — U.N. Climate Week (Baku, Azerbaijan)
Governments and other participants work on translating international climate decisions into action and generating input for COP31 in November. → Meeting information

Sept. 7–Oct. 7 — U.N. Human Rights Council, 63rd session (Geneva)
The Council opens a month-long session spanning global human rights crises alongside issues including hazardous substances and wastes, water and sanitation, climate finance and the human rights consequences of nuclear legacies. → Meeting information

Sept. 8 — U.N. General Assembly 81st session opens (New York)
The General Assembly begins its annual session ahead of the general debate and a series of high-level meetings later in September. → Meeting information

Sept. 8–9 — Plastics treaty heads-of-delegation meeting (Virtual)
Negotiators hold informal consultations on the roadmap toward the next formal session of negotiations on a global agreement on plastic pollution. → Meeting information

Sept. 8–9 — UNIDIR Outer Space Security Conference (Geneva)
Governments, researchers and industry experts examine threats to space systems, strategic stability, efforts to prevent an arms race in outer space and technologies for monitoring and verifying activity in orbit. → Program

Sept. 8–10 — IPCC-IWMI Expert Meeting on Water and Climate Change (Colombo, Sri Lanka)
About 60 experts identify research gaps and priorities on water, climate risk, adaptation and resilience that could inform the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. → Meeting information

Sept. 12–13 — BRICS Summit (New Delhi)
Leaders are expected to discuss cooperation spanning innovation, AI, digital infrastructure, climate, energy, health and economic resilience. → Schedule

Aug. 10–Oct. 2 — IPCC Working Group I First Order Draft expert review (Global)
Experts continue reviewing the first draft of the physical science contribution to the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. → Review information

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The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed an African-led effort to change how the world is represented on maps, calling on governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use projections that more accurately show the relative sizes of continents.

The resolution passed on Friday by 164 votes to one, with the United States alone opposing and six countries abstaining. It promotes the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps as alternatives to the centuries-old Mercator projection, which which exaggerates the size of landmasses farther from the equator.

The nonbinding measure does not abolish Mercator or establish Equal Earth as the U.N.’s official world map. Instead, it seeks to turn an African campaign over cartographic representation into changes in international standards, education, digital mapping and maps used by governments and international institutions.

“A map is never neutral,” Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said ahead of the vote. “It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”

Togo led negotiations on behalf of the African Group, building on a campaign endorsed by the African Union. The resolution describes distorted representations of continental size as contributing to the “symbolic minimization” of Africa and says correcting them can constitute an act of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation.”

The Mercator projection was developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for maritime navigation. It preserves direction, allowing sailors to plot courses using straight lines, but does so at the expense of accurately representing area.

As a result, landmasses appear progressively larger the farther they are from the equator. Greenland, for example, can appear roughly comparable in size to Africa on a Mercator map even though Africa is about 14 times larger.

Equal Earth, developed in 2018, instead preserves the relative areas of countries and continents, though like every attempt to represent a spherical planet on a flat surface it necessarily distorts other geographic properties.

The resolution acknowledges that no projection can perfectly represent the Earth and says different projections remain appropriate for different purposes. It specifically leaves existing navigational uses of cartography unaffected.

But African governments argue that Mercator’s continued use well beyond navigation, including in education, media, official materials and digital platforms, has consequences for how the relative scale and importance of different regions are perceived.

“Africa is not asking for preferential treatment,” Dussey said. “Africa is asking that its reality, aspirations and contribution to the international system be duly taken into account.”

The resolution goes considerably further than recommending a different classroom map.

It encourages member nations and international organizations to adopt Equal Earth and other equal-area projections when the relative size of continents matters, and calls for development of international standards for more accurate representation in printed and digital maps.

It asks UNESCO, the U.N. Development Program, U.N. geospatial experts and the Office for Outer Space Affairs to work with regional organizations and academia on cartographic standards, educational curricula and authoritative geospatial information.

It also urges global technology platforms to engage with governments and regional organizations on more accurate mapping and encourages schools to teach both more accurate continental sizes and the limitations of different projections.

As the only nation to vote against the resolution, the United Nations framed the initiative as part of a wider political agenda, criticizing its references to reparations and “cognitive justice.” Its representative called the measure part of a “much larger and more radical ideological project.”

The European Union, which supported the resolution, stressed that the measure concerns the relative size of landmasses and has no bearing on sovereignty, territorial status or internationally recognized borders.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced ahead of the vote that the French government plans to abandon Mercator for its world maps.

The General Assembly also asked the Secretary-General to provide information on implementation through its 83rd session and placed the issue of accurate cartographic representation and geospatial capacity in developing countries on that session’s provisional agenda.

“Our approach is not directed against any country, continent or cartographic tradition,” Dussey said. “Nor does it seek to impose a single interpretation of the world.”