 This presentation was prepared together with another person, the name of which is Peter McGrath, so I'm from Tuas. Tuas stands for the World Academy of Sciences. Peter McGrath is actually the coordinator of IAP, the Interacademy Partnership. Why am I here talking to you about sustainable development? Perhaps reason number one, because it's absolutely fundamental to all of us. Number two, because perhaps your scientific career may be able to have a positive impact on this. Number three, perhaps because sustainable development may have an impact on your career. In fact, since the United Nations announced this new sustainable development goals, there have been an increasing number of grants and programs on this. That means that you may get funding if your research was in line or directly related or beneficial to these. So I thought to start with a definition. Now, this definition is nothing new. I mean, 1987, I didn't have children. Perhaps the fact that I have children now somewhat changes my view of the future and how what we are doing now impacts on the future. And the changes I see now are seen in a different way, not only in terms of science, but in the white picture. One of the things that perhaps we don't often think about in terms of changes is something that is represented by this diagram of the carbon footprints. When I go to a scientific meeting, to be honest with you, I never ever thought about the carbon footprint of that scientific meeting. Of all of us being present in place, flying there, the organization and the background. We don't think about it, but actually all of that has a cost. Now, a lot of people don't like this diagram. It depends which country you're from. Because in this diagram, the United States doesn't look like it's having as much of a carbon footprint as China. People from different countries may prefer this kind of diagram, where the carbon footprint is expressed per capita. And so in that case, we see a completely different scenario. But this per capita introduces a new concept. And that is actually the concept of population, number of people in different countries. Population growth is indeed the key point about sustainability and sustainable development. And what we see here, we see that the human population was increasing ever so gradually and slowly until there was a huge increase. In the year 2011, five years ago, the human population reached $7 billion. It is now in 2016, $7.4, and predicted to reach $8 billion in 2024. So perhaps this is something that we don't often think about. Perhaps we should think about the sheer number of people that is using resources on our planet. On those bases, the United Nations released a number of years ago the so-called Millennium Development Goals, which were set to cover a period, this 15-year period, which ended last year. These were about poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, et cetera, et cetera. Some of these were actually perhaps not reached, but some progress was made. So it is argued still by the United Nations that over 90 percent worldwide are reaching primary education level. So this is a big improvement compared to previously, and it is thought that child mortality has been halved since 1990. However, there are many, many people that disagree that the Millennium Goals were a success and that much more work was needed. As a matter of fact, the United Nations released new goals. So that was last year. Last year was an important year for international agreements. We have the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction. We have the COP21 in Paris, and we have the Sustainability Development Goals. So I will only talk about this now. I may touch upon that later. So in about a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, the United Nations agreed on 17 new goals. Now, it would actually be interesting to spend time. We don't have time, so perhaps this might for some of you. I'm not sure I'd be able to reach out to all of you, but some of you actually look and reflect upon each one of those 17, because some of them are totally relevant to what we do. Now, the distinguished professor, Jackson, that spoke before, works on protein folding. I actually worked on protein structure, and I believe that every topic of biology is relevant to some of these goals, and we may actually be able to do something about them. Number 17 is perhaps the most important one, in that it recognizes that there must be cooperation between people working in different areas if we are to reach the goals. One of the goals is 100% health related, and so out of so many specific targets that have been identified for the 17 goals, many are totally health related. And that means that there are many programs in many countries that are now narrowing the focus, especially in the UK, for example, the Research Council UK has just released a huge call for funding, which focuses on the sustainability development goals and on engaging with developing countries. But that's exactly the problem. The problem is that despite these calls, a major gap, a drift exists between scientists and policymakers. So if we believe that we understand processes and mechanisms, perhaps we should also understand that the bridging of the gap is not going to come from these people, not offence to any politician, but my trust in that class is not very high, and therefore perhaps we should lend a reaching hand in order to bridge this gap. Because if the knowledge and wisdom coming from science does not get into practice through policy making, then that gap will remain and many solutions will never get onto the field, onto where they should be to solve challenges and problems. I'm not arguing that science can solve anything, but I'm certainly arguing that there are many solutions already there, but they're not getting in their place. An example of reaching out to the policymakers or the failure of doing so, it depends how you look at it, is given by COP21, which is also relatively recent at the end of last year, 2015. Many people thought that this was a great success because many countries signed up, but actually some other people do believe that this was a big failure because the signing up is not legally binding in many cases. COP21, as you might know, is about climate change. Now I'm dismayed that since working at Tuasa I had to do a lot of interactions with teachers. I not very long ago remember talking to a high school teacher who does not believe in climate change. Certainly does not believe even if there was a climate change it was caused by human action. We're no longer at 400. In 2016, in August 2016, the constitution of CO2 did not go below 402. I will not talk about the science behind this, but the answer to the question, some of you will already be aware of why that is so, but it is true that there is a huge body of science supporting the idea that things are changing and they're having an effect that are consequences. So this is just one slide from the BBC recent feature that there was on climate change following COP21. So I started by saying that I work for Tuasa, the World Academy of Sciences, Peter McGrath who contributed work for the interacademy partnership, and I would also like to mention another sister organization hosted at the ACDP called OASED, the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World. Now we are special programs of UNESCO and as such we have a lot of focus on UNESCO and the United Nations priorities and the sustainability development goals are exactly there. All three organizations have a common mission which is to invest in science, technology and innovation. Hopefully this will strengthen infrastructure and education leading to economic growth and that may have nice results. These ideas are not, again, they're not new, they date back over 30 years when Abdus Salam, a Nobel Prize in physics that is obviously the ACDP is named after him when he founded him and other scientists founded Tuasa. And basically many of his concepts are now reflected in what we do as well as in the SDGs. Tuasa has identified 81 nations that are science and technology lagging. 48 are classified as least developed countries by the United Nations. Of those 48 LCDs as many as 34 are in Africa and the African continent. I talked about population before. The population in Africa is booming. It's even more exponential in its growth than the rest of the world. And so it is expected to be much larger in the years to come. In particular, if we look at the section of people here, say between 15 and 24, we haven't expected the increase for the population from 200 million to 450 million, so more than a doubling. Now, the reason why I'm looking at this section of people is because a lot of education can be done with those people. So there is an opportunity, education is key. Just like this talk, this presentation is for raising awareness. Therefore, this is introducing an educational challenge for Africa. This is why Africa is a high priority for both the United Nations and for UNESCO. In this diagram, we report the pupil-to-teacher ratio that we have. And so you can see that there are countries clustering in the African continent where the pupil-to-teacher ratio is atrocious. It's really bad. So there's not only lack of infrastructure, but there's also lack of teachers. And there is also lack of researchers and PhDs in Africa. That's why the educational level is and may remain low unless something is done. I mentioned PhDs, so many nations in Africa are fewer than 100 per million. You see, in some other countries, the situation is much different and much better. So the general level of education has an impact, obviously, on what there is and what there could be. So if there are many challenges to face, Africa is not in a good place to face those challenges as well as other countries. It was, we have the largest south-to-south fellowship program, including both PhDs and postdocs, also visiting researchers and professors over 600 every year we fund. Recently, we sent out a core. This was a core focusing totally on sustainability. We had green chemistry as well as others. I mentioned green chemistry because I can imagine that some of you may be chemists. This particular core was not a south-to-south program, was a north-to-south, so to bring expertise to the south. One of the applicants did not receive a good reply from us because the application was not really related to sustainability. It seemed that that applicant misunderstood. I will not say obviously the name of the applicant or even the country of origin. However, I would like to quote the response which was mistakenly copied to everyone and therefore we read what the applicant wrote. I hate the word sustainability and the fact that everyone is trying to link it to everything. This is what the applicant said as an explosion talking to other colleagues that were copied in, but unfortunately we were also copied in there. So I thought that was very sad and I think if that's the attitude that many people have even when they apply for such funding programs, I'm not sure. It's very hopeful. So I'm trying to reach out to any of you who might get involved with some of this and take a different perspective and a different approach. So yeah, to us also has research support and prizes, but basically we deeply care about education which is sustainability goal number four. Hopefully all of this effort will result in increased scientific capacity which will impact on result number ten. Now these are just examples, these two, okay? Perhaps you will go away with one little memory that one of the sustainability goals is about education and education is obviously extremely important unless people understand and know they cannot do anything about a problem. And there are problems, there are plenty of problems. These problems are perhaps not official yet, but more or less efficiently the expression use these global challenges. They start with the growth of human population that has impact on energy as well as loss of biodiversity, increased CO2 emission, causing climate change, pollution of air and water, huge problem in Africa as well as environmental degradation. We know that resources are limited and they may be increasing, be limited. Urban sprawl and the growth of mega cities is introducing new problems. Finally, infectious disease epidemics, resistant to antibiotics may be things that some of you are familiar with perhaps even working on. Therefore, I will conclude, I hope I didn't take too long, by saying that these new sustainability development goals are not just, I hope, I hope I'm not tricking myself, just a political scout to make the UN look good, okay? Thank you very much.