New urban science policy expert panel to meet in London next week

This builds on work led by the urban research community in the run-up to the UN’s historic Habitat III conference on cities in Quito in 2016. At Habitat III, the community argued for a stronger role for science in urban policy making. They were concerned that the urban research community is “disparate, marginalized and ill-prepared to interact effectively with global policy.”

To redress these limits and advance the development of more integrated (cross-disciplinary) and policy-engaged research on cities, Nature Sustainability -the new interdisciplinary journal of Nature Research- and the City Leadership Lab at University College London have established an Expert Panel on the urban science-policy interface for global sustainability.

The panel includes a number of experts from ICSU’s programmes and networks, such as Shuaib Lwasa, Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk programme (IRDR), Mark Pelling, member of the IRDR Scientific Committee, Yong-Guan Zhu, Director General of the Institute of Urban Environment which hosts the ICSU Urban Health and Wellbeing programme, Susan Parnell, Chair of the steering committee of the LIRA 2030 programme, and Charles Ebikeme, Health and Urbanisation Science Officer at ICSU.

The core conveners of the Panel are the UCL City Leadership Laboratory, based in UCL’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) and Nature Sustainability. The Panel benefits from the support of the UCL Office of the Vice-Provost (Research) and UCL Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities, as well as the International Council for Science (ICSU) and its LIRA Programme, UCL’s Development Planning Unit (DPU), and the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit.

Find out more about the ISC’s work on urbanization.