Together, science funders are in a powerful position and can achieve a longer-term impact at a scale beyond what any one actor could achieve alone. With the increasingly likely prospect of a long-term economic downturn and its impacts on science funding, collaboration between science funders becomes even more important. And the SDG framework provides a common language and organizing principles for that collaboration to happen.
On behalf of the Global Commission, the International Science Council is calling on visionary funders – national funding agencies, foundations, philanthropies, development aid agencies, and development banks – to build strategic partnership and collaboration across funding sectors and support the development and implementation of Science Missions for Sustainability around the world in order to meet our most daunting sustainability challenges.
Scaling up science investment to support a limited number of Science Missions for Sustainability provides a real opportunity for mobilizing the best of global science for societal transformations to sustainability. This urgent moment in human existence on planet Earth requires visionary thinking and fundamentally disruptive actions from funders around the world, stepping out of business-as-usual approaches to funding science. We see funders, scientists and communities working together to create sustainability outcomes in an integrated and coordinated manner.
