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Read this excerpt from the report 'Inventing a better future'
The countless manifestations of science pervade our world, and they profoundly affect the social, economic, and cultural outlooks of societies and individuals alike. Moreover, the accumulation of scientific knowledge and its technological applications is accelerating at a dizzying clip, enabled in large part by ever more powerful computers and lightning-fast communications.
The Internet, for example, revolutionizes the very meaning of time and space. With the click of a mouse and the flight of electrons, vast quantities of data and manifold services can move across the globe. Today there are billions of pages on the appropriately named World Wide Web; by 2005 it will likely be eight billion. Thus the integration of the world economy through trade, capital flows, and enhanced communications is rapidly proceeding as the products of the Information and Communications Technology Revolution permeate every corner of society. The economies of the world will increasingly become 'knowledge-based,' with value-added coming more from knowledge than materials.
A revolution is occurring in the life sciences as well. Today we are not only decoding DNA - the blueprint of life - we are learning to manage the placement and expression of genes and to mobilize microorganisms to do our work. We can thereby manipulate - repair, transfer, insert - the constituents of living things in order to improve health, create new and useful products, increase productivity, and even transform whole industries.
Taken together, such innovations have altered and expanded our notions of economic and social development, and they often do so not with high-tech dazzle, but in mundane yet profound ways. We have come to realize that better health care, nutrition, and labor-saving devices make it possible for more young people to attend school and to complete more years of schooling. The net result, at least in some societies, has been a major increase in the number of able and educated individuals entering the workforce - people who have far better prospects of contributing to the overall welfare of society and of leading more satisfying lives.
Yet the global reality is that many innovations fail to accrue to those who need them most, and benefits are not shared equitably around the planet. Such maldistribution is further confounded by troubling trends in demography, urbanization, public health, and environment, which will continue into the foreseeable future even if only from their present momentum.
Demographic growth will continue until the world population stabilizes at between 8 and 9.5 billion persons by the middle of the century, with enormous differences in the age profiles of different parts of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, will continue to grow, likely reaching some 1.5 billion persons. Conversely, in Japan and most of Europe, populations will remain stable if not actually decline. The industrialized nations will increasingly see the graying of their labor forces and an increase in the needs of the elderly, with concomitant shortages in rapidly growing parts of their labor market; by contrast, the predominantly young populations of the developing nations will be putting enormous pressure on education and training facilities and on local labor markets to create adequate employment opportunities.
For the first time, the majority of human beings are now classified as urban, a phenomenon that will continue unabated, mostly in the developing world, even though some will use the new information and communications technology to work out of more rural surroundings. Urbanization will challenge the capacities of developing nations to deal with the enormous problems of their 'megacities' (those with populations over 10 million). Over the next three decades, India alone will face an increment of urban population twice the size of the total populations of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined.
Poverty, destitution, and hunger still stalk humanity. Despite the enormous improvements that have been achieved in human welfare, 38 percent of the people in the least developed nations are malnourished and the shadow of starvation and famine still looms large in parts of the world - especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where civil strife has exacerbated an already bad situation. One-sixth of the human family lives on less than a dollar a day, and almost half of humanity survives on fewer than two dollars a day. The richest quintile of the world's people earns more than 70 times the income of the poorest quintile.
Problems such as HIV/AIDS strike globally, though responses to the disease's devastation vary enormously with a nation's capacity to deliver treatment and modify societal behavior. Some societies are producing a generation of AIDS orphans, with large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia facing enormous and crippling losses. The decimation of young adults at their most productive moments is a human tragedy of gigantic proportions and a social and economic nightmare. Dramatic policy changes
are required to address this issue, as well as persistent diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis and the more recent threat of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). More research is required to find better responses. Scientific collaboration on confronting the challenge - and on making the results of the research available to those who need it most - is essential.
Environmental challenges abound. If present production and consumption patterns are not changed, the impact on our biosphere will be astounding: the air and water we depend on will become increasingly polluted; the soils will more and more erode; and forests, habitats, and biodiversity will continue to be lost. If the entire population of the earth were to produce and consume at present U.S. levels, we would need three Planet Earths. The need to implement more environmentally friendly and socially responsible economic activity has never been greater.Luckily, we have a growing level of international consensus today on these demographic, urbanization, public health, and environmental issues, among others, that has never before existed. In September 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit of the world's heads of state declared specific goals for reducing poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease, and environmental degradation. Explicit in these Millennium Development Goals is a commitment to equity and participation, rather than polarization and marginalization, as we move toward an increasingly knowledge-based economy in the 21st century. The need for international cooperation to address these concerns is also recognized in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, especially considering problems such as environmental issues, which cross national borders.
Yet despite the growing consensus on all these issues, despite agreement on the inevitability of movement toward a knowledge-based future, the international community has overlooked something critical. It has given inadequate attention to capacity building in science and technology (S&T) as the engine that drives knowledge-based development, that is essential to social and economical inclusion, and that alleviates the demographic, urbanization, public health, and environmental pressures plaguing the world - especially the developing world.
It is precisely the need to correct that critical omission that we address here, and we do so in terms of the needed personnel, infrastructure, investment, institutions, and regulatory framework available for conducting scientific research and pursuing technological development in every country of the world.
You can download the full 'Inventing a better future' report here.