Fostering Innovation To Tackle Global Challenges
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the United Nations (UN) and its member states have committed to, serve as the UN system's compass for addressing humanity's most pressing challenges. As a contributor to the UN Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum, I have shared insights on how AI and deep tech innovation can help accelerate progress toward the SDGs.
There remains vast untapped potential in how technology and business can address the systemic challenges our world faces. This premise has sparked conversations about emerging technologies, the steps needed to bring them to market at scale, and how startups, investors, academia, policymakers, civil society, and corporations can work together responsibly to do so.
Through public speaking and written contributions, I have provided stakeholders with recommendations on AI and other frontier technologies
and on the future of education, science, and innovation.
Shaping the Sustainable Development Agenda
In 2010-13, I served as the representative of AEGEE at the United Nations, with Special Consultative Status on matters related to higher education and future generations at the UN Headquarters, UNESCO, and UNEP, among other agencies.
As the UN started moving beyond the Millennium Development Goals, my work contributed to framing a new focus on sustainable development. Such work was tied to the Rio+20 Sustainable Development Summit (the largest event in UN history until then), and on the institutional process that led to the summit.
While the outcome text negotiated in Rio was not satisfactory, a number of impactful initiatives were created in the months leading to Rio+20 and at the summit. In Rio, governments agreed to a series of commitments to sustainable development, including more than $513 billion funds.
On behalf of AEGEE, I contributed to the Rio+20 Compilation Document that was used as a starting point for the negotiations. I also co-created a multi-stakeholder initiative, together with other members of the UN Major Groups, to suggest the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way of breaking silos and putting sustainability at the center of international development goals. My colleagues and I also sought to better include the interests of youth and future generations in the framework. Successively, the SDGs were proposed by the Government of Colombia and picked up by the 64th UN DPI Conference in Bonn in 2011, and then the process continued all the way to Rio+20 and beyond.
My most important contribution was obtaining support from the European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Potočnik, and from the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative David Nabarro. Potočnik was one of Rio+20's most influential negotiators representing more than 500 million EU citizens, and Nabarro was highly involved with the UN Secretary-General's work on Sustainable Development. As they joined our table, our requests gained legitimacy that extended well beyond that venue in Rio.
After Rio+20, the SDGs were formally established and Nabarro became the UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Climate Change.
Inclusive Decision-Making Protecting Young and Future Generations
The youth-led Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, Anti-Austerity Protests in Europe, and the Chilean Student Movement emerged in the early 2010s along with rampant inequality and worrisome youth unemployment rates in several regions of the world, including Europe. As the representative of AEGEE at the United Nations, I sought to bring youth — more than half of the world's population at the time — into the spotlight of the UN agenda.
Through joint efforts and coordinated inputs at the UN, a coalition of UN civil society representatives and I developed a strong case for more and better representation of youth and future generations as important stakeholders of decisions taken within the UN system.
In 2012, the UN Secretary-General announced that “the largest generation of young people the world has ever known” became one of the top five priorities in his agenda. He also appointed the first ever UN Secretary-General Envoy on Youth, who would become the direct channel connecting the Secretary General's cabinet and the UN delegates focused on youth issues.
