Protesters outside an IPCC meeting in Sweden in 2013 urge policymakers to accept that humans are warming the planet.Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty
We are in an era of disruption. The geopolitical context is increasingly adversarial, power is more widely distributed, and relationships among leading powers have become more competitive.”
These are the opening lines of Science Diplomacy in an Era of Disruption, a report published last month by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based in Washington DC, and the Royal Society in London. The organizations clearly leave no doubt as to why the report is needed, adding: “Scientific values once thought universal are now being re-examined. Trust in science and the use of evidence in policymaking is under renewed attack across the world.”
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Science diplomacy is the use of science to improve international cooperation, according to one definition. The document updates a report that the two organizations published in 2010, a different, indeed more optimistic, time for international cooperation — talks on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example, involving nearly 200 countries, would begin the following year. Today, by contrast, the United States, Europe and China are restricting their areas of cooperation and ramping up competition. Also different is that industry is a more visible presence in science diplomacy than in the past, and firms have resources exceeding those of many governments to promote their interests. “We need a framework on the practice of science diplomacy that recognizes the world for what it is,” the updated report notes.
The question it doesn’t fully answer, however, is how to do science diplomacy when the integrity of science itself is under attack from national actors, including the elected government of the United States, the world science superpower of recent decades. How, when the legitimacy of global scientific institutions is increasingly being challenged, can science be deployed in diplomacy — for example, to resolve disagreements on global challenges such as protecting the environment or public health? Events even since the report was published suggest more challenges that any new approach to science diplomacy must fully meet.
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Take the situation with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As Nature’s news team has been reporting, the United States, a significant supporter of the IPCC, looks to be on a path to pulling away from the underlying scientific infrastructure of world climate policy. For the first time in IPCC history, the United States did not send a delegation to attend a key meeting of the panel, in China, where the themes for the next global assessment report were being decided. This followed separate White House executive orders: one cancelled US funding for the UN climate convention; the other ordered a review of US membership of international organizations.
Since the IPCC’s founding in 1988, governments representing all systems of political thought have invited scientists to review the literature on climate change. The results of that knowledge have fed into talks to achieve legally binding agreements, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. IPCC meetings are frequently argumentative affairs for all sorts of reasons. However, and crucially, politicians do not instruct the researchers on which papers to read or what to write in their reviews. IPCC leaders past and present have been supported by their funders to follow the consensus of evidence when coming to a conclusion. The IPCC has experienced many stresses and strains over the years, but the system of governments protecting the integrity of the review process has held. Now, it seems, at least one of the panel’s sponsoring governments is no longer willing to play that part.
Even if deprived of US input, the IPCC must continue publishing its authoritative reports. But a potential US withdrawal poses a direct challenge to science diplomacy, with a key member of the international community refusing to recognize that science has a role in resolving disagreements on climate action.
An alternative approach
One approach to protecting science in diplomacy is outlined in a separate report by the European Union, also published last month. Entitled A European Framework for Science Diplomacy, it recommends that science move closer to the centre of EU policymaking. “There is hardly any (geo-)political development not affected by the output of research and innovation,” it says. Europe’s science, and therefore its scientists, must “become more visible and be at the core rather than at the fringe” of “foreign and security policy as well as research and innovation policy”, it says.
Such a shift will not be straightforward for researchers. They lack incentives to participate in policy work, as a survey in Nature last year showed (Nature 636, 26–30; 2024). Researchers who do participate are more used to providing advisory evidence, while staying at arm’s length from actual policy decisions. This distance ensures that responsibility for decisions rests with politicians and not their expert advisers, and it has mostly served research well in ‘peacetime’.
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But now that science itself is being contested, there are persuasive arguments as to why researchers need to be in the room when big decisions are being made on subjects such as climate change, pandemic preparedness or the regulation of artificial intelligence.
If researchers accept the invitation to join the EU’s policymaking high table, their presence might also provide them with a way to protect the ‘science’ in science diplomacy should there be calls for budget cuts or attempts at the kind of interference now being seen in the United States.
One of the EU report’s weaknesses is that it assumes a shared understanding on the part of diplomats and policymakers that researchers must be able to operate without direct interference. The experience of the United States tells us that this cannot be assumed.
If the EU report’s recommendations are to be implemented, one necessary, although not sufficient, step, must be to write researchers’ ability to operate independently into law, as it already is in some countries, albeit imperfectly.
Science diplomacy is needed more now than at any time in history, given the scale of challenges the world faces. Research is often described as a form of ‘soft power’ diplomacy, a way for nations to advance their national interests without using military means. The first step towards protecting science diplomacy must be to protect science itself.
