7 February 2023

Dear Colleagues,

Science is a leitmotif and cornerstone in the work and preparations of decision-shaping GA 77.

Our common endeavor to inform our discussions and decisions in the General Assembly continues today.

Science illuminates the very foundations that our decisions are based on.

Science lights up future possibilities and impasses.

Science transgresses boundaries.

Science helps to find compromise.

Science unites.

To bring science to our community, and to our work, my office is working with you and the Secretariat on 3 efforts. Let’s call them 3 layers

The first Layer is a targeted science briefing on relevant topics. It applies to all negotiating processes we have started.

Out of the 16, at least 13 will be very characteristic and making the scientific briefings the best use of.

Layer 2: ensuring that the product of your negotiations is relevant and transformative.

When we are approaching the face of the finalization of the result of the negotiations, it is very important to make sure that the results will really be informing our future activities, helping transformation, and make sure that we are addressing the most important interlinkages and most important challenges ahead of us.

Layer 3: We need to design a future validation mechanism for sustainable development – that is profoundly missing in the UN system.

All these activities are not prescriptive. They are meant to offer more targeted, better information for us to make our work more impactful and to help us finding the solutions we need to transform this word.

To make it what was intended from the very start of the UN: a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable community of people that lives in a harmony with and on our planet.

Today we have gathered for a Layer 1 activity.

We will hear briefings related to the upcoming UN conference on water, the climate and water interface, as well as the presentation on possibilities to improve pandemic preparedness.

This will be followed by a briefing on the status of the Global Sustainable Development Report, the science report on sustainable development that SG has commissioned for publication this spring.

So what we are going to have is an advance glance of the results and findings of the support.

I will make sure we excerpt the essence of the presentations and discussions today to support and to start populating Layer 2 in our effort.

My plea to you is: listen to the scientists, challenge them, ask questions, discuss, formulate the support that you expect for our negotiations here in this room. 

My other plea to you: let us work together to improve this format that we have organized in blueprint version for you today.

Please contact my science advisor, just behind me, Dr. Johannes Cullman who will take over the moderation today, if you have any further topics you want us to address, ideas how we can improve this format, expectations about how we can turn this into a useful part of changing this world.

With that I give the floor to Johannes Cullman who will introduce our first panel.