In Nature, Dr Marguerite Nyhan writes that while global efforts in science, technology and innovation could accelerate achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, scientists need to be incentivised to contribute to these goals with new reward and evaluation systems which capture both scientific excellence and SDG impact. 

This message is extremely important ahead of next week's 2023 United Nations SDG Summit. The summit marks the midpoint of the adoption of the SDGs in 2015 and their proposed achievement by 2030. Disappointingly, only a small fraction of SDG targets are on track to be achieved while a majority are severely off track or have regressed. As such, the authors propose that global efforts in science, technology and innovation should be incentivised to boost progress towards SDG achievement. Academic reward systems and broader evaluation and impact metrics focused on SDG-relevance and alignment would mobilise transformative SDG action.

Read the article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02860-7