The Science Diplomacy Center aims at generating research products that have societal benefit. The Science Diplomacy Centers seeks to stimulate imagination and compassion of next-generation science diplomats who can synthesize questions, facilitating international, interdisciplinary and inclusive integration before-through-after inflections points with practical positive consequences for the lives and livelihoods of people short-long term at local-global levels. Global inflection points are illustrated in the following figure in relation to exponential changes when human interventions are urgent to ‘bend the curve’:
- month-years in view of our global pandemic (highlighting that we all have a common interest in survival) with challenges to end the devastation on a planetary scale and to evolve as a globally-interconnected civilization;
- years-decades in view of high technologies and the opportunities as well as challenges of digital era, considering communications, genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3-D printing, nano-technologies, clean energy systems, outer space exploration and other creative contributions that are transforming science fiction into reality;
- decades-centuries in view of human population growth and Earth’s climate on a planetary scale, underscoring the time frames of sustainable development across generations with ever-present urgencies to balance environmental protection, economic prosperity and societal well-being.
It is noted that social-media time scales (minutes-months) are reactive and too short to produce informed decisions that operate across a continuum of urgencies short-long term.
See The Pandemic Lens: Focusing across Time Scales for Local-Global Sustainability