CAIRO: Arab scientists and engineers gathered this week in Cairo to discuss sustainable development strategies in a workshop run by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the United Nations' Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). According to the report at the Regional Science and Technology Workshop for the Arab States, the scientists and engineers wish to undertake regionally coordinated research into sustainable development due to what they have perceived as a failure in the policies established after the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the Rio+20 Intergovernmental Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Arab Region, which was also held this week, scientists called for policymakers to aid the work of scientists in the region by recognising and supporting their work. “The science community in the Arab region has been observing for the last 20 years an empty promise from the governments to achieve sustainable development, and the institutional framework that was set failed to achieve the goal,” Nazar Hassan, senior program specialist at the UNESCO Cairo Regional Bureau for Science and Technology in the Arab States, toldSciDev.Net. The failures in question are the post-1992 measures taken by the arab governments, such as establishing environmental ministries and Qatar's Supreme Council for the Environment and Natural Sanctuaries. Hassan's call for change involves three aspects; knowledge management in economic sectors to allow for a shift into environmentally friendly technologies, stronger links between the scientists and the scientific institutions through more effective governance and socio-economic research to better understand the people and their environment. “From what I heard in this meeting there is a lot of capacity in the Arab region, but it is fragmented and not well utilised or supported by policymakers,” a science officer at ICSU, Peter Bates, commented. While the call has gone out to shift towards more sustainable economic development, Professor Boshra Salem of the environmental sciences department at the Alexandria University in Egypt warns scientists that they should be wary of tuning sustainability into a primarily economic issue. The workshop was one of five regional workshops organised by the ICSU. The other workshops were in Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe. The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development will be held in June of next year in Rio de Janeiro. BM
