European network releases White Paper on Science, Technology, and Innovation collaboration to advance the UN SDGs

White Paper

A network of legal entities based in Europe, coordinated by LifeWatch ERIC, has released a white paper that presents a collaborative commitment to leveraging scientific knowledge and digital innovation, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Emerging from discussions at the 79th United Nations General Assembly and the Science Summit (SSUNGA79), the white paper is the result of joint work by a network of partners with global interests in biodiversity, ecology, engineering and beyond. These organisations have decided to combine their expertise through European initiatives such as Research Infrastructures, e-Infrastructures, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Digital Twin projects and academic publishers. Their aim is to provide a strong base for collaboration and to contribute strategically to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (K-M GBF) targets. Moreover, they also seek to forge an international alliance to further integrate biodiversity conservation into the UN Summit of the Future priorities and the post-SDG agenda.

The starting point is clear: biodiversity can no longer be treated as a siloed issue. It is foundational to climate resilience, public health, food security, and economic stability. The three interconnected planetary crises facing humanity (biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution) represent the most urgent challenges of our time. Addressing them requires collective efforts from scientific communities, as well as the public and private sectors and policymakers.

In this context, Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) are crucial, because the complex transformations we need demand data-driven decision-making, cross-sectoral collaboration, and multidisciplinary and cross-domain research frameworks.

The network had already demonstrated this holistic approach during a workshop held in New York, in September 2024, as part of the SSUNGA79. Building on that foundation, the organisations now focus on their shared impact, rather than individual achievements. They have identified the K-M GBF as a testbed for contributing to the SDGs, based on long-track experience in European initiatives.

The K-M GBF itself focuses on seven strategic considerations, and twenty-three specific targets for its implementation. In the white paper, the network has been working collectively on the seven strategic considerations, outlining practical ways to contributing to each of them.

Moreover, the paper expands to other UN STI priorities and sets the basis for a global alliance: a convergence point for diverse knowledge systems, from cutting-edge digital tools and genomic research to traditional ecological practices, and as a mechanism for aligning efforts across thematic domains, such as climate, health, food, and equity. 

Read the full white paper here: https://riojournal.com/article/168765

NELOS divers will now access WoRMS from their digital dive log

NELOS divers

NELOS, the Flemish diving federation, has recently integrated WoRMS (the World Register of Marine Species, supported by LifeWatch Belgium), into its internal platform DIVES: a Digital Verification System used to log tens of thousands of dives each year.

This integration marks a very important achievement, because divers will now be able to record the marine species that they come across during their observations, in direct connection with the WoRMS database!

The WoRMS database provides an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, controlled by taxonomic and thematic experts and continuously updated. Its editorial management system, in fact, includes one expert for each taxonomic group, who controls the quality of each entry. The editors can also invite specialists of smaller groups to revise specific species.

An interesting characteristic of the new integration with DIVES, is that the platform adapts to common marine species names used in Dutch, and through a built-in search function, it automatically provides the scientifically correct version of the name.

This integration has a great potential to support future research by becoming a valuable data source, supporting citizen science and marine biodiversity through simple digital tools.

Read more about this on LifeWatch Belgium:

https://www.lifewatch.be/news/nelos-divers-use-worms-digital-dive-log-step-toward-citizen-science

LifeWatch ERIC and CSIC working together towards a unified platform for biodiversity modelling

LifeWatch ERIC plus MNCN-CSIC

As part of its ongoing mission to provide state-of-the-art tools for biodiversity and ecosystem research, LifeWatch ERIC is collaborating with CSIC on an initiative to build a unified, open platform for biodiversity modelling. Below is the full announcement from MaraujoLab:

LifeWatch ERIC and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC), through the Biogeography and Global Change Group led by Research Professor Miguel Bastos Araújo, have signed a four-year Memorandum of Understanding to develop a cutting-edge platform for biodiversity model outputs. The collaboration seeks to address one of the most pressing scientific and societal challenges of our time: understanding and forecasting biodiversity responses to global environmental change.

This strategic partnership capitalises on LifeWatch ERIC’s mission to mobilise and integrate biodiversity data and computational tools across Europe and beyond, and on the MNCN-CSIC team’s internationally recognised leadership in biogeography, macroecology and climate change biology.

At the core of the agreement lies the co-development of a public database platform for sharing, comparing and validating outputs of biodiversity models —especially species distribution models under climate change scenarios. The platform will support explanatory, predictive and forecasting applications, and will be openly accessible to scientists, conservation practitioners and decision-makers worldwide.

“Making biodiversity model outputs findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) is essential to unlock their full potential for science and policy” says Miguel Araújo. “This platform will facilitate cumulative science while supporting evidence-based decision-making in conservation and environmental management”.

Dr Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of LifeWatch ERIC, emphasises the importance of federated infrastructures and domain expertise: “This collaboration illustrates how distributed research infrastructures like LifeWatch can synergise with world-leading scientific teams to deliver services of high societal relevance. We are proud to support this joint venture”.

The platform will be co-branded by both institutions and will evolve in phases —from conceptual design, pilot studies and expert networking to community testing and global deployment. It aims to serve as a benchmark repository for biodiversity modelling outputs and to promote transparency, reproducibility and comparability in ecological forecasting.

By aligning LifeWatch ERIC’s infrastructure development capacity with the scientific excellence of researchers at MNCN-CSIC, this partnership sets the stage for a new era of collaborative biodiversity research and innovation.