Event Overview and Objectives

This parallel side event at highlights the importance of climate-related health research and the behavioral and communication interventions needed to translate this knowledge into action.

Notably, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that climate change affects reproductive health outcomes. Still, actual policy frameworks and public discourse are needed to continue representing them and to provide research-based behavior interventions. In this context, the event also highlights the contributions of the .

In particular, its research on “Women鈥檚 Role in Transformational Adaptation in Kurigram” underscores how locally grounded, gender-responsive knowledge can inform climate resilience strategies.

Institutionalizing the Climate Arts Research Group

The event will introduce and advance the Climate Arts Research Group. It aims to institutionalize collaboration between researchers, artists, and policy actors to support the integration of scientific evidence, participatory methods, and communication strategies within UNFCCC processes.

Consequently, it will contribute to ongoing SB64 processes, such as the 鈥�18th Research Dialogue,鈥� the 鈥淒ialogue on Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE),鈥� and the 鈥淟CIPP Annual Dialogue on Indigenous and local knowledge systems,鈥� by promoting transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production and dissemination.

Addressing Reproductive Health in Climate-Vulnerable Areas

Evidence from climate-vulnerable coastal areas shows a clear intersection between environmental stressors such as salinity intrusion, freshwater scarcity, and limited healthcare access and adverse reproductive health outcomes, including menstrual irregularities, increased prevalence of thalassemia, and low birth weight.

These impacts disproportionately affect women and adolescent girls, underscoring the need not only for further research but for stronger recognition, integration, and communication of existing knowledge within climate policy and practice.

Integrating Community-Based Communication and Participatory Research

Positioned within ongoing SB64 processes, this event contributes to adaptation discussions by emphasizing the importance of integrating health into climate response strategies. Hence, a participatory research approach will be presented to strengthen the scientific evidence base, drawing from CPRD鈥檚 work in Kurigram to illustrate how community-driven evidence can fill data gaps.

Furthermore, collaboration with demonstrates how locally embedded communication strategies can enhance awareness, trust, and behavioral change at the community level.

The Role of Climate Arts in Planetary Transformation

Climate arts research, aligned with the emerging X-ART Planetary Arts Movement, is introduced as a complementary approach that translates scientific data into accessible, emotionally resonant, and culturally grounded forms. Thus, the initiative emphasizes the role of artists, scientists, and creatives as catalysts for planetary transformation, ecological awareness, and collective resilience.

Advancing Gender and Capacity-Building Agendas

By foregrounding reproductive health as a key dimension of gendered climate impacts, the event reinforces the need to integrate existing evidence into more responsive and equitable policy frameworks and to strengthen communication strategies that enable broader societal engagement.

笔谤辞驳谤补尘听

The survey’s findings were striking in their clarity. When respondents ranked 25 priority topics on a 1-to-5 scale, education, energy development, and food supply emerged as the height of global concern. These were followed by health and medical care, population distribution, and mobilizing public participation in decision-making. The behavioral and social sciences dominated the fields of interest at 37%, suggesting that even then, experts recognized that humanity’s greatest challenges were fundamentally about people, not just technology or resources.

What’s most revealing about the 1974 priorities is what they tell us about that historical moment. The survey captured a world still reeling from the 1973 oil embargo, haunted by the specter of overpopulation (the “population bomb” fears were peaking), and awakening to environmental degradation. The emphasis on energy and food wasn’t academic鈥攖hese were existential anxieties rooted in immediate material scarcity. Education ranked first, reflecting an era-specific faith that knowledge and schooling could solve civilizational problems. Public participation in decision-making, ranked sixth, revealed a democratic idealism about including ordinary people in governance.

Yet perhaps most fascinating was what received the lowest priorities: outer space exploration and vulcanism (earthquakes) ranked near the bottom, even among earth scientists. In 1974, humanity wasn’t yet preoccupied with asteroid impacts or space colonization as survival strategies. The future seemed to belong to those who could feed themselves and power their societies here on Earth.

Fast forward to 2026, and the conversation has transformed in ways both predictable and surprising. Climate change鈥攂arely mentioned in 1974 (though ecology appeared as an “other” category added by respondents, with 119 additions focused on environment)鈥攏ow dominates global discourse. We’ve replaced anxiety about scarcity with anxiety about excess: excess carbon in the atmosphere, excess heat in our systems, excess consumption. The existential threat has shifted from “will we have enough?” to “will the planet survive what we’ve taken?”

Energy remains critical, but now the priority isn’t development and use; it’s transition and sustainability. And as of right now, with the crisis in Iran, highly political. Food supply persists as a concern, but now intertwined with climate, land use, and biodiversity. Health and medical care, always important, has been turbocharged by pandemic awareness and the recognition that biosecurity and equitable healthcare access are civilization-level concerns.

The biggest shift, however, may be in what we’ve learned about education. While still valued, we now recognize that schooling alone cannot solve our problems鈥攖hat education must be coupled with behavioral change, institutional reform, and global coordination. The 1974 optimism that knowledge translates to action has been tempered by fifty years of knowing better without doing better.

Remarkably absent from the survey is artificial intelligence and technology, which barely existed in 1974 and dominates anxious conversation today. The 1974 survey included space sciences at just 2%, yet today we debate whether AI could be our greatest existential risk or our greatest hope. This omission is humbling: we’re likely as blind to 2074’s critical concerns as the 1974 respondents were to ours.

Perhaps most sobering is the continuity in unmet needs. That 1974 emphasis on income distribution and consumption (ranked seventh) remains urgent today. Social discrimination, clarification of value norms, and control of violent coercion鈥攁ll high priorities fifty years ago鈥攕till plague us. We’ve made progress on some fronts; we’ve stalled on others; we’ve created new problems while solving old ones.

What McHale called the development of an “appreciative system” in society鈥攃ontinuous appraisal and assessment of human activities鈥攆eels more necessary than ever. Yet the survey’s greatest insight may be the very act of asking what matters, of creating forums for global consensus-building on priorities. This is itself a priority, and an ongoing mandate of the 被窝影视福利, today. The 1974 respondents from 72 countries found surprising agreement on what mattered most, transcending specialization and national interest. Whether we could generate that same consensus today, in an age of algorithmic filters and political fragmentation, remains uncertain.

The 1974 WAAS survey reminds us that priorities reflect the anxieties and hopes of their moment. We cannot return to their concerns; we cannot escape ours. But we can honor their effort to think systematically about the future and ask ourselves the same hard question they posed: what do we believe humanity most urgently needs? And then, we must actually do something about it.

The economies that most need innovation are often precisely the ones whose institutions make it hardest to invest in it. Understanding why – and what can be done – is one of the defining policy challenges of our era.

A Paradox at The Heart of Development

More than half the world’s population lives in middle-income economies – societies that have escaped extreme poverty but have not yet reached the living standards of high-income countries, and many risk never doing so. The culprit, increasingly, is not a shortage of capital or labour. It is a shortage of productivity growth: the capacity to produce more with what already exists.

Brazil is the country I know best, and it illustrates the paradox with unusual sharpness. Brazilian agriculture is a world-class performer: sustained public investment in tropical biotechnology and precision farming lifted agricultural productivity by roughly 35 index points between 2007 and 2024. Yet industrial and services productivity – the sectors that account for virtually all of Brazil’s domestic economic impulse – grew by barely a fraction of that over the same period. The result is an economy that exports innovation to global commodity markets while struggling to distribute its benefits to the majority of its citizens.

What causes this divide? And, more importantly, can deliberate policy close it?

The Monetary Double Dividend: A Finding That Surprised Us

Our research set out to quantify the macroeconomic returns to Brazil’s principal innovation policy instruments – the Lei do Bem, a long-standing tax credit program for industrial R&D, and federal public investment in knowledge infrastructure. What we found exceeded our initial expectations, not in the magnitude of the direct productivity gains, but in the way those gains compound through the monetary system.

When innovation raises total factor productivity, it reduces firms’ marginal costs and com-presses inflation. Under Brazil’s inflation-targeting regime – maintained continuously since 1999 – the central bank responds to that disinflationary signal by reducing the pol-icy interest rate. That rate reduction, in turn, stimulates private investment and amplifies the original output gain through a second channel that conventional supply-side analysis misses entirely.

We call this the monetary double dividend. The counterintuitive finding with the broadest policy relevance is that the mechanism is stronger in economies with high neutral

real interest rates. Brazil’s famously elevated real rates – long viewed as the country’s principal growth impediment – turn out to be the amplifier that converts a supply-side improvement into a substantial and persistent macroeconomic dividend. The implication is not that high interest rates are desirable. It is that, in an economy already burdened by them, supply-side innovation policy constitutes a means of unlocking monetary space that tight financial conditions have otherwise closed.

A coordinated innovation package – combining RBD tax credits) public investment) and direct innovation grants – raises GDP by over nine per cent at peak and delivers a welfare gain equivalent to a permanent 3.3 per cent increase in household consumption. These are not marginal adjustments; they are structural transformations.

Knowledge, Institutions and The Limits of Policy Instruments

I want to be candid about what our research also reveals, because intellectual honesty is what WAAS asks of its members.
The policy instruments for raising innovation exist. Brazil’s Lei do Bem has been in operation for two decades. The technical knowledge of effective R&D incentive design is broadly available. The monetary transmission mechanism is well understood. And yet the productivity gap persists.

The binding constraint, our evidence suggests, is not the toolkit. It is the institutional ecosystem within which instruments operate: the depth of university-industry linkages, the quality of intellectual property enforcement, the degree of integration into global value chains, and the absorptive capacity of firms to convert innovation inputs into sustained productivity gains. Without these foundations, R&D subsidies become transfers rather than investments, and the monetary double dividend remains theoretical.

This is precisely the kind of challenge that WAAS is uniquely equipped to address – not because it requires further econometric research, but because it requires a transdisciplinary dialogue that economics alone cannot sustain. Questions of institutional trust, educational quality, social cohesion, and the governance of knowledge are as much questions of art, philosophy, and political science as they are of macroeconomics. The disciplinary silos of academic specialization are exactly what this Academy was founded to transcend.

What I Hope to Contribute

Joining WAAS at this moment is both a privilege and a responsibility. The middle-income trap is not a Brazilian problem. It is a global challenge affecting billions of people across Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Its resolution will require exactly the kind of transdisciplinary, value-centered, and institutionally conscious thinking that this Academy has championed since its founding.
In the years ahead, I hope to contribute to WAAS’s work in three directions.

First, by bringing rigorous empirical evidence about what innovation policy actually achieves – not in theoretical models, but in the complex reality of a large emerging economy characterized by deep inequalities and layered institutions. Second, by translating that evidence into policy recommendations that are actionable for finance ministers, central bankers, and development institution leaders operating under genuine fiscal and political constraints.

And third – most ambitiously – by examining whether the monetary double dividend extends to green innovation: whether productivity gains from low-carbon technology can simultaneously raise output, reduce inflation, and accelerate decarbonization, generating a triple dividend with profound implications for sustainable development.

The challenges confronting humanity in the coming decades demand that rigorous knowledge reach decision-makers faster, more clearly, and with greater urgency than it currently does. I look forward to pursuing that goal alongside the distinguished community of Fellows and Associate Fellows of this Academy.

Underlying research. The findings discussed in this piece draw on: Oliveira, J.G.A., Andrade, J.P., Amorim, C.R., and Soares, V.A. (2025). “When High Rates Help: Innovation Policy, TFP, and the Monetary Double Dividend in Brazil.” Working paper submitted for peer review. Data and replication code are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Primary data sources: IBGE, BCB/SGS, MCTI/PINTEC, Receita Federal, SOF/STN, EPE/BEN, Penn World Tables 10.0. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the World Bank Group, its Executive Directors, or the governments they represent.