Last week, our Wavemaker Abed El Rahman El Khatib, member of our Youth Board, took the stage as one of the speakers at the UNESCO Conference “Innovation in Action: Young Leaders Shaping Tomorrow”,co-organized by JCI (Junior Chamber International) France and UNESCO’s Natural Sciences Sector as part of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development.
Abed spoke about the gap between scientific knowledge and real-world change. Drawing on his own fieldwork and experience, he argued that the problem is never the science itself. The science and scientific data are always there. What breaks is the chain after it.
He introduced the idea of the science-policy loop: data should inform policies, strategies and laws and then those should be implemented, and implementation should feed back into new science bringing new data due to monitoring. In practice, that loop breaks in two places, either the data never reaches or is not used by policy makers and decision-makers, or the regulations exist but are never enforced.
He called on institutions to fund post-implementation monitoring, treat environmental data as long-term infrastructure rather than a one-off deliverable, and create genuine entry points for young professionals in policy design, not symbolic ones.
He closed by arguing that young professionals today, trained across disciplines, moving freely between the lab, the policy space, and the community, are uniquely positioned to close that loop. Not because they are better. Because they are not boxed in yet. And networks like Wavemakers United, UNESCO GWYN, and Youth4Water Plus are the infrastructure that makes that possible at scale.
Youth Voices in Action: UNESCO Conference
