Global crises like climate change are driving the need for transformative solutions to catalyse sustainability transitions and enable resilience. Emerging technologies, like next generation biotechnologies, are already fundamentally reshaping our societies and will thus play a key role in delivering these much-needed transformations.
Countries around the world are rapidly ramping up their biotechnology capabilities. Synthetic biology along with gene editing, gene drives and biomanufacturing - promise a revolution across many sectors and offers solutions to global and local societal challenges. However, serious policy challenges remain: balancing open science with biosecurity, building resilient value chains, scaling of biotechnology innovations and bridging biotechnology divides across the globe.
In the margins of the OECD Science and Technology Policy Ministerial Meeting, the Global Forum on Technology will convene a day-long event to deep dive into the promise of next generation biotechnologies, the associated policy challenges and the opportunities to address them. Challenge-based panels will put biotechnologies into their application context, bringing to light the value added of bio-based innovations and their policy issues.
The Global Forum on Technology (GFTech) has been created as a space for global dialogue on the directions of technology governance and how to best steer technology towards desirable socio-economic impacts. This event will deep dive into issues of global concern: food security and soil health, health innovation resilience, sustainable production and international cooperation in a time of geopolitical tensions.
By exploring how promising biotechnologies will contribute to tackling these challenges, this event will incorporate a forward-look on what is on the horizon for the next 10 years, and also open up broader policy questions about responsible innovation in next generation biotechnologies.
