Cooperation in a fragmented world – why atoms matter 

Science and technology help us to understand and overcome our biggest challenges, whether it’s a deadly pandemic or the existential threat of climate change. But science and technology are unequally distributed across the world, with those who need them most, having the least access.

Addressing this injustice is crucial to saving the lives and livelihoods of billions of people living in developing countries, and in strengthening the foundations of trust and empathy necessary for the world to come together to tackle its shared crises. If developing countries hardest hit by climate change, disease, hunger, energy insecurity and water scarcity are unable to benefit from the solutions we already have today, how can they be confident they will benefit from a greener and safer world we all are trying to build for tomorrow?

Among the sciences, nuclear science is unique in the scale and breadth of its application. The atom’s enormous power to threaten lives and save them prompted world leaders, more than half a century ago, to build an international framework to harness the atom for the good of all.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is part of that framework. It may be best known as the world’s nuclear watchdog, but the IAEA has an equally important mandate to widen access to the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology. Every day, as we work with our 175 member states to solve national, regional and global problems, we see science save lives and livelihoods and bring people closer together.

Atoms are the building blocks of life and our universe, and scientists have unlocked their power to deliver reliable low-carbon energy; to fight diseases; to study scarce water resources; to develop hardier crops; and to tackle pollution.

But for too long the scale of action in ensuring that everyone has access to these proven solutions has not matched the scale of the need.

Cancer places its heaviest burden on low- and middle-income countries, where over 70% of cancer deaths occur, yet the people living in these countries benefit from only 5% of the global spending in this area, including in nuclear medicine. In Africa, half the continent lacks a single radiotherapy machine, which is why the IAEA’s Rays of Hope initiative was launched there this year.

More than 3 billion people rely on the ocean for their livelihood, with the vast majority living in developing countries. As a carbon sink and trapper of heat, a healthy ocean helps us battle climate change. Radiation can be used in plastic recycling and isotopic tracing to study micro-plastic pollution in the ocean, which is what our scientists help developing countries to do under the Nutec Plastics initiative. Nuclear applications like the PCR test with which almost everyone in the developed world is now familiar, help detect and study zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19 and Ebola. Zoonotic diseases are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of illness and 2.7 million deaths worldwide each year, most of them in developing countries. Through the Zoonotic Disease Integrated Action, we are working to equip them with the technology and knowledge to study these diseases and prevent the next pandemic.

Science has the power to connect the world, building empathy, trust and a reliable, objective and usable library of data, knowledge and experiences that can lead to game-changing solutions and inform policy decisions across the world whose benefit go far beyond the country that makes them.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 600 million people live without electricity, while fast developing cities across Asia are choking in clouds of pollution. Nuclear energy is and will be a key element to help countries reach their economic, environmental and health goals. Nuclear power plants emit no carbon and provide reliable energy when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. The IAEA works with developing countries and regions to map out their energy future and build the legal and regulatory infrastructure they will need if they choose to include nuclear energy in their mix.

The war in Ukraine, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, has also been disastrous for food security. In two years, the number of people facing, or at risk of, not having enough nutritious food to eat more than doubled, from 135 million living in 53 countries to 345 million living in 82 countries.

In the quest for a long-term solution to hunger, scientists are speeding up the natural process of plant mutation and creating crops better able to withstand diseases and the climatic shifts caused by our warming plant. In Laos, Burundi and Ghana this process more than doubled cassava yields.

Meanwhile, in Austria and Monaco our laboratories are pushing the frontiers of discovery.

Late last year a rocket shipped seeds belonging to the IAEA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to the international space station so that we can find out what happens to them in conditions of low gravity and high cosmic radiation.

When these seeds return to earth, our scientists will use what they learn about the changes in their cellular structure to assist any country in the world that requests it. That means countries won’t have to have a space programme to benefit from such studies.

When we share science and data for the good of humankind, we lay the foundations of a better more harmonious world. But the scale of the crises the world faces today, means we need to increase the scale at which we do it, here at the IAEA and beyond.

In the days between important global summits such as the World Economic Forum at Davos and the annual UN Climate Change Conference, there is work to be done in sharing the life-affirming properties of science more justly. We need to give everyone a chance to benefit from the solutions we have today as we seek global agreement on those for tomorrow.