The Diplomat
Barcelona has hosted this week the events commemorating the fifth anniversary of the founding of SciTech DiploHub, the hub of science and technology diplomacy in the Catalan capital, in which it was announced that the City of Barcelona will host the next World Forum on Science Diplomacy in 2024.
The event took place this past July 6 at Llotja de Mar, with the presence of representatives of the Government, the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Barcelona City Council and the European Commission, as well as fifty ambassadors and consuls from more than 30 different countries, more than 300 representatives of universities and research centers, entrepreneurs and a large representation of the ecosystem of knowledge and innovation in the city.
SciTech DiploHub is the public-private partnership organization working to deploy Barcelona’s science and technology diplomacy strategy. The initiative was launched in November 2018, after all university rectors, research center directors, former mayors, startup CEOs, think tank directors, business organizations, as well as leading researchers in Barcelona and abroad, decided to mobilize the city’s scientific capital in favor of a global strategy.
“Faced with situations such as the Council of Europe’s refusal to establish the European Medicines Agency in Barcelona in 2017 or the risk of losing influence in major technological changes, the Catalan capital has decided to conspire to boost its internationalization and global influence, aligning its interests and projects abroad, connecting the diaspora of scientific talent and promoting international collaborations with universities, companies and research centers,” SciTech DiploHub said in a press release.
“In 2018, long before the onset of a global pandemic or the outbreak of the social impact of artificial intelligence, we already decided to bring together the main public and private players in the ecosystem, to make Barcelona the capital of scientific and technological diplomacy, the epicenter of knowledge and training on the management of the great scientific and technical challenges of the new era,” said Alexis Roig, executive director of SciTech DiploHub. This fact, he said, is comparable to “the city’s joint bid to host the ’92 Olympic Games.”
Roig also announced that Barcelona will host the next World Forum on Science Diplomacy in 2024. In the words of Kimberly Montgomery, speaker at the event and director of International Affairs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), “Barcelona is leading the thinking in the field of science diplomacy, key in the achievement of major global challenges such as climate action, energy transition, the fight against antibiotic resistance or the rise of artificial intelligence.”
The project has the institutional support of universities such as Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and La Salle-Ramon Llull University (URL); research centers such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute (IJC) and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal); organizations responsible for economic, business and innovation promotion such as Biocat, ACCIÓ-Agency for Business Competitiveness and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation; private foundations such as Barcelona Tech City, the Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation, the Banc Sabadell Foundation, the La Caixa Foundation and Itnig; and public institutions such as the Barcelona City Council, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Development of the Government of Catalonia and the Catalan Competition Authority (ACCO).
