United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; Wales' Research Performance

A look into the Elsevier Report of 2021

With the introduction of a 20mph default speed limit throughout Wales, people are beginning to see the green zealotry of Mark Drakeford and Welsh Labour, only many may not realise how long this has been in the planning.

The ‘Written Statement two years ago by Mark Drakeford on November 23^rd 2021: Five Priorities for Research, Development and Innovation’ contained the following quote:

·       “We will deploy research, development and innovation capacity to support our Programme for Government focus on climate change, environmental recovery and decarbonisation, including support for local government decarbonisation plans.”

Mark Drakeford is fond of using such military terms as ‘deploy’, seen below to mean:

1.   To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line. 

2.   To bring (forces or material) into action. 

3.   To base (a weapons system) in the field.

Surely ‘utilise’ would have sufficed, rather than deploy?

In this statement he also refers, as always, to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and cites the ‘recent’ report by Elsevier, commissioned by the Welsh Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor at a cost of £12,100 (obtained through a Freedom of Information request). The report can be found in pdf form if you search for ‘Elsevier report Wales Sustainable Goals Cardiff University. Important: Please see my postscript on this publication.

This report is a comparative assessment of Welsh research output related to the Sustainable Development Goals. Although this figure of £12k is not phenomenal in the grand scheme of things, Elsevier has been criticised for its high profit margins according to Wikipedia. It is also no stranger to controversy including ‘fake journals’ (involving pharmaceutical company Merck), plagiarism and ‘scientific racism’. I wonder if Mr Drakeford is privy to this information?

Interestingly, for those of you not on X (Twitter) and who won’t have seen my recent post, the former scientific advisor that commissioned the report is Professor Peter Halligan, a psychologist and neuroscientist with links to the World Economic Forum.

Why employ a psychologist to review scientific advice provided to Welsh Government, amongst other duties, you might wonder? Especially since most of the scientific advice will now be related to climate ‘science’. It has echoes of SAGE, Spi-B, NERVTAG and those advisory groups, which sound like something out of a Bond movie, that employed applied psychology to induce fear and control during Covid.

Professor Jas Pal Badyal is the current Chief Scientific Advisor to Welsh Government. This is some of his comment from an interview in March 2023:-

“Wales faces a diverse range of environmental, economic, social and health-related challenges which are not unique to Wales; they are shared and often global. These challenges will demand an increasingly collaborative approach, between nations and sectors (including government, academia, third sector, business and industry) and Wales has an important contribution to make. Collaboration must be effective, with shared risk and shared reward.

No country, sector, institution, or company can do everything. Therefore, as for all nations, Wales must decide how to target its resources and effort for maximum positive effect, both in terms of the inhabitants of Wales (human, animal, and plant) and the wider global community. The Welsh Government’s recently launched Innovation Strategy seeks to address all these aspects.

Decisions will be required – and many of these will involve difficult choices between competing options and demands. Good decisions require a sound understanding and evidence of the research, development, and innovation landscape, within Wales and the wider context of the global system in which Wales is embedded.”

For anyone in Wales who questions what the United Nations SDGs ‘has to do with us’, this supplementary report, “Wales and the Sustainable Development Goals” explains it.

In the same year that Wales brought into law its equivalent of Agenda 2030, the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), the United Nations adopted the SDGs, as mentioned in the executive summary of the Elsevier report. The graphic to accompany this article shows the relationship between the UN goals and Wales’ goals and originates from a Welsh Government document.

The findings of the Elsevier Report

“Although small, Wales plays a strong role in global SDG related research.”

Research is measured by Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI). FWCI divides the number of citations – mentions - received by a publication by the average number of citations received by a publication in the same field, of the same type and published in the same year.

The report found that Wales has the highest percentage of FWCI ‘internationally collaborated publications’. Half of its publications were published with international partners during 2010-2019. Wales’ Sustainable Development Goal research was found to be 130% above the world average, making Wales the ‘golden child’ of the UN, one would imagine. As a point of interest, most of Wales’ research is related to the SDGs that are relevant to ‘Planet’.

Most of the SDGs are grouped around three macro themes:-

1.People

2.Planet

3.Prosperity

Presumably this demonstrates the order of importance of those three themes to Welsh Government. Planet first, people and prosperity later?

Incidentally, Elsevier states that scientific research outputs can take many forms including articles in journals, books, monographs and non-textual media such as music and art (!) However, this Elsevier report focused upon academic research in journals, review articles and conference proceedings.

So, just to recap on the number of ‘firsts’ for Wales:-

1.   First country in the world to call a ‘climate emergency’.

2.   First country to have a Future Generations Commissioner.

3.   First in the UK to introduce a Public Health Act (2017)

4.   First (only) UK country to have a health agency collaboration  with the World Health Organisation – the IHCC

5.   First UK nation to introduce a national soundscapes strategy. See the explanation here.

6.   First UK country to make 20mph its default speed limit.

7.   In 1998 Wales became one of the first nations in the world to have a constitutional duty on sustainable development.

 (source: Page 9 here)

Not to mention that, along with Scotland, Wales is one of a handful of countries to have joined the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. For more detailed information on what this could mean exactly, please see my recent article on UK Column news.

Post script

Curiously, after writing and making a Freedom of Information request about this report, the link already embedded in my Substack was broken. Subsequent internet searches would not bring up the report and when I tried to look on the Elsevier site or Welsh Government’s Facebook post on the report, the links would go haywire. The same links brought up links to X rated sites on my husband’s laptop.

Eventually I found the report in a pdf on the website of Cardiff University.