November 9 the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO and The Swedish Research Council arranged a half day seminar to celebrate the World Science Day 2012. The opening interventions were made by representatives from the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

After that the five Swedish national committees for UNESCOs science programmes made presentations of how they work and introduced a dilemma within their scientific area:

The national MOST-committee spoke about ”Land investment or land grabbing in Mozambique – new challenges for social scientists and CSR?”,  the national IGCP-committee reflected on ”Conflicts, natural resources and geoscientific research”, the national IHP-committee presented ”Hydrological science for policy relevant advice. What are the respective roles of the researcher and the decision maker in this interaction?”, the national MAB committee spoke about ”Information access and benefit sharing - Correctly structured and used, informatics initiatives will revolutionize the development of ideas and resource use” and the national IOC-committee analyzed ”Power of information = power over the world? Who is responsible for planning marine studies; who performs it? Who has the right to the results?”

These dilemmas formed the basis for group discussions where participants from all areas discussed the problems presented.

Mr. Anders Ahnlid, Swedish Ambassador to UNESCO and to OECD closed the seminar and thanked the organizers for this new arena where many stakeholders were given the opportunity to discuss UNESCO’s scientific work.