Nicholas Wallace Sep. 22, 2020, et al. “Europe Unveils Targets for Hyped Research 'Missions'.”
Europe Unveils Targets for Hyped Research ‘Missions,’ ScienceMag, 22 Sept. 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/europe-unveils-targets-hyped-research-missions
Summary:
On September 22, the European Union finally announced their plans for ‘missions’ that they have been planning for months. These ‘missions’ will focus research funding towards five broad different areas; cancer, adapting to climate change, carbon-neutral cities, healthy waters, and soil health. These plans will be primarily funded by the Horizon Europe organization, which has grown to be an 81 billion euro company, in just seven years. And these funds will be supplemented by other programs in the EU as these missions will require several hundred million euros a year to operate.
The plans that were published introduce ideas about the advisory boards, responsible for designing the missions, which will consist of scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and other luminaries. These individuals will be taken with finalizing long term plans in addition to interim targets, which will then be reviewed by the European Commission. All of this responsibility and uncertainty poses questions and concerns for the public. “It is still unclear how the missions will be organized and managed, and what their budgets will be, casting some doubt on whether they will be ready by the January 2021 start of Horizon Europe” (Wallace).
Additional challenges may arise when the organization takes the plunge from looking how to form the big picture to actually acting on their targets. The secretary-general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, Jan Palmowski, expressed both these anticipated challenges in addition to highlighting how quickly these plans are coming together, as European politicians did not agree on the five targets until early 2019.
They debited on the five areas to highlight and further the diction needed to portray their objectives; for example, after discussing their plans for clearing the water, they changed the name of the water focus from: “oceans and healthy waters” to “healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters” to better represent their goals.
As far as interim goals, the plan states that they aim to reduce carbon emissions from the shipping sector by 45% and phasing out bottom trawling. Lamy, a former French naval officer expressed how “People roughly understand that we have a problem in the atmosphere…” and continues to talk about how the ocean is often overlooked as we are not living as in touch with it as we are with the ground around us.
Switching over the “Conquering Cancer” sector of the plan, they aim to “prevent 3 million cancer deaths by 2030 through better prevention and treatment, and to improve rehabilitation for cancer survivors” (Wallace). In addition to establishing an EU-wide networking platform that would allow for cancer research sharing and improved access to early cancer screening. This aspect of the plan would not only increase funding for cancer research, but also connect policies regarding the risk factors, including taxes on tobacco and alcohol. Noting that you can not be serious about finding a cure for cancer without addressing its risk factors head on. Which has added some controversy to the finding.
Some skeptics believe that because the plan covers new aspects, such as looking into the causes, that the funding money would not be put to good use as it will not go straight towards cancer research. This is an issue that we see across america today in organizations that claim to be nonprofit, but their spending is disproportionate to what they claim their primary goals are.
In the end, this proposal of focusing on specific sectors for funding is in its early days and it is ‘too soon to tell’ what the future of funding will look like.
Relevance:
In today's pandemic ridden world it is easy for people to be distracted from the other long term issues that nations across the world are divided on. Reading this article made me think about how many different issues we have in today's society and how funding is necessary to address and improve almost all of them, often resulting in political debates as to where funding should be focused. In the plan proposed in the EU they have decided to focus on five separate rather broad issues that will each have their own funding for research and environmental conservation. Cancer is the first area in which they are proposing additional research, aiming to save the lives of millions by getting involved further in prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment. This is relevant throughout the world today as tens of millions of people are diagnosed each year and a cure could save the lives of millions. The later four focuses of this plan are on the environment; an issue that is often overlooked by the American government. With our current nationals leaders simply dismissing climate change and not addressing the growing carbon footprint; the EU is taking the opposite approach highlighting and funding environment conservation efforts. The specific areas they are focusing on are ‘adapting to climate change, carbon-neutral cities, healthy waters, and soil health’. If these same policies were implemented throughout the world, the carbon footprint would be reduced, the rising global temperature would plateau, the water ecosystems would flourish, and the soils nutrientes would be restored in just a matter of years.
Critique:
Overall I think that this article was incredibly informative and well written, as I simply had no idea about the implementation of these policies overseas. Nicholas Wallace did a very good job expressing and citing information from experts in the field and those that worked with the plan directly, this allows for the reader to trust the points that were being made while also addressing the perspective they were coming from. Wallace did not provide a lot of background information about what reforms were taking place prior to this proposal which leads me to question what the motives are and where the funding is being spent now. What other areas does the EU deem valuable enough to highlight and further allocate funding towards? I also would have appreciated if he referenced other forthright policies in the same field as this could provide a valuable contract to show just how innovative or traditional these ‘missions’ are.
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