OPENING REMARKS

With the current scope, scale and depth of global actions committed and in implementation against the global problems of the era including climate crisis, economic inequity, destruction of biodiversity and invasion of viruses, it is clear the whole global community will come to face and be forced to swallow the actualities of global disasters within few decades. Problems of now and in the near tomorrow are glaring piercingly into our eyes with silent fury, and omened is the doom that will be evenly distributed and commonly disseminated to every and each life on the earth.

Reaching the goal of maintaining the global temperature below 1.5° C above pre-industrial level and achieving 169 goals under 17 Sustainable Development Goals by transforming the whole global community realizing resilient, sustainable, and healthy environment within the time frame of the last opportunity until 2050, seems to be a far cry.

The global community should urgently make a big transition toward green resilient sustainable societies with a new paradigm of economic prosperity, through new inspiration, new global solidarity and new collaborative action. We need to cross borders, economies, cultures, sectors, and communities to create resonant actions of speed and scalability.

Spreading of the current pandemic deepened the graveness of wicked problems the whole global community has been facing, but it can’t stop us from moving forward. Rather, we should use this global threat as the impetus of acceleration for the change we have been committed for a long time already.

Urgency of coordinated global action is intensified day by day while there are uncountable complex and hideous challenges on the road ahead blocking the path to the big transition. But enormous opportunities are sparkling especially from conversive advancement in digital, bio, and infrastructure technologies which suggest global pathways to revitalize and reshape the whole societies, industries, businesses, cities, environments, and infrastructures. More than anything else, as manifested by the Paris Agreement signed by 196 nations in 2015, as one of the most important global common promises in the whole human history, collective consensus on the need for deep fundamental pervasive transformation is gaining momentum at all the global, national, city and community levels.

Let’s come together to inspire, design, and implement ambitious big global actions through integrated strategy, determined will, shared hope and powerful determination. With steadfast will of global solidarity and collective creativity, we, together, can breakthrough all those challenges ahead and turn our vision to a true new reality.

Junseok Hwang

Director, Seoul National University Global R&DB Center
Director, Transdiciplinary Graduate Program in Smart City
Professor, Technology Management, Economics, and
Policy Program in College of Engineering