Nairobi, Kenya – The  Youth Cafe and The Journal of Science Policy & Governance (JSPG), is proud to announce the release of its Special Issue on the Impacts of Emerging Technologies on Inequality and Sustainability. This issue was produced in collaboration with The Youth Cafe, the formal mechanism for children and youth to engage with various stakeholders, including the implementation, follow-up, and review of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Sustainable Development Goals are 17 interconnected goals for countries to achieve by 2030, aiming to address the issues of poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice to "achieve a better and more sustainable future for all."

In the fall of 2019, the JSPG and The Youth Cafe teamed up to launch a joint call for submissions for a special topics issue around the "implications of emerging technologies on inequalities and sustainable development." 

As a result, the new issue "spans a variety of topics and styles, touching on critical issues of technology access and implementation, looking at assistive technologies and sanitary technologies, to UN policies, such as coordination of international aid, to tackling new areas where policy is necessary, such as the need for stronger planetary protection policy," said JSPG Assistant Editor-in-Chief for Special Issues, Madeleine Jennewein. "The six articles with authors from five nations, represent a broad work of scholarship on diverse areas that are critical to tackling the UN's development goals."

In a statement for the issue, the Director of Division on Technology and Logistics for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Shamika N. Sirimanne said, "Rapid technological change could be transformative in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and several frontier technologies have shown great potential to help to achieve the SDGs. At the same time, frontier technologies could also have unintended consequences, potentially widening inequalities or creating new ones. In this regard, I welcome this initiative by JSPG and The Youth Cafe to engage young researchers to improve our understanding of multidimensional implications of emerging technologies."

Submissions to this special issue aim to inform discussions at the 2020 Commission on Science & Technology for Development, including the deliberations around the 2020 Technology and Innovation Report as well as the Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology & Innovation on SDGs.

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ABOUT JSPG
The Journal of Science Policy & Governance (JSPG) is a nonprofit organization and open-access, peer-reviewed publication managed by and for students, policy fellows, and scholars in science, technology, and innovation policy. Since 2011, JSPG has provided students and early career researchers a vehicle to bolster their research and writing credentials in science policy. Visit sciencepolicyjournal.org and follow @SciPolJournal on Twitter to learn more.