You can find the text of the petition at „3% for Science, 100% for Poland”.”, and here you can sign it. It comes down to three simple demands:
- Science sector employees must earn a living wage
- Stable and dignified conditions for students and doctoral candidates
- Researchers must have the means to conduct scientific research.
Poland currently allocates 1.41% of its GDP to research and development funding (2024 data according to Eurostat). That is well below the EU average (2.24%) and incomparably less than the USA (3.45%) or South Korea (4.96%). R&D is of course funded to a significant extent by businesses, but for that activity to be possible, there must be adequately funded academic institutions and researchers who can participate in that research. It is not possible to develop and modernise businesses over the long term without the foundation created by science. And science, in turn, is primarily funded by the state.
Are we proud that Poles are one of the largest national groups in the core team developing artificial intelligence at the most dynamic and largest company in that industry today (OpenAI)? That is wonderful but let us also remember that those people were educated in the Polish school system and at Polish universities. And those universities need adequate funding for such achievements to remain possible in the future.
Funding science is not just about numbers and ratios of expenditure to GDP. Sometimes it comes down to very mundane matters that prevent outstanding individuals from contributing to things that benefit us all in everyday life. In the pre-pandemic era, I participated in the work of the first Project Taskforce at EFRAG. We were working on methodologies for analysing and assessing climate-related risks and opportunities. Two participants had to resign at a certain point for a very simple reason: team meetings were held monthly at EFRAG's headquarters in Brussels (Teams and Zoom were not in common use back then), and their universities were unable to fund monthly business trips. We lost the substantive contributions of two people who brought a great deal to our analyses. The final report was of course produced, but it could have been better had the science funding in those two individuals' home countries been at an adequate level.
Many of the technologies that today seem obvious tools for the sustainable transformation of businesses were developed thanks to state funding of academic institutions. This was the case, for example, with lithium-ion batteries, now ubiquitous. Early prototypes of wind turbines used to generate electricity were created using public funds. The significant reduction in the cost of manufacturing photovoltaic cells was aided by research conducted at the state-funded Solar Energy Research Institute in the United States.
Without adequate funding for science, it is difficult to imagine a sustainable transformation. I fully support the petition „3% for Science, 100% for Poland”.”. I encourage you to do the same 😊
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