Today, 10 November, we celebrate World Science Day for Peace and Development. The Day grew out of the 1999 World Conference on Science in Budapest, was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2001 and first observed in 2002, with a simple purpose: to bring science closer to society, keep citizens informed about scientific progress and encourage public debate on the issues that shape our future.
Why does it matter? Because science is one of the few languages that no one owns. Evidence, data and methods can be shared, tested and improved by anyone, which makes science a solid foundation for sustainable peace and development, in Europe and especially in the Global South, where access to knowledge and research infrastructure can decide whether a community receives solutions or helps to write them. We see science as a universal good, and the right to share in scientific progress and its benefits, recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a human right. Science should not know boundaries or borders. When it crosses them, it builds the trust on which diplomatic and political cooperation can grow.
This is the thinking behind this year’s theme: “Common ground through science diplomacy”. Science diplomacy is the use of scientific cooperation to build bridges between countries, to inform decisions with evidence and to tackle shared challenges together, from climate to health to the digital world.
At Trust-IT, this is what we do every day. Our job is to bring science and scientific projects closer to the general public, translating complex scientific language into everyday language, so that science becomes more appealing and easier to understand for everyone.
We do it across many projects built to foster open science. Among them are our EOSC projects, supporting the European Open Science Cloud, from EOSC Gravity to FIDELIS. EOSC-CONNECT, running from September 2026 to February 2029, connects National Nodes in 14 European countries to the EOSC Federation, so that researchers can find, share and reuse data more easily across borders. We lead its stakeholder engagement, dissemination and open calls.
Science also needs a bridge to society, and that is the angle of INNOVADE. This interdisciplinary project looks at how digital technologies can support inclusive democracy, through Living Labs where citizens, researchers and public authorities co-create and test digital democracy tools together.
At the heart of every Horizon Europe project we support lies scientific cooperation. Each one is designed to make the world a more sustainable place, in line with the ESG principles that guide our own work. And while these projects aim first at the development of Europe, their benefits travel further, indirectly reaching citizens, scientific communities and everyone involved.
For Trust-IT, this is more than a line of work: it is part of our mission. We believe that research only reaches its full value when people can understand it, discuss it and use it. That is why, in every project we support, we work to open science up to wider audiences and to connect researchers with policymakers, industry and citizens. Helping science travel across disciplines, sectors and borders is our way of contributing, every day, to the common ground this Day celebrates.
Will more science secure more peace and development? We cannot promise that. But we choose to believe it, and to work for it: translating complexity into clarity, data into dialogue, and cooperation into common ground.
