The sudden blow to UNESCO’s budget - following the US freeze on its funding for the organisation after it voted to admit Palestine at its general assembly last month (31 October) - cast a shadow over the World Science Forum, which is co-organised by UNESCO.

Aloizio Mercadante (the Brazilian science and technology minister)

Mercadante welcomed Palestine’s admission to UNESCO in his plenary lecture and invited the world’s governments to re-invigorate their support for UNESCO. There is no organisation like it - he said - that puts so much effort into, and has so much capacity to promote, multilateral science collaborations. He called for involvement of all countries in truly multilateral science collaborations for the benefit of all, not just the interests of individual states being imposed on the international community, hinting presumably at the United States.

Gretchen Kalonji (UNESCO’s assistant secretary-general for Natural Science):

Despite the fact that UNESCO is going through some challenging times I can personally guarantee that we will re-double our efforts in connections between science and society.

William Colglazier (science and technology adviser to US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton):

Because of congressional legislation the executive branch almost had no choice, so I know the State Department was trying to head it off, because whatever we might feel about trying to help the Palestinians in terms of science – back when I was at the American Academy of Science, we had a number of joint projects between Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian scientists – but the worry was there would be, because of the existing law, no choice for the US government but to cut off funds and that was gonna’ have a lot of negative repercussions.

I think there was a great sadness at what that impact would be of the sort the symbolic decision that was made. I don’t know what the potential over time is to try and change it. But I certainly think the impacts on UNESCO are unfortunate.

Mićo Tatalović