It is important to note that the OAD forms part of a broader conversation around science-for-development. In exploring the world of “astronomy for development” it is ever more clear that all sciences have significant contributions that can be made in order to achieve global development goals. It is only through working together across disciplines that we can achieve the level of impact that we hope. A schematic of the landscape of “science for development” is shown in the following image:
All scientific disciplines have tools which they use in their fields. There are many overlaps with similar tools being used in different sciences. These tools in turn can be used to drive various actions, borrowing other relevant tools from other science disciplines in order to optimize the actions. The actions in turn will influence one or several of the SDGs.
At the .Astronomy (dot-astronomy) hack day in Cape Town (November 2017) we (Fernando, Vanessa, Carolina) generated the following interactive Sankey diagram (needs further development – this is basically a draft). On the left-most column are the disciplines, followed by the tools, actions, then SDGs. Scroll over the nodes to highlight the links on either side. Scroll over the links to see the which nodes it connects.
Ideally we would like people from different fields of science to look critically at this diagram and try to enhance it with their input. The idea is that this could be a space for different fields to easily and visually identify interdisciplinary conversations in order to use science for development.