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International, Marine Stewardship Council, RainforestAlliance, Forest Stewardship Council and the SustainableAgriculture Network is also collaborating with COSA on avery similar set of indicators and methods and integratingother leaders including MIT’s J-PAL and 3Ie. Leadingdevelopment agencies and donors are piloting programsthat incorporate indicators and approaches fostered by theCOSA Consortium. They have also been adopted byprominent producer organizations such as the NationalFederation of Coffee Growers of Colombia with more than500,000 members. As more organizations take on suchcommon approaches and help to improve and evolve them,more institutions are being trained to work with them indeveloping countries. The collective impact could beconsiderable, especially as both public agencies andcompanies with extensive global supply chains adopt suchmethods.Source: D. Giovannucci and F. von Kirchbach, 2015, HowNew Metrics for Sustainable Agriculture Can Align the rolesof government and business, Brief submitted for the GSDR20151.2.2. Providing a platform for science-policy dialogueRoles and actions identified in this cluster are directlylinked to usual roles of science-policy interfaces, using thesetting of the HLPF as a forum where international policymakersmeet with scientific communities and developmentexperts.Provide improved access to the findings of existingassessments and highlight synergies and trade-offs. This isa direct extension of roles related to assessments describedabove. What seems to be a most pressing issue is the needfor translation of the findings of international assessmentsinto usable, policy-relevant material, at both internationaland national levels. Many contributors to this chapter, fromdeveloped and developing countries alike, mentioned thefact that, due to their complexity, assessments are noteffectively used by policy makers. 44 Material produced forthe GSDR could be useful in this regard and could bedisseminated at the HLPF, for example, thematic briefshighlighting the main messages from assessments coveringspecific clusters of issues.Provide a forum for wide participation through multiplechannels and feature a wide range of perspectives. Whilethere is a growing awareness regarding the need to drawmore systematically on a broad range of knowledge types(e.g. across sectors and disciplines, across scales, nonformalknowledge), their effective incorporation in SPIprocesses is still a challenge. In particular, incorporation ofsocial science approaches in international assessmentprocesses has often been identified as insufficient.34Consideration of a broader range of knowledge and inparticular indigenous knowledge is critical to the credibilityand legitimacy of science-policy interface mechanisms. 45The HLPF can provide a forum for broad participation, inwhich communities that do not usually have access toscience-policy debates in the UN can have a voice.Box 1-6. Efforts to further integrate social sciences in thescience-policy interface for sustainable developmentEfforts to bring together the natural sciences and thesciences of man and society started more than 40 yearsago. An early example was the Man and the BiosphereProgramme of UNESCO, established in 1971 to promoteinterdisciplinary approaches to management, research andeducation in ecosystem conservation and sustainable useof natural resources. Yet, it is widely recognized that theseefforts have not fully succeeded. Only economic sciencehas been able to gradually percolate into the assessments(IPCC, IPBES, World Oceans Assessments), but socialsciences remain relatively absent. Yet, to the extent thatsustainable development policy primarily seeks to changeattitudes and behaviours, further integration of natural andsocial sciences is necessary in order to make the sciencepolicyinterface fully relevant.Many international research programmes currentlypromote integration of scientific disciplines from natural tosocial sciences, engineering and humanities and encourageresearch co-design in partnership with various stakeholdersto address complex sustainability challenges. They include:Future Earth (http://www.futureearth.org/); ICSU’sProgramme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS)(http://www.icsu.org/what-we-do/interdisciplinarybodies/pecs/pdf/pecs-summary.pdf);the InternationalHuman Dimensions Programme on Global EnvironmentalChange (IHDP, http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/pages/?p=about);the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR,http://www.irdrinternational.org/); and others that addressissues of relevance to both science and society such asclimate change, oceans, urban health and well-being.Source: Chabason, L., and ICSU, contributions to the GSDR2015.Bring the work of independent scientific advisory groupsand assessment initiatives to the intergovernmentalarena. As described above, many assessments and otherscientific initiatives exist, both inside and outside the UN,and the forum could help bring their work to the policyarena. 46 Getting away from a model where some actorshave privileged access to policy circles, the Forum could be