This panel will focus on global grand challenges — the climate crisis, our need for clean energy, public health emergencies like COVID-19, conserving our marine resources, and many others. These challenges require global scientific collaborations supported by robust broadband networks. To ensure we meet the future data transfer needs of big science, collaborative research, cultural and artistic exchanges, transnational education, global scale scientific instruments like the Square Kilometer Array of telescopes, and to foster more multidisciplinary partnerships and data-sharing in and among numerous disciplines — all of these require a global fabric of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), a resilient, coherent, and secure architecture that provides reliable high-speed connectivity and customized services that ultimately bolster scientific discovery and innovation.
