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UN Assembly to look at using space technology to reach development targets

UN Assembly to look at using space technology to reach development targets

The United Nations General Assembly this week is examining how space technology can be used to help reduce global poverty and hunger, improve public health and reach other key development goals.

Speaking at a press briefing on this week’s meetings, Ambassador Walter Lichem, head of Austria’s delegation to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, noted that “space is moving to development.”

In the past, security policies and technological power had been expressed in terms of space capacities, he said. “Today, we’re moving to a new space age,” one in which space technology “can be key in relation to whole number of core items on our global agenda,” from natural resource management to disaster reduction to the environment.

As part of the Assembly’s debate, the Vienna-based UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) has organized a panel discussion Tuesday on “Outer Space and the Global Agenda.”

The meeting will seek to highlight space technology’s contribution towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight time-bound targets that seek to slash extreme poverty and hunger, curb infant mortality rates and major diseases, and improve access to education and health care for all – all by 2015.