Data Trust and Responsible AI Essential for Verifiable ESG Delivery - UN Youth Forum
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Speakers at an official side event of the 2026 UN Economic and Social Council Youth Forum called for trusted data, responsible AI and auditable delivery systems to help young people turn ideas into scalable solutions for sustainable development. Held online, the event was co-organised by Tianjin Eco-city Friend of Green Eco-Culture Promotion Association and the Grouphorse ESG Global Governance Talent Industrial College at Sichuan International Studies University. It examined how governance in the digital era can move from compliance rhetoric to practical execution frameworks, with particular relevance to the UN’s 2026 review of SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11 and 17.
Participants included experts from the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and Stanford University, alongside youth representatives from Columbia University, Tsinghua University and Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School. The session was moderated by Wang Muyao, Part-Time Associate Faculty in the Enterprise Risk Management Programme at Columbia University. Contd
Barry Katz, a Stanford professor and IDEO fellow, argued that design should be understood not as the making of attractive new objects but as a strategy for solving real problems. He illustrated that point with a Stanford student team’s work on a low-cost infant warming device for premature babies in low-resource settings. Rather than simply redesigning an incubator, the students identified the challenge as keeping newborns warm for hours in villages with little electricity and limited medical access. Through field research in Nepal, repeated prototyping and cultural adaptation, the team developed a low-cost solution that could function without power and later scale globally. Katz said effective design must be rooted in field realities, repeated testing and cultural understanding, and ultimately must leave the classroom and enter the world as a verifiable and repeatable delivery system.
Margaret Harris, a former WHO spokesperson, focused on the role of communication in building trust. She said even strong ideas and technically sound projects will fail if the intended public does not trust them. Drawing on her experience in public health risk communication, Harris said trust depends on listening rather than one-way messaging, coordinating across platforms and institutions, acknowledging uncertainty and linking communication to services people can actually access. She argued that evidence only leads to action when communication, community understanding and usable services form a closed loop.
