A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has urged world leaders to recognise how international cooperation between geopolitical rivals will be crucial to solving humanity’s biggest challenges.
In a passionate defence of the unifying power of science, Omar Yaghi said efforts to extract millions of tonnes of carbon from the air, based on his Nobel-winning research, could only reach the required scale if G20 nations came together to invest in international science.
Scientists from Saudi Arabia, China, India, Russia and the US among other countries were working together on a project based on his research that allowed researchers to take water directly from the air, even in arid countries, to make this science commercially viable, explained Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025.
“That work is being done by countries that sometimes do not get along but they get along in the lab,” said Yaghi to an audience of young scientists at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is taking place in southern Germany from 28 June to 4 July.
That work, explained Yaghi, had the potential to deliver water security for every person on the planet, potentially ending hundreds of years of suffering and conflict related to access to clean drinking water.
