Societal challenges are lining up. Can we do something about them? You can find the slides used during the lecture here: https://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/urgentdecisions10may023.pdf From the local to the global, the challenges are lined up. The climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, pandemics, and upheavals linked to new technology such as artificial intelligence are developing at breakneck speed, and the solutions must come just as quickly. For solutions to actually be solutions, they must be based on actionable knowledge, and no single person can have a complete overview. The enlightened autocracy cannot exist. Therefore, we must have good institutions that are able to collect and translate science into action. Jeroen van der Sluijs, professor at the Center for the study of the sciences and the humanities, UiB, works with institutionalised evidence-informed policy-making. Recently, he has been working on the decline of pollinating insects, but the fundamental problem is much bigger than just that issue. The evening is led by Ingjald Pilskog, associate professor at the Høgskulen på Vestlandet.