Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest Blog by: Oli Brown  Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House. The original is published here. 

Make no mistake, when Erik Solheimresigned as head of UN Environment on 20th November 2018, less than two and a half years into what most likely would have been an eight-year tenure, the timing was not of his choosing. The proximate reason for his defenestration was a damning report by the UN’s internal auditors, known as the Office for Internal Oversight Services. The report excoriated his travel expenses, which amounted to nearly $500,000 spent on business-class flights and hotels over the course of 22 months. It also detailed a variety of other eye-catching issues, such as spending nearly 80% of his time out of the organisation’s Kenyan headquarters and relaxing HR rules for favoured staff members.  It is vanishingly rare for Under-Secretary-Generals (USG) in the UN system to be forced out of office. Getting one of those jobs involves extensive lo…

Guest Blog: By Greg Rogers and Charlie Atkins(Full article can be viewed here)

Climate Change, Terrorism and Actionable Intelligence In its final report to Congress in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission likened the threat from terrorism to “global disease or environmental degradation, … challenges that are transnational rather than international,” and recommended steps to unify governmental agencies and information flows, both across the foreign-domestic divide and within the U.S. intelligence community, so that the intelligence community can “assemble the puzzle pieces gathered by different agencies to make some sense of them and then develop a fully informed joint plan.” We posit that climate change and terrorism are alike in that both present uncertainty about the nature, timing and potentially catastrophic severity of future losses caused by inimical forces, and both require collaboration and collective action across national and organizational boundaries to overcome fragmented intel…

February 25th Registration CLOSES for UNEA4 https://reg.unog.ch/event/26962/ March 5-8th 50th UN Statistics Commission  https://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/ Oversees the SDG Indicators – the formal review will be in 2020 11-22 UN Commission on Status for Women   http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw62-2018 7-15 United Nations Environment Assembly 4 – time table here