Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Rio+20: The Long View Interview of Felix Dodds in FORBES by  Terry Waghorn  from Katerva Author and global sustainable development leader  Felix Dodds has spent more than two decades observing and participating in international development meetings, including the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Conference on Human Settlements in 1996, the Johannesburg Summit in 2000 and the Millennium Development Goal meetings in 2005. His most recent book, authored with Michael Strauss and Maurice Strong,  Only One Earth: The Long via Rio+20  to Sustainable Development,  will have a companion out later this year: Written with Elizabeth Thompson and Jorge Laguna-Celis, From Rio+20 to a New Development Agenda: Building a Bridge to a Sustainable Future  will provide an inside look at the 2012 conference and  an optimistic perspective on where it might lead. Dodds recently  shared his thoughts with  Ensia  and  Terry Waghorn ...

The by-election for Chris Hulm e's seat Eastleigh looks like being one that could benefit from that great BBC correspondent Vincent Hanna (RIP) as Martin Kettle mentions in the Guardian today. For those who do not know the great man he was Newsnight's by-election specialist in the 1980's--  few escaped from his tough questioning. He was one of those larger than life characters. Vincent was a Northern Ireland Catholic born in Belfast and married to the daughter of Gerry Fitt the founder and first leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland . He started his journalist career reporting on the civil rights movemen t in Northern Ireland. It is perhaps less well known now that many catholic's did not have the vote in Northern Ireland until the 1970s. The right to vote was linked to being a registered householder. To get a job or public housing in those days you had to answer on an application form what religion you were...

Today I saw that my friend Stanley Johnson has a new book out 'UNEP - The First 40 years' to coincide with the first meeting of UNEP as a universal membership organization in Gigiri just outside Nairobi. Stanley is an Ambassador for the Convention on Migratory Species and I have at least two other books of his on my shelf. I have to say my favorite is 'Stanley I Presume?' a wonderful tour de force of his life from travelling from London to Afghanistan on a motor bike to his time in the European Union as an MEP and as a civil servant, and association with the Rockefeller Commission on Population, but I digress. In all the meetings around Rio+20 last year there perhaps wasn't enough time to look at UNEP at 40 and see what it had achieved. This book goes someway to giving a wider audience the chance to read and appreciate what it has achieved and what challenges it faced and is still facing in trying to be the environmental consensus for the world. This...

I thought this recent interview i did with Civicus might interest people. Felix Dodds is an independent consultant focusing on stakeholder engagement in the sustainable development process. He is also a current Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute. Prior to these roles, he served as Executive Director of the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future and has been active at the UN since 1990, having attended a myriad of World Summits. He has also participated in all UN Commissions for Sustainable Development and UNEP Governing Councils; and has chaired the 64th UN DPI NGO Conference on Sustainable Development. Additionally, he is a member of a number of advisory boards such as the Great Transition. 1. How have the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) assisted in creating an environment conducive to the actions of civil society since its inception in 2000? It should be remembered that unlike Agenda 21 there was little stakeholder involvement in the development of the MDGs. The...