Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

The General Assembly will convene a meeting on 1 September at 10 a.m. in the General Assembly Hall to take action and transmit the draft outcome for consideration at the 25-27 September Summit to adopt the post-2015 development agenda.  The draft outcome document "Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development" is now available in the six official languages of the UN at:  https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld The UN has also produced six issues briefs which will serve as background for the Interactive Dialogues between Heads of State to be held as part of the September Summit have been posted on our website at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/summit  

THE FRIDAY FORECAST http://treealerts.org/forecast/ Reproduced from the Tree Team.  UPCOMING EVENTS 30-31 Aug  – Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience (Alaska) The U.S. Department of State will host this major event to focus the world’s attention on the most urgent issues facing the Arctic today and provide an unprecedented opportunity for foreign ministers and key stakeholders to define the region’s most crucial challenges; highlight innovative ways in which these challenges can be addressed at the local, national and international levels; and broaden global awareness of the impacts of Arctic climate change. Foreign ministers and high-level leaders from the seven other Arctic nations as well as countries and intergovernmental bodies with strong interests in the Arctic. Leading policy makers, indigenous leaders and influential public and private sector representatives from Alaska, the Arcti...

I am attending a very interesting Green Growth and Travelism Summer School organized by he Green Growth and Travelism Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium. A very interesting venue where a former prison has been converted into a prison. I was looking back at a very good publication produced for the Rio+20 Conference on Green Economy Principles by Stakeholder Forum, the Earth Charter Initiative and Bioregional. The fifteen principles had been identified representing a consolidation of existing international agreements and more radical and forward-thinking proposals, cutting across The Stockholm Declaration, the Rio Declaration, The Johannesburg Declaration, The Earth Charter, The One Planet Living Principles, The Green Economy Coalition, the TUC ‘Just Transition’ principles, and The New Economics Foundation. rereading the paper I think it is a useful contribution to the follow up to the outcomes from the Summits this year. The document offers State and non-State actor...

I have to say I am getting bored with armchair journalists and academics who think they know better than 193 countries, thousands of NGOs and experts. So I am going to try and make this the LAST comment on an ill informed article....but i cant promise it. I am hoping at some point the UN will start dealing with these themselves... or someone will set up a 'war room' . The term 'war room' as some people will remember was made famous by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos as a rapid response team for then Governor Clinton to deal with the onslaught by President Bush (the first) campaign team. The backdrop is how they had destroyed Democratic contender for the Presidency Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis . Anyway back to what is this time an article by Jason Hickel an Anthropologist at the London School of Economics. His article in Jacobin called 'The Problem with Saving the World' suffers like many of a number of faults. It references already dis...

Follow Wayne Visser here As the SDGs start to be promoted there is the need for good graphics. This is the best one ive seen so far for the 5 P's that are in the preamble to  ‘ Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.   coupled with the SDG graphic below they should be used where ever possible in articles and promotional material.

Time for all of us to be creative - Nice contribution from IIED. Are there any other creative ideas out there? If so send them to me at felix[at]felixdodds.net and the best ill promote here in the blog.

With the next meeting of the  Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), in Bangkok 26-28th of October they have opened a  consultation on the development of a global indicator framework for the Sustainable Development Goals .   This is to enable input from stakeholders  This consultation started on the 11 August  and will continue to the 7 September .  The inputs will then feed into the  Bangkok meeting .   The consultation form can be found here .  Please use the link below to access the consultation form here. The reference documents are available on the SDG Indicators Website here .   and attached to this email. In particular: List of Indicator Proposals (11 August 2015).pdf Summary and compilation of Civil Society inputs

I had missed Bjorn Lomborg ’s article in the Guardian "These are the four SDGs we need to agree on to help the planet" in the section sponsored by Business call to Action. I can only hope that someone else decided on the title as it clearly indicates a lack of understanding what a target and a goal is. This was as I am sure many of my readers would appreciate was because I was recovering from the over two weeks of negotiations on the final text for the Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. I didn’t see Bjorn there at all maybe I missed him. The article is recycling what he had said this time last year and is so out of date in its criticism of the SDGs you have to wonder if he has understood the process at all. The SDGs and their targets (other than some that underwent some technical fixing e.g. filling in the x’s) were decided last August. He takes a snarky jib at what was the most consultative and transparent process conducted by the U...

Im enjoying a little downtime after the crazy 2015,2014,2013,2012 processes and wanted to share some books out by some of my friends which you may enjoy for summer reading. I reviewed Nixon's Comrades: A Kremlin Note Taker Remembers  earlier in the year a great book by Andrey Vavilov who was the Russian governments Deputy Ambassador to UNEP and Habitat as well as an 'enb'er. In the book Andrey looks back on his unique experience at the side of Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, Cold War rivals who became architects of détente. He offers a private tour of super power summit conferences of the 1970s, where he took notes and interpreted for Soviet leaders in their secret discussions with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and later with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. “Nixon’s Comrades” draws mainly on the author’s notes, recollections and private sources. It is a personal view of the gravitational attraction of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency and Brezhnev’s One-Party State. ...

We now have an agreement and a very good name for the agreement it will be called ‘ Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. ’ This was important because of the ongoing discussion in the negotiations of taking poverty eradication out of sustainable development and then linking to it. It has been a major problem since 1992. The title makes it clear that poverty eradication is part of sustainable development.  The final sticking points around MOI/FfD, climate change, policy space, family, biodiversity and migration to mention a few of the 15-20 were sorted out. I love the new Preamble it is short inspirational and also recognizes the key aspect of this agenda that will need to be fulfilled in it is to be truly transformational. That is that it needs to not only recognize sector work but also the interlinkages. Something Paula Caballero (Colombia) was very passionate about and which I supported through the work on the Nexus. The Goal...