Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

((Rogue CNN exists in a parallel universe to ours where a property developer and reality TV star gets elected President)) Wolf: Well what a week it’s been here in Washington – AGAIN!!! We have no health bill with Senators McCain, Murkowski and Collins voting no against the skinny health care bill. We have the new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci – on his first day - talking on the record to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza . On the call indicating that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebu s is behind the leaks from the White House and Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon is basically more interested in creating his own empire and taking up yoga. The continued tweeting of the President to undermine US Attorney General Jeff Sessions .  With Republicans indicating their support for Sessions perhaps best expressed by Sen. Lindsey Sessions "If Jeff Sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay." He went on to say and to underline “Any ...

The Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is pleased to announce our intention to reconvene our Nexus conference addressing Water-Energy-Food and Climate on April 16-18. We have just opened the chance to submit abstracts.  This will be the second Nexus Conference that The Water Institute organized the first in 2014 made a significant input to the negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through the Chapel Hill Declaration . The 2030 Agenda adopted in 2015 at its heart has 17 SDGs, 169 targets, and 232 indicators. It is the blueprint to a more sustainable, fair and equitable world. It is the first global agreement that recognizes the inter-linkages between sectors and suggests ways to address them. The 2018 Nexus Conference will focus on the: Science-policy interface; partnerships; solutions; review of Sustainable Development Goal commitments (2018 and for the Heads of State review in 2019); sharing of tools, indicators a...

This is an important time for the UN with reform ideas in the air.  Do you as a ‘stakeholder’ want to have a say – well the system is now up and running under the Deputy Secretary General (DSG) for you to do that. I made my initial comments in a previous blog here. The first Secretary Generals Report can befound here . My advice is if you have some ideas now is the time to start formulating them and discussing them with Member States and the DSGs Office. The Deputy Secretary General is now leading the process to follow up the publication of the Secretary General’s Report on the re-positioning of the United Nations Development System to support the delivery of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The second report is due out in December. The consultation that is envisioned – which I will outline later is this blog – should help focus that second report.  The report and its recommendations will be considered during the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in its ...

((Rogue CNN exists in a parallel universe to ours where a property developer and reality TV star gets elected President)) Wolf: We are about to go to hear from White House Press Secretary Michael Strauss but before we do that lets just talk to the panel we have here -  Charles Krauthammer:  Fox contributor who is trying out Rogue CNN tonight to see if he prefers a channel that speaks to the truth. Charles welcome. Charles: Thank you Wolf. I just want to underscore what I said in my column I believe that the Russian scandal has entered a new phase, and there's no going back. I have long been a skeptic of charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but "open to empirical evidence." With the revelation about emails between Donald Trump Jr. and a business associate who helped arrange a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, I have said that "evidence is now shown." This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks th...

As someone who has been to all the previous Commission on Sustainable Development meetings and now the High Level Political Forum I probably have a unique view of what has worked and what has not. The History How did we get the HLPF? Well that is a good question. The old Commission on Sustainable Development had a good first ten year from 1993 to 2002. It had some major successes during those years such as: Facilitating the discussion that birthed the POPs and PICs agreements; Facilitated the process on Forests that set up the UN Forum on Forests; Set a date for all countries to complete their Sustainable Development Strategies (2002); Expansion of the United Nations guidelines on consumer protection to include sustainable consumption;  Birthed the process that became Financing for Development; Birthed the process that became the Conferences on Land Based Pollution to the Marine Environment (The latest will be in Indonesia in October)  Set up under the UN General...

Book launch of  Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals: A transformational agenda for an insecure world by Felix Dodds, Ambassador David Donoghue and Jimena Leiva Roesch at the UN Bookshop in New York was  live streamed hon Friday 14th July . the video is available to watch below. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal set of seventeen goals and 169 targets, with accompanying indicators, which were agreed by UN member states to frame their policy agendas for the fifteen-year period from 2015 to 2030. Written by three authors who have been engaged in the development of the SDGs from the beginning, this book offers an insider view of the process and a unique entry into what will be seen as one of the most significant negotiations and global policy agendas of the twenty-first century. The book reviews how the SDGs were developed, what happened in key meetings and how this transformational agenda, which took more than three years to negotiate, cam...

Republished from URBANET URBANET fosters the international dialogue on development activities worldwide and conveys expertise in the areas of municipal and local governance, sustainable urban development and decentralisation. Articles, interviews, photo stories and multimedia publications draw their variety from numerous contributions by practitioners, research scholars, representatives of civil society organisations, international organisations, think tanks, development institutes such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and many more. The platform aims to trigger debates, share and distribute relevant information on sustainable urban development, municipal and local governance and decentralisation. In this regard, URBANET also looks at international processes and agreements such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement (COP21), and in particular the Habitat III process and the New Urban Agenda. It provides thought-provoki...

Last week the Secretary General presented his report on Re-positioning  the UN Development System to Deliver the 2030 Agenda.  This is happening at a time when President Trump has told the State Department to reduce US funding by more than 50% to UN programs. and as he is cutting State and US AID budgets by 37%. There will be a second Secretary General Report in December. This is in accordance with the request of the Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review (QCPR). That document will provide further clarity on the measures and ideas mentioned in the present report, in particular regarding proposals for the improvement of the Resident Coordinator system. That report will also respond to the QCPR call for a system-wide strategic document, and will provide recommendations on how funding efforts can better align with the work required from the United Nations in response to the 2030 Agenda. So, what are the highlights of the first report? The report identifies three gu...

((Rogue CNN exists in a parallel universe to ours where a property developer and reality TV star gets elected President)) Wolf: We are here today to have a more in-depth look at Michael Strauss the White House Press Secretary. Strauss took over from Sean Spicer in April after Spicer’s disastrous three months in post. I guess the first question is what would Dr. Hunter Thompson say about his former intern Michael Strauss now White House Press Secretary? I like to think he would be proud of the way Strauss has handled the position. He is in many ways following the good Doctors lead.  During the Gerald Ford Presidency - ‘Duke’ as Thompson was fondly known - while still working at Rolling Stone applied for the position of Governor of American Samoa. Surprising everyone he was confirmed by the US Senate. Some think because he had photos of most of the Senators joining him for some drug-related evening. Others think they thought it would be hilarious to give him the positio...