Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest blog by Futurist Thomas Frey - republished from LinkedIn here . Thomas Frey is Keynote Speaker, Sr Futurist DaVinci Institute, Editor FuturistSpeaker.com, & Innovations Editor THE FUTURIST Magazine and author of “ Epiphany Z – 8 Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future ” Every major industry today was started as a micro industry. Everything from steel, to photography, oil, airlines, electricity, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and search engines all worked their way into existence from a tiny starting point. Many of the oldest ones like steel, automotive, and pharmaceuticals took centuries to grow into the massive global industries they are today. But those created with digital technologies like search engines and smart phones sprang to life in only a few years. Countless businesses are already feeling the first waves of disruption as industry veterans are hoping to navigate the turbulent waters ahead. As always, it much easier to visualize what goes away than w...

While in New York in June I met up socially with some of the members of the House of Commons International Development Committee who were visiting to look at the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse in multilateral organizations within the aid sector as part of their research for their full report relating to the issue int he aid sector as whole. I strongly recommend reading the whole report which is a sobering and far too often shocking read. I am republishing the section of the report that deals with primarily the UN. I have written before about concerns i have had in the development NGOs over a number of issues. What this report does do is challenge us all in the international arena to actually practice the values that we say we believe in. This report came out two weeks ago and perhaps will nto receive the review it deserves because it came out as many people were going on holiday. I hope this blog expands the group that will read both this section and then go onto read t...

Nick Meynen is an author of literary non-fiction books and a regular contributor to Meta , The Ecologist and MO* magazine . He works as a Policy Officer for Environmental and Economic Justice at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). This blog appeared first in Metamag: The News Channel of the European Environmental Bureau. It may be the start of August – but 2018 should really be over. Humanity already used the amount of resources that the earth can regenerate this year. At the same time, violence against those who protect the earth is on the rise. Earth Overshoot Day never fell as early as this year: on 1 August.  From now until December we’re eating up resources that have accumulated over the past 4 billion years. An increasing number of these resources are steadily evolving towards “out of stock”. Earth Overshoot Day is calculated by dividing the world’s biocapacity (the amount of natural resources generated by Earth that year), by the worl...