Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

A consortium of foundations – the Ford Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – today acquired the archive of Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), publisher of the iconic  Ebony  and  Jet  magazines. The archive includes more than 4 million prints and negatives comprising the most significant collection of photographs cataloguing African American life in the 20th century. The archive was acquired for $30 million as part of an auction of the assets of JPC in connection with its Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing and approved by the bankruptcy court. The foundation consortium will donate the archives to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Getty Research Institute, and other leading cultural institutions for the public benefit to ensure the broadest access for the general public and use by scholars, researchers, journalists and other interested part...

Guest blog by Jill Van den Brule who is a humanitarian and social entrepreneur named 40 over 40 by Forbes. She co-founded a B Corps that makes solar lanterns and helped launch the UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocates. Originally published in the Solutions Journal here.  We have a climate emergency. Regardless of where one stands on this issue – this is our ‘inconvenient truth’. Yet the power to reach people has never been greater. Close to 3.2 Billion people today are online, about 2 Billion are from developing countries and over 89 million from least developed countries.1 Our currency today lies is in our culture, our capacity for mass mobilization and in the immense untapped power of our global neural network. We can literally put our heads and hearts together on this one! Yet, why do the majority seem paralyzed by the daunting challenge of tackling climate change? How do we move humanity beyond the denial and doom? How do we begin making changes in our daily lives t...

Just published the paper: Misaligned SDG Targets: How to Handle Target Dates Before 2030; FULL paper downloadable from Juniper Publishers - International Journal of Environmental Sciences & Natural Resources (IJESNR)  here By: Felix Dodds1,2*, Jamie Bartram2, and Gastón Ocampo3 Abstract  Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by the 193-member states of the United Nations in September 2015. It includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are accompanied by 169 targets, 107 of which are considered output targets and 62 are designated ‘means of implementation’. While the SDGs are associated with the period 2016 - 2030, twenty-three targets (14%) have dates for completion before 2030. For twenty of those targets the date is 2020 and for the remaining three it is 2025. The affected targets are associated with 232 individual indicators. Not addressing the issues that arise because of this has the potential to ...

Can go to the page h ere too.

Tuesday, 24 September 15:00-15:55 Opening Taking stock of the status of achievement of the SDGs: progress, challenges and the way forward, and adoption of the  Political Declaration  of the SDG Summit     15:55-16:00 Messages on “Leaving no one Behind” #1     16:00-17:00 Plenary Statements delivered on behalf of groups of Member States     17:00-17:05 Messages on “Leaving no one Behind” #2     17:05-18:00 Leaders Dialogue 1 – “Megatrends impacting the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals” Leaders will address implementation of the 2030 Agenda in the context of megatrends: opportunities presented by these global trends for accelerating progress across multiple goals and targets; and the potential impact of collaborations and partnerships towards more sustainable outcomes.     Wednesday, 25 September 10:00-10:05 Messages on “Leaving no one Behind” #3     10:05-11:00 Leaders Dialogue 2 –...

Summer is here and so I thought is share a few books that you might enjoy while on holiday. Possibly the best political book I have read this year...when listening to on my trips is "we were eight years in power" by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  The amazon note says it better than I could: "We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president".  But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices,  das, and movements for justice that emerged over ...

This is published on new S DG Online Taylor & Francis Group , which includes Routledge Publishing, publishes more than 2,500 journals and over 5,000 new books each year, with a books backlist in excess of 120,000 specialist titles. It has great resources and other thought pieces  The 1990s was a decade of UN Conferences and Summits which had resulted in programmes of action on children (1990), environment and development (1992), population and development (1994), social development (1995), women: action for equality, development and peace (1995), food security (1996) and human settlement (1996). By the end of decade, most governments couldn’t deal with the amount of commitments they had made. The idea around the 2000 Millennium Summit was to simplify these various commitments into a concise and achievable series of goals and targets that could be measured and reported on. The Millennium Summit did not agree the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as some people think;...

Guest blog by Homi  Kharas:  Interim Vice President and Director - Global Economy and Development and John McArthur:  Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development. Originally published on Brookings Institute website here in their Future Development section.   John McArthur Homi Kharas Pouring several colors of paint into a single bucket produces a gray pool of muck, not a shiny rainbow. So too with discussions of financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Jumbling too many issues into the same debate leads to policy muddiness rather than practical breakthroughs. Financing the SDGs requires a much more disaggregated mindset: unpacking the specific issues, requiring specific resources, in specific places. In a forthcoming paper, we zoom out on the global SDG financing landscape in order to zoom back in on country-specific contexts and gaps. In particular, we consider how much the world’s governments are already spending on SDG-related ...