Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

By Gabriele Koehler,  a development economist searching for gender-just, climate-just and economically-just policy approaches.  Just out: The Politics of Social Inclusion. Bridging Knowledge and Policies Towards Social Change by Gabriele Koehler, Alberto Cimadamore, Fadia Kiwan and Pedro Manuel Monreal Gonzalez.  This blog was originally published at IDEAS here. Acute deaths, chronic deaths  The COVID19 pandemic is frightening. The staggering number of deaths in just a few months is numbing our minds and breaking our hearts. Medical disasters such as the current Covid-19 pandemic, or natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, earthquakes, or man-made disasters such as nuclear power plant implosions affect a large number of people in one incident. They are acute. They are distressing. They ought to not be happening. At the same time, despite the enormous morbidity and mortality of the Covid-19 virus, year upon year, chronic medi...

By Felix Dodds and Michael Strauss first published on Inter Press Service here. With the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the planet and the governments of both wealthy and poorer nations overwhelmed by the demands of managing a response, the scheduling of this year’s critical UN Climate Summit is suddenly in doubt.  COP26 (formally, the 26 th annual Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) is planned for Glasgow, Scotland (UK) from 9-20 November. It will be the culmination of five years of negotiations since the historic 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. More than 100 presidents and prime ministers are expected to present their nations’ plans for carrying out the sweeping environmental, economic and energy changes necessary to keep the Earth’s warming to survivable levels.   In all, over 30,000 government delegates, intergovernmental officials and stakeholder representatives are preparing to attend. The agenda of COP26 is deep and ur...

Guest blog by  Professor Geoffrey Lipman, President SUNx Malta “Let me start by making it clear that today and for the coming months every government and industry action must be focused on a total response, repeat total response, to the global enemy of COVID 19. To health issues: livelihood issues: family issues and business survival issues. It is war. Nothing is more important than coherent national and international response, where co-ordinated,   joined-up   action is the only path open.” As the pandemic crisis intensifies, pulling the world economy towards recession it’s clear that the Travel & Tourism sector is in the centre of the maelstrom. Airlines are slashing flights: Cruise companies are cancelling programs: Hotels are seeing bookings evaporate. And with it the entire Travel Ecosystem of airports, ports, stations, along with meetings, sports events, theme parks, music festivals and all the attendant hospitality services...

This is a press release from UNECE which can be found here . The Sustainable Development Goals’ globally-agreed framework of 232 indicators allows everyone—governments, researchers, civil society, business and beyond—to keep track of how our countries are progressing towards environmental, social and economic sustainability. A new  UNECE Dashboard for SDG s, launched ahead of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development for the UNECE Region, brings together available data for its 56 member countries, providing for the first time a regional perspective on the global indicators. With data for 80 regionally-relevant indicators across all 17 goals, users can see snapshots of where countries stand for each indicator, view differences between women and men; create graphs and maps; compare countries; access definitions and explanations; and download full datasets for more in-depth analysis. UNECE Executive Secretary Olga Algayerova emphasized that “Countries from across th...

Guest blog by: Oscar Ugarteche (1), Alfredo Ocampo(2), OBELA (3) originally produced On December 31, 2019, the coronavirus (COVID-19) appeared in Wuhan, China. While this explains the speed of the stock market fall, it is not enough to explain why it resembles the experience of the 2008 - 2009 crisis. Even before the crisis, the global economic outlook for 2020 was even lower than that for 2019. The impact can be comprehended, understanding the importance of China in global value chains. China is the source of five branches of the world economy: pharmaceuticals, automotive, aeronautics, electronics, and telecommunications. The closure of China's factories and trade slows down the production of these five branches in the world./ The impact is an immediate slowdown in world production until it grinds to a halt. The origin of this is the world order established in 1990 by the United States when the wall fell, and simultaneously China was integrated into world trade, creating t...

Preparing For the Glasgow 2020 Climate Summit article 7 Harold Goodwin is the World Travel Market’s Responsible Tourism Advisor, he puts together the flagship Responsible Tourism programme at WTM London . He is also a Director of the Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is an Emeritus Professor, and Founder Director of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism promotes the principles of the Cape Town Declaration (2002) which he drafted.  https://news.wtm.com/category/responsible-tourism/    or here  https://haroldgoodwin.info/blog/  In April last year, I described aviation as the  Achilles Heel  of our sector and pointed out that consumers are increasingly demanding that producers and suppliers address the sustainability of the goods and services offered to us to purchase – the same pressure needs to come on the manufacturers of aeroplanes and providers of flights and fuel. I learnt last week, ...