Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Geoffrey Lipman: SUNx Co-founder /President of ICTP It feels good to be back in Manilla for more fun in the Philippines. Not the usual description of a UN Statistics Conference. Even worse, I want to make two what I suspect are contrarian points about the proposed declaration. And then offer a suggestion to strengthen it. First. The past is prologue. As a sector, we are not going far enough fast enough. This declaration needs to be half as wordy: twice as much implementation: four times as fast. And some real multi-stakeholder checks on delivery Why? Because the scale and speed of change and connectivity is accelerating and if we don’t move at the same pace the decisions will be made outside our sector. By environmental and finance institutions; by business coalitions: by local authorities: by States and regions and by very smart cities. This is not business as usual. Climate change is existential. Repeat existential. Second, we need to expand our vision of measurement of sust...

By Geoffrey Lipman and Felix Dodds For 2017, the focus of the world’s largest socio-industrial activity, Travel & Tourism, will be on how to link its growth strategies with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - an evolving, 15 year, locally led framework of 17 global SDGs, with 169 targets and 304 indicators, that addresses every aspect of life on our planet. However, one SDG stands out from the rest – namely Goal 13 Climate Change - for the simple reason that it is existential. Existential means life on the planet is fundamentally threatened.  Without a fix, future generations will freeze or fry. And intensifying climate impacts will severely aggravate many other SDG challenges.  A key issue will be how to keep existential Climate Resilience front and centre in our sector, when Tourism sustainability is everyone’s flavour of the month, humanity’s agenda is shifting to all the SDGs as well as integration of the Paris Accords with their own intense 2050 carbon red...