Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

For this year’s Earth Day (22 nd of April) which happens the same day that Heads of State sign the Paris Climate Agreement in New York it’s time to reassess the impact of Rio+20.  The Climate agreement is of course a daughter of the 1992 Earth Summit. It is  a huge achievement. At Rio+20 it was clear that neither some of the large NGOs nor the majority of press understood the significance of the conference. Perhaps it’s because it was compared to Rio 1992 which at the time I and other explained was the wrong comparison – but hay isn’t getting headlines much better for fundraising for some NGOs. To quote John Vidal the Guardian environmental journalist two weeks after Rio+20: “Read the post mortems and commentaries from Rio+20, and you'd think a global disaster had taken place. The UN multilateral system is said to be in crisis, the environment is falling off the edge, and every blade of grass and hillside is for sale. Pundits and NGOs scream that it was "the ...

UNCSD: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY Felix Dodds, Fellow at the Global Research Institute UNC and Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute I cannot believe that today will see the twentieth meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and its final session. I write as a member of a very small group of people that attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and all of the CSD meetings to date, giving me a relatively unique perspective. It should be remembered that the CSD was a compromise between the UK and USA, in particular, who did not want any UN institution for sustainable development, and Maurice Strong (Secretary General of Rio 1992), Norway and some developing countries who wanted to either transform the Trusteeship Council to an Ecological Security Council or create a new Council of the General Assembly. It was in fact a group of NGOs who came up with the compromise, handing the suggestion that this new body be a functional commission of the UN Economic an...