Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at a workshop organized by the UN Office for Sustainable Development in Incheon Korea. The workshop  ' Bridging Knowledge and Capacity Gaps for Sustainability Transition: A Framework for Action' brought together governments and stakeholders  to look at existing knowledge and capacity building models, platforms and initiatives contributing towards sustainability transition and how they could make best use of available resources and platforms to meet their  knowledge and capacity needs; assessed success stories, trends, needs, and gaps in knowledge and capacity for advancing sustainable development in a post-Rio+20 context. Speech to final plenary  The workshop underlined the importance of the inclusion of sustainable development knowledge and capacity building in formal planning processes, such as National Sustainable Development Strategies. Post Rio+20 there needs to be 'one' process in countries as far as...

On March 1st I had the pleasure of being a during dinner speaker for A Drink for Tomorrow   which is a college chapter at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The speech was on climate change and water. A Drink for Tomorrow is a great project supported by university  students  that is educating thousands of people about the problems  around  the lack of access to water and sanitation in the developing world. They have been giving talks to  toddlers in mom's groups to kindergartners at summer church camps to high school students at Youth Groups, Interact Club meetings, and Model United Nations events. Rotary Clubs and college students have raised money to bring clean drinking water to people who had none.  A Drink for Tomorrow have also been raising funds for particular projects helping over 13000 people in eight countries and 26 communities  They have funded drilling new wells to well rehabilitation, from in...

Rio+20: The Long View Interview of Felix Dodds in FORBES by  Terry Waghorn  from Katerva Author and global sustainable development leader  Felix Dodds has spent more than two decades observing and participating in international development meetings, including the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Conference on Human Settlements in 1996, the Johannesburg Summit in 2000 and the Millennium Development Goal meetings in 2005. His most recent book, authored with Michael Strauss and Maurice Strong,  Only One Earth: The Long via Rio+20  to Sustainable Development,  will have a companion out later this year: Written with Elizabeth Thompson and Jorge Laguna-Celis, From Rio+20 to a New Development Agenda: Building a Bridge to a Sustainable Future  will provide an inside look at the 2012 conference and  an optimistic perspective on where it might lead. Dodds recently  shared his thoughts with  Ensia  and  Terry Waghorn ...

The by-election for Chris Hulm e's seat Eastleigh looks like being one that could benefit from that great BBC correspondent Vincent Hanna (RIP) as Martin Kettle mentions in the Guardian today. For those who do not know the great man he was Newsnight's by-election specialist in the 1980's--  few escaped from his tough questioning. He was one of those larger than life characters. Vincent was a Northern Ireland Catholic born in Belfast and married to the daughter of Gerry Fitt the founder and first leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland . He started his journalist career reporting on the civil rights movemen t in Northern Ireland. It is perhaps less well known now that many catholic's did not have the vote in Northern Ireland until the 1970s. The right to vote was linked to being a registered householder. To get a job or public housing in those days you had to answer on an application form what religion you were...

Today I saw that my friend Stanley Johnson has a new book out 'UNEP - The First 40 years' to coincide with the first meeting of UNEP as a universal membership organization in Gigiri just outside Nairobi. Stanley is an Ambassador for the Convention on Migratory Species and I have at least two other books of his on my shelf. I have to say my favorite is 'Stanley I Presume?' a wonderful tour de force of his life from travelling from London to Afghanistan on a motor bike to his time in the European Union as an MEP and as a civil servant, and association with the Rockefeller Commission on Population, but I digress. In all the meetings around Rio+20 last year there perhaps wasn't enough time to look at UNEP at 40 and see what it had achieved. This book goes someway to giving a wider audience the chance to read and appreciate what it has achieved and what challenges it faced and is still facing in trying to be the environmental consensus for the world. This...

I thought this recent interview i did with Civicus might interest people. Felix Dodds is an independent consultant focusing on stakeholder engagement in the sustainable development process. He is also a current Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute. Prior to these roles, he served as Executive Director of the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future and has been active at the UN since 1990, having attended a myriad of World Summits. He has also participated in all UN Commissions for Sustainable Development and UNEP Governing Councils; and has chaired the 64th UN DPI NGO Conference on Sustainable Development. Additionally, he is a member of a number of advisory boards such as the Great Transition. 1. How have the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) assisted in creating an environment conducive to the actions of civil society since its inception in 2000? It should be remembered that unlike Agenda 21 there was little stakeholder involvement in the development of the MDGs. The...

I just had a telephone conversation with Jan Piotrowski from SciDev.net. SciDev is an excellent web site that looks at science and science policy interfaces in the area of sustainable development. Jan was calling me for a comment on the paper Anita Nayar and I did for UNEP's Perspective Series on Rio + 20 , which was published on December 24 th . While he was obviously more interested in the science side of the Rio+20 outcomes, it made me think more about the paper that Anita and I had originally written late last  summer and how we had widely consulted with stakeholders on particular sections they had been involved with. If you haven't read the paper I encourage you to read it. If you find yourself enjoying it then I highly recommend reading Only One Earth - The Long Road via Rio to Sustainability which I did with Michael Strauss and Maurice Strong . This book gives you an understanding that these conferences are important but happen within a world lan...