Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest blog: Lenni Montiel: Senior UN Development Leader (Ret.) | Former UN Assistant Secretary-General |UNDP Resident Representative | Governance, Public Policy & Multilateral Diplomacy | Leadership Advisor & Trainer | Chevening Scholar. Lenni writes on LinkedIn about the UN and international development. Originally published here. The system already existed. It had institutions, expertise and finance. But it did not yet have a unified strategy, or the full participation of the countries it was intended to support. Between 1945 and 1960, responsibilities were scattered across UN organs, specialized agencies, regional commissions and international financial institutions. ECOSOC provided the main intergovernmental forum for economic and social cooperation. The UN Secretariat supplied research, statistics and technical expertise. FAO worked on agriculture. UNESCO on education and science. WHO on health. The ILO on employment and labour institutions. UNICEF gradually shifted from p...

Guest blog: Lenni Montiel: Senior UN Development Leader (Ret.) | Former UN Assistant Secretary-General |UNDP Resident Representative | Governance, Public Policy & Multilateral Diplomacy | Leadership Advisor & Trainer | Chevening Scholar. Lenni writes on LinkedIn about the UN and international development. Originally published here. "The UN doesn't work." I've heard this for decades. Some of it is true. After many years inside the system, I can acknowledge what critics get right. Yes, the UN can be slow. Building agreement among 193 Member States takes time. Urgent decisions often move at the pace of the most reluctant government. The bureaucracy is real. Processes designed to ensure accountability and transparency can also create delays and complexity. Coordination across dozens of UN entities is genuinely difficult. Political interests shape everything. The Security Council still reflects the power relations of 1945. Vetoes can block action even during crises...

 By Climate High-Level Champions - originally published here. Over the past five years, the Race to Zero campaign has helped establish a common definition of credible net zero action while mobilising thousands of organizations to act. The next phase is about enabling those organizations to deliver and scale climate solutions faster. To that end, the campaign – which quickly became the world's largest coalition of companies, cities, investors and other non-state actors committed to net zero – is being integrated into the new structure of the Global Climate Action Agenda designed to accelerate implementation and deliver on the five year plan for 2025-2030 . The transition is unfolding in a more complex landscape than the one that existed when the campaign launched in 2020. Climate action has become more embedded in business strategy and public policy, even as political conditions have shifted and progress has varied across sectors and regions. At the same time, voluntary efforts hav...

The UNC Water & Health Substack is free to read and subscribe to on Substack . If your work involves water quality, sanitation, hygiene, environmental health, infectious disease, WASH policy, or public health, subscribe and make it part of your regular scan of the field. One Place to Keep Up with Water and Health Research Anyone working in water, sanitation, and hygiene knows the problem: there is more useful research being published than most of us can realistically follow. A study on drinking water quality appears in one journal. Research on sanitation and enteric disease turns up somewhere else. New evidence on antimicrobial resistance is published in a public health journal we may not routinely monitor. Conference announcements circulate through professional networks. Funding opportunities appear on agency websites, often with little connection to the research conversations that should inform them. Keeping up can become a research project of its own. That is the prob...

  By Felix Dodds, Chris Spence, Hugo-Maria Schally, Peter Bridgewater and Craig Boljkovac  Just published in Inter Press Service here APEX, North Carolina / SAN FRANCISCO, California / VIENNA, Austria / SHEFFIELD, United Kingdom / GENEVA, Switzerland In March 2025, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched “UN80”. Recognizing that the world is in a state of dramatic and rapid change at a time when funding for the UN is under threat from budget cuts, Guterres declared that, on the anniversary of the UN’s 80th birthday, a review of its work was long overdue. Now, UN80 is coming to a head with a set of recommendations that cover almost every aspect of the UN’s work. Some of the recommendations are focused on reducing budgets. With some major governments cutting their funding and heavily in arrears, the UN needs to cut its spending. The current target is a reduction of roughly 20%. This has already resulted in a decision to shift staff from high-cost duty ...