Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

It is always challenging looking back on a year and forward to the next. I guess the highlights of 2019 were after three years of work the UN General Assembly passed the resolution on Promoting Investments for Sustainable Development . Passed on November 27 th 2019 by the UNGA. The original idea for such a resolution was a result of work started under the Danish Presidency of the UNGA of Mogens Lykketoft. He commissioned a report the Chain of Sustainable Finance:   Accelerating Private Investments for the SDGs, including Climate Action from that report there was an ongoing discussion in member states and stakeholders including the private sector led by AVIVA. In 2018 Nigeria championed the idea and the resolution passed under the Nigerian Presidency of the UNGA of Tijjani Muhammad-Bande. For me the sad part of it was I was out of the country in the UK when it happened. At the start of the year, it was a pleasure to serve on the UN Global Compact Internal Review Taskf

Personal message Sorry I've been absent from blogging for a while. As some of you will know I stood (unsuccessfully) in the UK election. My hope was to get close to the UK government as an MP to help with next year's UNFCCC in Glasgow. Prior to the election and this year's COP it was already looking like a very challenging conference. What was perhaps hopefully was that the climate emergency was part of the political discourse and one of the leader's debates was on the issue ...though unfortunately not attended by the head of the party who won the election. The constituency I was standing in was Mid-Derbyshire and it was hit badly by the floods... It turns out that the UK has built over 40% of the new houses since the Second World War on flood planes.....  this will require some new thinking and a considerable increase in funding for the UK's environment agency. Building resilience is increasingly part of what every community will need to do and planning wi