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Showing posts from January, 2020

The Future of Work: 5 Game Changers Overview

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The full report by the Canadian Government can be found here or click any of the chapters. Foreword Introduction Game Changer 1: Work Moves from Being Long-Term and Time-Based to Temporary and Task-Based Game Changer 2: AI and Automation Could Erode Employment Long Before These Technologies Replace Entire Jobs Game Changer 3: AI Ends the Scarcity of Knowledge Workers, Potentially Allowing Jobless Growth in Knowledge Industries Game Changer 4: Combined Digital Technologies Could Reduce the Role of and Need for Human Intermediaries Game Changer 5: Where People Work and Earn May Not Be Where They Live and Spend Acknowledgements Endnotes

Guest blog: Towards sustainable investments in the ecological transition: the green taxonomy of the European Union

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Guest blog by Nicolas Berghmans who is a Research Fellow at IDDRI on Energy and Climate policies, specializing in the electrical sector. His work focuses on the integration of renewable energies into the electricity system and the governance of energy markets in Europe. The blog originally appeared on the IDDRI web site here.  The adoption in December 2019 of the regulation on the taxonomy of green activities (1) opens an ambitious project to achieve a European benchmark for sustainable finance. As technical discussions begin to determine the technical thresholds and criteria that will make it possible to define "sustainable", "transitioning" and "enabling" activities, it will be necessary to ensure, on the one hand, that these criteria are based on long-term decarbonisation pathways that are systemic, robust, transparent and shared by all stakeholders and, on the other hand, that they are well aligned with the objective of climate neutrality by 2050,

The Convention on Biological Diversity. Does it live in a parallel world?

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With the World Economic Forum  (WEF) just started I thought  id share the WEF top five global risks. As they are all related  to the Sustainable  Development Goals (SDGs) . In Rio in 1992 the Earth Summit agreed two conventions – on climate change and biodiversity. It was also the birth place for what became a series of other legal agreements the: Desertification Convention, Straddling Fish Stocks Agreement, Persistent and Organic Pollutants agreement, and Prior Informed Consent agreement. As some of you know this year, we will have two very important Conferences of the Parties (COP).   These are the two Rio Conventions. The UNFCCC COP will be in Glasgow to review the progress towards the Paris Climate commitments and to hopefully ratchet up to higher commitments. I will write about the Glasgow UNFCCC on another occasion and my frustration with the political action. The second COP that of the Convention on Biological Diversity will meet in October

Guest blog: Public-Private partnerships and foreign direct investment as determinants of SDG achievement

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By Christian Kingombe (Managing Partner at 4IP Group and Research Associate at CSEND) and Raymond Saner (Professor of International Relations & International Management at the University of Basle, Switzerland and Director of the Centre for Socio-Eco-Nomic Development (CSEND) in Geneva). On 25 October 2018, two synergistic United Nations agencies based in Geneva – UNCTAD and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) – joined forces at the World Investment Forum’s 10th Anniversary in Geneva to address how Public-Private (PPPs) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) could contribute to the implementation of the SDGs.(1) . Since the agreements on the 2030 Agenda and the Financing of development (AAAA) in 2015, the member countries of the United Nations have agreed that domestic and foreign direct investment and PPPs are expected to be aligned with the 2030 Agenda. The 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda are supposed to be achieved in an integrated manner focusing at the s

OECD Recommendation on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development

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Background Information The Recommendation of the Council on Good Institutional Practices in Promoting Policy Coherence for Development was adopted by the OECD Council on 29 April 2010. The Recommendation was revised by the Council on 11 December 2019 on the proposal of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the Public Governance Committee (PGC). On this occasion it was renamed the Recommendation on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD). The revisions aimed at providing a comprehensive instrument to help Adherents equip policymakers with the necessary institutional mechanisms and policy tools to support and promote coherent policies for sustainable development with a view to respond to the universal commitments made under the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. OECD’s work on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development and the need for a standard on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development Since the early 1990s, the OECD has been at t

some reflections for this years work on the SDGs

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Interlinkages One of the main differences from the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) was that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognized that we needed to move away from a sector approach to a sector and interlinkage approach.  As some people seem to be harking back to the idea of prioritizing different SDGs eg one is more important than the other. I would remind them that that discussion on prioritizing the SDGs happened during the Open Working Group meetings promoted in particular by the US and the UK who wanted a more MDG+ and the development NGOs who saw it as somewhat an impact on their funding….among other things. The SDGs are a huge achievement of a participatory engagement of all stakeholders, not just the small subset that calls itself civil society. One of the sad things about the SDG negotiations were the collision of the stakeholder discourse (from the sustainable development world) and the civil society discourse (from the development world). For th