Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

By Felix Dodds and Chantal Line Carpentier who   is Chief, UNCTAD New York office of the Secretary-General, former UN DESA Major Groups Coordinator where she facilitated non-state actors’ contributions to the SDGs negotiations. She’s an Agricultural and Environmental Economist with PhD. from Virginia Tech and MSc. and BSc. from McGill University The financing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement will need a refocusing of private sector finance. In that context, it might be useful to just look at the UN ecosystem of initiatives on   private sector finance to address these issues. There are several entry points in the UN system which can have an impact on the private sector. These include: UN General Assembly The annual UN General Assembly resolution on “Promoting investments for sustainable development. [A/C.2/L.40]” (UN, 2020) (see UNCTAD section below) UN ECOSOC forum on Financing for Development “About the Forum The ECOSOC...

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). Fo...

July 2018 9-18 High Level Political Forum no date yet theme Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies, New York  https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf 13 UN Partnership Exchange     https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf/PartnershipExchange 11-12 G20 2nd Meeting of the Development Working Group Tucumán   https://www.g20.org/en August 221-22 G20 2nd Meeting of the Task Force on Digital Economy Salta   https://www.g20.org/en 23-24 G20 Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting Salta   https://www.g20.org/en 26-31 World Water Week Stockholm   http://www.worldwaterweek.org/ 29-30 G20 2nd Meeting of the Climate Sustainability Working Group Puerto Iguazú   https://www.g20.org/en September 3-6 12-14 Basel Convention Open Ended Working Group in Geneva Global Clima...