Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

By Felix Dodds and  Jenkins Thomas Habitat III where the world gathered in Quito and adopted the New Urban Agenda at the third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. finished on the 20 th of October. We thought it would be a good time to look to the Post Quito period. The conference has shaped a new global action plan for cities. Second, it marked the end of a long and arduous negotiation process considering the difficult negotiation terrain defined by low political impetus, and third it opened yet a new chapter- of relooking at the mechanisms for implementing the New Urban Agenda. What it failed to do was to link substantively the New Urban Agenda to the Sustainable Development Goals and in particular to the over 140 targets that will need to be implemented at the sub-national and local level. This will impact on the implementation of the agenda as governments will focus primarily on delivering the Paris Climate Agreement, the Send...

This is reprinted with kind permission from the Ford Foundation web site. The original can be read here .  Don Chen is participating in the Habitat III Conference in Quito this week. Follow him on Twitter at @donchennyc for live updates from the conference. This week, the city of Quito will host the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, also known as Habitat III. With more than 40,000 participants attending Habitat III—double the number that attended Habitat II—expectations are high for the conference and for the conference’s final agreement, called the  New Urban Agenda . Why is the Habitat III conference generating so much buzz? First, it has the potential to build on and localize the implementation of a series of momentous UN agreements, such as the Paris climate deal and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), recognizing that cities and urbanization are critical to addressing global inequality, poverty, and climate ch...

Insights on key issues at the last informals ahead of HABITAT III Conference By Yunus Arikan, Head of Global Policy and Advocacy, ICLEI World Secretariat National government negotiators are gathering at the UN Headquarters in New York City on 7 – 9 September to seek consensus on key issues for a New Urban Agenda before finally heading to the HABITAT III Conference in Quito, Ecuador on 17 – 20 October. This briefing and opinion piece aims to highlight key issues ahead of this meeting. 1. Sustainable urban development in action worldwide While HABITAT III negotiators are struggling to agree on the details of a New Urban Agenda, local and subnational governments, in collaboration with their partners at the local, subnational, national, regional and global levels, are already accelerating action under numerous fields of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  On the SDGs, the City of Seoul, South Korea hosted a major conference on advancing the Urban Sustainabl...

I’m recovering from the third PrepCom for Habitat III held in Surabaya. If you are not aware of where Surabaya is, it is an industrial city in Indonesia a little below Jakarta. Not somewhere that is on many people’s tourist plans. I have to say as always the Indonesian people were amazing and the entertainment on the first night spectacular. The urbanization of the world is one of the greatest challenges we face.  Its impacts are and will continue to be huge. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth Assessment Report said that 40-50% of all GHG emissions are attributed to be originated to urban activities According to the World Bank up to 80 % of the expected $80 billion to $100 billion per year in climate change adaptation costs are expected to be borne in urban areas; see the World Bank. We also know due to the excellent work of the Stockholm Environmental Institute that the increase in urbanization (60% of all people will live in urban areas by 2050) [UN Habita...

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: WORKSHOP TOWARD GUIDING PRINCIPLES WRITTEN BY  CHRIS DEKKI  ON  JUNE 8, 2016 . POSTED IN  PARTNERSHIPS In an effort to establish guiding principles for PPPs in implementing the SDGs, Communitas organized a convening of leading thinkers and practitioners with a broad range of views on PPPs for urban infrastructure. Presenters and participants included representatives from local government, the UN, NGOs, researchers, development institutions, and the private sector. The convening provided a venue for an exchange of views on the potential benefits and risks of PPPs with the aim of identifying conditions under which such partnerships can be beneficial for cities and regions.  Draft Principles for Public-Private Partnerships for Urban Infrastructure  (Comments welcome by 24 June!)

I am a huge supporter as are most Member states of utilizing the Habitat III conference to be a major implementing agent for the SDGs, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the Sendai Disaster Risk Reduction Framework and the Paris Climate Agreement at the local and sub-national level. There is no question that the Habitat III process is way behind where Habitat II   was  at this point in 1996. Not only was there a text then that member states were happy to negotiate around by now but many many more days still left to negotiate that text. In 1996 there was still 23 days of negotiating days left for Habitat II at this time in the process. Habitat III has only nine days left for negotiations -  though there is a proposal for an additional two days at the end of this month. Clearly there will need to be additional days I would guess in total 10-15 to address the 104 page comments by member states into the 20 page original zero draft. A new text is expected by the ...

Dear Friends,   If you are engaged or planning to engage in Habitat III, or just interested in learning how to better participate in intergovernmental processes at the United Nations, please join the Communitas Coalition for our lobbying and advocacy webinar on: 14 April, 10:00 am - 12:00pm (New York time) The presenters will include : Felix Dodds , Senior Advisor to the Communitas Coalition ( www.felixdodds.net ) Co-author of How to Lobby at Intergovernmental Meetings: Mine is a Café Latte Debora Leao , Deputy Organizing Partner Habitat III Working Group of the UN Major Group on Children and Youth Laney Stone , Stakeholder Coordinator for Habitat III Secretariat Moderator : Christopher Dekki , Communitas Coalition Secretariat To RSVP, please fill out the following form:  http://goo.gl/forms/h1O96Ii87d If you have any questions, please send a message to Christopher Dekki ( chris@communitascoalition.org )....

In relation to the issue of stakeholder modalities for the preparatory process for Habitat III which already has had two prepcoms some people might say at last..... The governments produced in the end a very good resolution which addresses all the issues that were outstanding and did so in a constructive and forward looking way. First on the stakeholder engagement the approach builds on the open way that stakeholders engaged in the 2015 process and not the more restrictive approach that the same governments were looking to introduce in Nairobi at prepcom 2. Individual local authorities as is normal will have to accredit through their associations and this enable the issue of the Falklands to be put to rest as it will be the responsibility of the associations to ensure any one they accredit abides by the rules. There was as i indicated in a  previous posting the recognition that they needed many more days than were allocated in the original motion establishing the prepar...

INPUTS TO HABITAT III The process of the SDGs is coming to the end of the negotiation stage with the Summit 25-27 th September. The focus will shift onto the agreement on which global indicators we will have for SDGs, how the UN will deal with monitoring and review and the toolkits for implementation. In the next year Habitat III will play a critical role as the first major conference to deal with what this will mean. I wanted to produce a report on this processThe Habitat III process will have four major inputs. These are: National Reports : National reports from countries which should have or should involve national stakeholders. Regional Meetings: There will be regional meetings in four of the UN regions. The output in each case would be a Declaration. There is NO template for the Declarations so it will be up to each meeting to produce what they want. The Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting is in Jakarta, Indonesia is on 21-22 October 2015; the Africa Regional Meeting is in ...