Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest blog by  Pragati Pascale. She is  a Strategic Communications Consultant and Writer who has worked for a number of  UN posts that include Chief, Development Section, Strategic Communications Division  United Nations and Spokesperson for Rio+20. For over thirty years, as I have worked for the UN on major sustainable development and climate summits, I have watched as most, like the Glasgow COP, result in government and business pledges that are a step in the right direction, but nowhere near what is needed. And probably like many of you, I have asked myself, what will it take for change to actually happen on the scale and timeline required? Is there any hope? As climate change and broken ecosystems are now causing massive suffering and devastation, and we collectively become more desperate for answers, it seems that more and more people are open to a deeper approach – that we need to change not only our policies, but also ourselves. We hear variati...

The wonderful Mark Stafford-Smith has an interesting article on the SDGs in Nature this is my response to it. I have attended all the negotiating sessions of the SDG OWG and Mark is right the input from science has failed on two accounts on content and on lobbying. I dont agree with the issue of 10 goals and the reason for that is we should not be focusing on the number but on what needs to be addressed. In that context the difference between the MDGs and SDGs is that the MDGs dealt with ONLY developing countries and only traditional development. The SDGs is dealing with ALL countries and sustainable development. It is therefore not surprising we have twice as many. As far as the targets are concerned one of the very cleaver things the governments have done is to separate the outcome from the SDG OWG and the formal negotiations which will probably start in February by six months for exactly this consideration of what the final targets should be. This is a "floor not a ceiling...