by Ann Thorpe | Oct 20, 2015 | News and Comment
Image: Air traffic visualisation, NATS Press Office Open data is a term used to describe data that is free and openly available for anyone to use. Many governments around the world are challenging software developers to help identify applications that help citizens...
by Ann Thorpe | Oct 20, 2015 | News and Comment
The UN: success of Sustainable Development goals depends very much on process. Image: number10gov/flickr, CC BY-NC James Patterson, Florian Koch, and Kathryn Bowen have written an article examining key governance issues underpinning the success of the UN’s...
by Ann Thorpe | Jul 25, 2015 | News and Comment
Felix Dodd has blogged about this new book, Governance for Sustainable Development, that collects the best insights from three recent workshops held by the “Group of Friends of the Governance for Sustainable Development” that was created to help prepare the Rio + 20...
by Ann Thorpe | Jun 20, 2015 | News and Comment
The group 10:10 “is about doing practical stuff that helps solve climate change” and has a particular interest in community energy. In 2013 the group helped set up a renewable energy co-op in Balcombe, refocusing a “fracking village” around solar power. The Back...
by Ann Thorpe | Jun 12, 2015 | News and Comment
You’re probably familiar with the United Nation’s (UN)Millenium Development Goals (MDG), adopted in 2000, for improving well being for the world’s poorest. They carried the tagline, “we can end poverty.” It’s estimated that roughly 40% of the eight goals, listed at...
by Ann Thorpe | Jun 1, 2015 | News and Comment
One avenue toward democratizing sustainable development is to engage more people in the science of sustainability. An example is The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network, led by Imperial College London. OPAL engages people through science-based activities that can be...
by Ann Thorpe | May 25, 2015 | News and Comment
“There remains a democratic deficit within planning.” -Five Radical Ideas for a Better Planning System A group at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, led by Professor Yvonne Rydin, has proposed five radical ideas for better planning, with two...
by Ann Thorpe | May 16, 2015 | News and Comment
The Access Initiative and the World Resources Institute are launching the first ever Environmental Democracy Index (EDI) on May 20th. EDI is the first index to measure how well countries’ national laws protect environmental democracy rights, namely, the right of the...
by Ann Thorpe | Apr 27, 2015 | News and Comment
In March the European Environment Agency published its State and Outlook Environment Report (SOER) 2015 (available here). The report highlights innovations in governance needed for long term sustainability. In addition, a section of the SOER website highlights global...
by Ann Thorpe | Apr 24, 2015 | News and Comment
How should we account for the fact that a great deal of environmental damage associated with one’s own country actually occurs overseas? For example, Chinese manufacturers making our shoes, electronics and bicycles emit a lot of carbon on our behalf. Are...
by Ann Thorpe | Apr 21, 2015 | News and Comment
Recently Techpresident has covered a couple of new online tools that might be applicable to people working in democracy and sustainable development. The first tool is The People’s Lobby, which is a process for structuring citizen participation to make it more...
by Ann Thorpe | Jan 6, 2015 | News and Comment
No taxation without representation, right? So one way of guaranteeing a carbon tax is to impose one on yourself. That’s just what David Lawrence did and he tells the story over on The Energy Collective in his article “a Carbon tax on me: one person’s story of a...
by Ann Thorpe | Jan 6, 2015 | News and Comment
FDSD Board Member, Graham Smith, spoke at several events recently. In Paris he contributed to the UNDESA/UNESCO Expert Group Meeting ‘Formal/Informal Institutions for Citizen Engagement for implementing the Post 2015 Development Agenda’ from 20-21 October 2014. He...