Democracy, SDGs and COP—interview with János Zlinszky
János Zlinksy, one of our longest serving Trustees and an advisor to the UN Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, reflects on the relationship between the Paris COP and the Sustainable Development Goals Interview by Nick Aveling There’s been a lot of...
Climate change action needs more than scientific evidence | Blog by Simon Burall
Simon Burall is the Director of Involve, a think tank and charity specialising in public participation. Their mission is to inspire, innovate and embed effective citizen engagement, to enable members of the public to take and influence the decisions that affect their...
Managing the Psychological Distance of Climate Change
Climate change is a notoriously ‘distant’ risk for most people. We hear about it in the news, but it rarely seems relevant to our everyday life – “it feels ‘not here’ and it feels ‘not now’”. This sense of non-urgency couldn’t be further away from the actual impact...
Climate change action needs widespread democratic change | Blog by Andrea Westall
This blog first appeared on the Involve website, January 8, 2016; and has just been published on the Democratic Audit UK website on January 14, 2016. COP21, the UN’s December 2015 Climate Change Conference, created a toughly negotiated agreement with space to improve...
COP21 – the sound of the bell for system change
“Habemus consensus!” a Huffington Post article reads, summarising the sanguine diplomatic outcome of the COP21 conference in Paris. It might not be as binding as hoped by the hundreds of thousands of people engaging in the climate march; it does, however, signify a...
People’s Climate March 2015—largest mobilisation in history
On 29 November 2015, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history. 785.000 citizens participated in 2,300 events in 175 countries and thousands of cities to march for a clean energy future, aiming...
Runciman on democratic politics and climate change
How to sustain democratic politics in the face of climate change? This is the central challenge raised by David Runciman, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge in this review essay of recent books on climate politics originally published by the London...
JRF evidence review on community resilience to climate change
The concept of community resilience to climate change in the UK is multifaceted and comes with a wide range of associated activities. In order to build the evidence base and help support the development of community resilience to climate change, the Joseph Rowntree...
Summary and footage: EAC conference on the Government’s approach to sustainable development, 10 November 2015
The Environmental Audit Committee, a Select Committee in the UK Parliament, has published the transcript of its first conference, held on 10th November 2015, on the Government’s Approach to Sustainable Development. Following the EAC’s public inquiry from July 2015, to...
How the UK is really doing: NEF’s five headline indicators of national success
With their latest report “Five headline indicators of national success – a clearer picture of how the UK is performing”, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has launched a campaign to end “short-term obsession with narrow economic measures and … flawed conception(s) of...
Sophie Howe appointed first Future Generations Commissioner for Wales
Following the adoption of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act in April 2015, the Welsh Government has appointed its first Future Generations Commissioner, Sophie Howe, currently Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner for South Wales. "Public bodies in Wales...
Autumn 2015 Newsletter
In the wake of September's adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this second edition of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development's quarterly newsletter focuses on SDG 16, which aims to "ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and...
The UK, the SDGs, and particularly SDG 16
The UK Government hasn’t yet involved the public or any other stakeholder in discussions about the relevance of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for domestic application in the UK. According to BOND’s report on Bringing the Goals Home: Implementing the SDGs in...
Open Data supporting democracy, sustainable development and the SDGs
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...
Governance the Key to SDG Success
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 Sustainable...
SDGs: precious lever for progress in the UK | Ann Pfeiffer, Green House
Unlike the Millennium Development Goals, which focus primarily on social development priorities in low-income countries, the Sustainable Development Goals are intended to apply to developing and developed countries alike. In her Green House essay What do the...
‘Bringing the Goals Home: Implementing the SDGs in the UK’, report by BOND and Beyond2015 UK
BOND (the UK membership body for NGOs working in international development) and Beyond2015 UK published 'Bringing the Goals Home: Implementing the SDGs in the UK' in September 2015. The report urges the Westminster Government to clearly outline its strategy for the...
The worrying rise of anti-democratic sentiments amongst climate scientists
In his latest essay Climate Policy: Democracy is not an inconvenience, Professor Nico Stehr—founding director of the European Center for Sustainability Research—reflects on the growing number of climate scientists who are not only expressing their impatience with...