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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Climate Risks and Democracy
Ecological crises can make politics horrible: panic-inducing scarcity, ethnic and religious conflict, hunger driven imperialism. In his latest essay “Climate Apocalypse and/or Democracy”, Professor Jedediah Purdy is shedding light on the fact that an...
New Book: Governance for Sustainable Development
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...
The Conservative Government and Community Energy
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...
Sustainable Development Goal 16: Governance
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...
Democracy and a Better Planning System
“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...
First ever Environmental Democracy Index
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...
The State of Europe’s Environment
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...
Our foreign pollution from imported goods
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...Sign up for newsletter
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