Category Archives: Sustainable Development Goals
Leave room for legal ambition in the Paris Agreement
The Paris climate agreement expected in December should include the option for countries to take on legally binding targets, even if no country is willing to enlist initially Continue reading
Climate change and the post-2015 goals: Passing ships or all in the same boat?
With 2015 potentially signaling a new chapter for the “global partnership” for poverty eradication and sustainable development, developing country leaders have to consider one question very carefully: do they really want to perpetuate the aid and charity paradigm that reduced them to unequal partners in this partnership for the last half century? This blog considers options, mainly in the context of the new report by the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts Sustainable Development Financing (ICESDF). Continue reading
Climate change and the Post-2015 goals: Passing ships or all in the same boat?
CBDR was viewed as a dilution of the more straight-forward polluter pays principle, where the concepts of responsibility and liability are better defined. Two decades later, developing countries feel that even this diluted version of the polluter pays principle is threatened. Developed countries would like to replace CBDR with “applicable to all” in the climate negotiations, and “universally applicable” in the post-2015 negotiations, to reflect the “changing world order”. Continue reading
Vulnerable India 2: Beneath the veneer
The polishing of India’s image in the recent past appears to be slowly erasing an integral truth about the country. ‘India Shining’ and ‘Incredible India’ at home, the country is commonly referred to as an ‘emerging economy’, a ‘key/large developing … Continue reading
Vulnerable India 1: Climate change in the world’s largest democracy
Real Swaraj (self-rule) will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, Swaraj is to be attained by educating … Continue reading
Why Community Based Adaptation is not enough
For some time now, I have been meaning to write a blog on why splitting climate change adaptation into “community based adaptation” (CBA) and “ecosystem based adaptation” (EBA) is not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of … Continue reading
Forget development goals. Focus on empowering communities
A shorter version of this blog also appears here. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post on the United Nation’s post-2015 process for Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development Goals, noting that the global community had not yet been … Continue reading
Can the system adapt?
It seems fitting that the field work for my project on climate change adaptation begins in Tamil Nadu, the south Indian state of my birth and childhood. The nodding, smiling helpfulness of its people, the fragrance of sambhar spice and … Continue reading
Draft report of High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda does not address the bigger (and more problematic) picture
In my last two posts on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I have tried to point out that the global community must tackle broader issues that are stalling existing multilateral processes. Without addressing issues such … Continue reading
The rot starts at the top
Last week, I was at the second meeting of the open working work discussing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN headquarters in New York. Everyone here agrees that “coherence”, “integration” – call it what you will – is … Continue reading
It must be said! 