Tory energy minister John Hayes’s off-message remarks about onshore wind in the UK have generated a fast-evolving case study of one of the thorny issues we’re trying to get to grips with as we consult on what should go into a manifesto for democracy and sustainable development.
Onshore wind farm developments are often subject to vehement opposition in communities where they are slated for development. But they also have plenty of supporters, and they form an important part of the UK’s overall approach to meeting its renewable energy targets.
The issue for our manifesto, in the abstract, is this:…
With Paper Four (Climate Change: an overview of science, scenarios, projected impacts and links to democracy) in our project on The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change posted to the FDSD website, Halina (FDSD’s Director) and I decided to reward our hard work with a trip to the Science Museum and its new Atmosphere gallery.
How has London’s famous Science Museum gone about communicating climate science to its visitors?
In our own work, Paper Four aims to uncover links between the current state of climate science on one hand, and democracy on the other. As with …
Give Your Vote, a campaign to get the UK’s voters to donate their votes in the forthcoming General Election to citizens of Bangladesh, Ghana and Afghanistan, is launched today, and seems to be attracting quite some interest in the mainstream media and in the world of social networks.
Give Your Vote is an offshoot from the campaign group Egality Now. The campaigners argue that:
“We think we can do better than a world where politicians from the strongest countries decide for everyone else.
The UK makes decisions about climate change, migration, poverty and war that directly affects …
FDSD is pleased to announce a collaboration with Schumacher College- the International Centre for Sustainability, Dartington Hall Trust, Salzburg Global Seminar and Goodenough College in London to present an international leadership seminar on ‘Mobilising Democracy to Tackle Climate Change’ in the centre of London on 19-20 April 2010.
The seminar will focus on the central question: what innovations are needed in democracy and participatory decision-making, if we want them to deliver the actions required to mitigate and adapt to climate change?
Priced at £75/Euro 85 for the one and a half day seminar, the programme has been designed …
I’m back in London after a week in Copenhagen at various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over the past two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
As we start work on our project here at the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next?
We’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.
So in this …
Week two of the COP15 climate summit. The outcome remains uncertain. We now post a piece by FDSD Vice-Chair Ian Christie which cautiously welcomes the debate over ‘climategate’.
Meanwhile so-called ‘climate sceptics’ continue to publicise what they suggest amounts to muzzling of their legitimate questions inside the COP15 meeting space, and just one week has passed since Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Vice-Chair Jean-Pascale van Ypersele complained that “[w]e are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators”.
Climategate, Ian argues, teaches us that
1) climate science is not a ‘done …
I came across two interesting new UN documents whilst in New York earlier this week. Both are dated September 11th 2009; 9/11.
The first is a Guidance Note of the Secretary General on the United Nations Approach to Democracy. This has emerged out of consultations within the Inter-Agency Working Group on Democracy of the Executive Committee on Peace and Security, and sets out ‘the United Nations framework for democracy’.
The second document is an ‘advanced unedited copy’ Report of the Secretary General on climate change and its possible security implications. The summary of the latter identifies ‘democratic governance’ as …
FOUNDATION FOR DEMOCRACY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
PRESS RELEASE
Climate Policy could threaten democratic freedoms, warns NGO
EMBARGOED TO 00:01 GMT, 15th September 2009
In an open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon published on their new website today, the second International Day of Democracy, UK-based non-governmental organisation the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (FDSD) warn that unless governments step up immediate efforts to tackle climate change, the result could be significant incursions into future democratic freedoms.
As the UN and supporting organisations around the world celebrate democracy today, they know that there are some formidable environmental and natural …
We want to open our Blog to invited guest bloggers, and we’re pleased to post below a first contribution from Alejandro Litovsky, who heads the Pathways to Scale programme with our friends at Volans.
You can also find Alejandro’s post on the Volans website, here.
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‘Radical’ is not the word that is most often used to describe the European Commission’s President, Jose Manuel Barroso. Over the last two years, his efforts to align European countries behind ambitious climate targets have run into the inevitable stalemate and compromise.
But as Barroso unveils his new ‘manifesto’, intended to …
Climate change presents the biggest challenge to democracy of any in the burgeoning list of environmental and social pressures. And there is already a body of evidence that climate change is shaping democracy. Climate Camp offers some examples.
Earlier this year, I went to a Climate Camp meeting in London. In the wake of the London G20 protests, I was interested to learn more about Climate Camp, but also casting about for inspiration for work on “direct action, democracy and sustainable development”. Please comment if you have ideas on that.
I asked one of the climate campers what we could …
In the US, opposition to the Climate Bill has shown just how hard it can be to get popular support for much-needed measures to put economies on track to head off the worst effects of climate change.
The US model of democracy within which President Obama must work is itself partly to blame. As a recent op-ed from the UK Observer Newspaper suggests:
“The structure of the US Senate makes the passage of complex legislation difficult… One hundred senators have the power to halt legislation…
…Last week in Houston, 3,500 people, many of them energy industry workers, attended an anti-climate …
