Helen Clark thanks Brazil on Twitter for gender equality

Tale of green cooking stoves in Brazil: - $$$millions spent for un-certified stoves -- with no real impact to environment

Credit: UNDP

28 January 2013 – The story of an indigenous family in west-central Brazil which now uses clean, economical and green cook stoves provided through a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project is among 12 winners of an annual storytelling competition and featured in the second edition of a newspaper presented today by the agency.

“As in last year’s issue, these stories highlight UNDP’s critical work on poverty reduction, democratic governance, crisis prevention and recovery, and the environment and sustainable development,” said UNDP Administrator Helen Clark in a letter to readers. “They remind us that people are and always will be the centre of UNDP’s work.”


Click here for this story in full @ : http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44018#.UQlG9rbTroA

Who are the main players in global climate negotiations

Click here for this story in full at philStar.com: http://www.philstar.com/breaking-news/2012/11/25/873333/main-players-global-climate-negotiations

DOHA (Xinhua) - A new round of UN climate change conference slated for Nov. 26-Dec. 7 will be held in Doha, Qatar where negotiators are expected to push ahead what was achieved in Durban last year and work out the details of the second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol.
In climate change talks, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) mainly group under three contending forces, namely the Umbrella Group, the European Union(EU) and the G77 and China.

UMBRELLA GROUP

The umbrella group mainly consists of the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Russia, whose stance regarding climate change is less enthusiastic than most of the developed signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. Particularly, in 2001, the United States withdrew from the Protocol, and in 2011, Canada followed its step.
The Umbrella Group insists that developing countries should undertake quantified emission reduction commitments along with the developed countries, regardless of the fact that rich nations are responsible for 80 percent of the existing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere due to their unsustainable way of industrialization in the past.

EU

The EU is more active in fighting climate change than the Umbrella Group and supports a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol being negotiated.
Nevertheless, the EU sees the second commitment period only as a transition phase, following which a new treaty should be implemented in its stead to assign all major economies mandatory emission cut targets.
These economies that the EU has in mind include the United States, who has so far showed no interest in the second commitment period, as well as the emerging economies, mainly include China and India.
Again, the EU is aiming to discard the core principle of the UNFCCC, "common but differentiated responsibilities," and tries to blur the distinction between the duties of developed and developing countries.

G77 AND CHINA

The G77 and China represent the interests of the developing countries in the climate negotiations.
An important player under this bloc is the BASIC nations, which encompass China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The BASIC group often meets to coordinate their positions ahead of major climate talks.
The G77 and China advocate respecting the UNFCCC and the Bali Roadmap, which set a double-track process for climate negotiations and differentiates the duties of the rich and poor countries.
They argue that the developed countries should make greater commitment to cutting carbon emissions, citing their historical discharge, while the developing countries, aided by financial and technical support, should also make efforts to cut their emissions on a voluntary basis.

Click here for this story in full at philStar.com: http://www.philstar.com/breaking-news/2012/11/25/873333/main-players-global-climate-negotiations

Is United Nations becoming a operation arm of BRICS ? (Brazil, India and China)

Click here for full read @ Whale Cottage:  http://www.whalecottage.com/blog/tag/united-nations-procurement-programme/


  

More than 1000 jobs were created in the same period.  The dominant export markets for the Western Cape remain the UK, France and Germany, but the West Africa Trade Corridor is gaining importance, in particular Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Angola has taken over from Mozambique as the province’s largest trade partner in Africa, said Nils Flaatten, Wesgro CEO.

Brazil, India and China, all BRICS countries, are important for partnerships to promote the economy of the Western Cape.

The United Nations Procurement Programme, incorporating our province as one of only three developing areas, is a bonus for the Western Cape.

Click here for full read @ Whale Cottage:  http://www.whalecottage.com/blog/tag/united-nations-procurement-programme/

UN's FAO spent $1.1 Million to study shared stock of shrimp and groundfish in Guianas

To Read this in full click here: http://www.guyanatimesgy.com/2012/09/14/fao-studying-shared-stocks-of-shrimps-groundfish-in-guianas/

The Food and  Agriculture Organ-isation (FAO) of the United Nations has facilitated a case study on the shared stocks of shrimps and groundfish in the Guianas-Brazil Shelf under the Caribbean Large Marine Ecosystem (CLME) Project.

In a release, the FAO said the overall objective of the project is to improve management practices of the shrimp and groundfish fishery at the national and sub-regional levels, to ensure that maximum benefits can be gained from these resources and to improve livelihoods of those directly and indirectly dependent on these fisheries. The project commenced in July 2011, and is expected to be completed in November 2012.

Guyana, Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago are involved in the study, whereby each country is expected to prepare a Baseline Report on the current situation with respect to their shrimp and groundfish fishery. A draft report was prepared for Guyana and several priority issues and suggested actions were identified. The report is expected to be validated by stakeholders.

To this end, the FAO, in collaboration with the Fisheries Department of the Agriculture Ministry, will be convening a National Stakeholder Consultation workshop. The workshop will be held on Tuesday, September 18, at the Regency Suites Hotel, Hadfield Street.

How Helen clark sees Social Media and use of it by United nations

"Don't wait for the markets to do this one. Markets can be helpful but they don’t deliver social justice or equity that is a matter of deliberate public policy (i.e. United Nations)"

Helen Clark

Claudia Rosett: Meanwhile, the UN Is Planning Your Future — All of It

@PajamasMedia

The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program,Achim Steiner.)

But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, and election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.

As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Now, Fox News Executive Editor George Russell reports that Ban Ki-Moon, Sha Zukang and another two dozen or more of the UN’s top Rio+20 planners held a closed-door retreat last October, at a Long Island mansion, where they discussed how Rio+20 could help them reshape the world. The proceedings were meant to be secret (apparently, UN top managers prefer that the world not know the details until their world reshaping is already well underway). But Russell got hold of the confidential minutes of the discussions, which are linked in his story, “UN chief, aides, plot ‘green economy’ agenda at upcoming summit.”

The minutes include the usual mind-numbing welter of UN buzz words: “sustainable…implementing… institutional framework… integration, implementation and coherence…” etc. George Russell has done us the favor of slogging through this, and sums it up as as an agenda of “bold ambitions that stretch for years beyond the Rio conclave to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions ‘to manage the process of globalization better.’”

Could this really go anywhere? Don’t underestimate it. Thanks in substantial part to U.S. tax dollars that subsidize most of its system, the UN has the ability and resources to stage these mega-conferences, whether the U.S. contributes directly or not. These conferences produce secretariats that become permanent fixtures, and spin off other conferences, commissions, programs — which in turn become frameworks and funders of global lobbying efforts in which an organized few can trample the interests of a disorganized many. At what cost to humanity does this “sustain” and continually expand the UN, and its ever-swelling ambitions?

As it is, we have a huddle of UN officials — none of them chosen by any process that a normal democracy would recognize as elections — bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and protected by UN immunities, meeting in luxurious secrecy on Long Island to plan the reshaping of the world. Not a good sign.