Monday, December 10, 2012
Scotland will give $$$ to Malawi thru UNDP to provide "Energy for All"
SCOTLAND AND UN "ENERGY FOR ALL' DEAL
Electric Light & Power
People in Malawi and other developing countries will have better access to clean energy thanks to action by Scotland and the United Nations. Scotland's Sustainable Energy for All partnership with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) will deliver ...
Electric Light & Power
People in Malawi and other developing countries will have better access to clean energy thanks to action by Scotland and the United Nations. Scotland's Sustainable Energy for All partnership with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) will deliver ...
Leadership Academy for Muslim Women
Leadership Academy for Muslim Women
The Nation
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Social Development and Human Security Ministry will officially launch the innovative new programme at 2pm, with a joint partnership signing. Of the roughly 7,000 political positions in villages and ...
The Nation
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Social Development and Human Security Ministry will officially launch the innovative new programme at 2pm, with a joint partnership signing. Of the roughly 7,000 political positions in villages and ...
UNDP to give $144 Million for rural Burma
UNDP confirms 3-year plan for rural Burma
Mizzima News
UNDP-logo The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is to implement a three-year new program in Burma providing US $144 million for various projects, many of which are scheduled to be initiated in rural and border areas, state-run media reported ...
Mizzima News
UNDP-logo The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is to implement a three-year new program in Burma providing US $144 million for various projects, many of which are scheduled to be initiated in rural and border areas, state-run media reported ...
State of denial: the UN and the protection of its whistleblowers
Click here to read this @ UN Justice: http://unjustice.org/news121.htm
7 December 2012
UNJustice has learned with grave concern and sense of shock that
the UN Secretary-General, through the UN Legal Counsel, H.E. Ms.
Patricia O’Brien, has just lodged a cross-appeal to the United
Nations Appeal Tribunal (UNAT) seeking to have 16 paragraphs
(numbers 60-76) of a United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT)
ruling redacted. On 12 July 2012, a landmark UNDT ruling
suggested that former UN staffer Ms. Vesna Dzuverovic suffered
retaliation and “RECOMMEND[ed her case] to the
Secretary-General for sympathetic review with a view to bringing
substantive justice and closure to it” [para. 74
UNDT/2012/105, original emphasis].
The UNDT also tried to send a
very important message to the Secretary-General about the
importance of effectively upholding the UN whistleblowing
policy, noting that, exceptionally in this case:
“This recommendation is made bearing in mind the special measures that have been put in place with regards to the protection of whistleblowers who risk their jobs, professional lives and livelihoods by courageously seeking to expose wrong-doings within the Organization.The United Nations, being the foremost international Organization for setting standards for governments and other organizations, needs to review the case of this Applicant as this will serve not only the ends of justice but also to reassure whistleblowers that they are indeed protected” [paras. 75 and 76 UNDT/2012/105].
Following these findings, on 7
September 2012, Ms. Dzuverovic wrote to
the Secretary-General pleading for the UNDT recommendation
to be accepted and to be provided with a remedy. However, her
letter received no reply and she had no option but to reiterate
her request through a formal appeal to the UNAT.
The position of the
Secretary-General is incomprehensible. The UN whistleblowing
policy is a major element of the UN reform agenda and a first
step in preventing retaliation is its recognition.
Last year, on 14 October 2011,
following a film screening of "The
Whistleblower" at the U.N. Headquarters,
the Secretary-General declared
that “[the film] underscores how important it is to speak out
against abuse or injustice... Those who do so, in good faith,
must not be punished ... We need to promote a culture in which
people feel free and obliged to raise their voices in the face
of wrongdoing and abuse."
Surprisingly, the cross-appeal
now lodged by the Secretary-General constitutes an alarming
backtracking of the UN whistleblowing policy which goes exactly
in the opposite direction of the UNDT recommendation, sending
the wrong message that protection of UN whistleblowers should
not exist and impunity should be offered to all those who may
choose to victimise or retaliate against fellow UN colleagues
who have made credible allegations of misconduct.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Thursday, December 6, 2012
For Whom Do the FAO and Its Director-General Work?
Click here to read this story in full @: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/goswami041212.html
by Rahul Goswami
For farmers small and large? For the tens of millions of food-consuming households, poor or just getting by? For the governments and bureaucracies of small countries who want to import less and grow more? For the organic cultivators on their small densely bio-diverse plots? Or for the world's large food production, trading, and retail corporations, whose influence is wide and whose power is vast?
There is the continuing if travel-stained hope -- held by so many of us, those who work at humble stations in the food and agriculture sector -- that, of all those whom the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO of the United Nations) does work for, it is not that last. But, since 2011 June, when José Graziano da Silva became the head of the FAO, the signs have been otherwise, and they are growing stronger with each passing month...
Click here to read this story in full @: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/goswami041212.html
Heritage.Org: U.S. Should Put U.N. Climate Conferences on Ice
Click here to read this story on Heritage.org: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/12/climate-change-us-should-work-outside-of-united-nations-climate-conferences
By Brett D. Schaefer and Nicolas Loris
December 5, 2012
The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is currently holding its 18th meeting in Doha, Qatar. The two-week conference ending on December 7 is intended to jump-start the stalled negotiations on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Midway through the meetings, it is clear that very little of substance will transpire, which has been the case for years.
The past four years have demonstrated conclusively that there is no international consensus for action. The U.S. should refuse to attend future U.N. conferences on climate change, call for a moratorium on future conferences unless there is a fundamental shift in position among key countries, and focus its efforts on alternative forums involving key countries. Further, the U.S. should prevent and remove unilateral attempts to address climate change that have adverse economic effects and no environmental benefit.
Talking in Circles
The U.N. has been the central forum for discussing climate change issues for more than two decades. The U.N. led the effort to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, which released its first report in 1990 and, unsurprisingly, confirmed the global warming theory and laid the foundation for an international agreement to address the issue. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced the UNFCCC, wherein countries pledged to consider actions to limit global temperature increases and cope with the resulting impact of climate change.
The high point of UNFCCC efforts was the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which established binding restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialized countries, including principally the European Community, by an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008–2012.
The U.S. is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, and supporters of the pact point to this fact to justify its failure. In reality, even accepting all IPCC model assumptions, shortcomings of the agreement—particularly the exemption of major developing country sources of greenhouse gas emissions, loopholes, and other ruses that allow some developed countries to largely avoid emissions reductions—ensured that the Kyoto Protocol would do virtually nothing to reduce emissions and have no detectable impact on climate change.[1] The bottom line is that even with perfect compliance and U.S. participation, Kyoto would not significantly arrest projected global warming.
The past four years have seen successive annual U.N. conferences (Copenhagen in 2009, Cancun in 2010, Durban in 2011, and Doha this year) frantically trying to reach agreement among nearly 200 countries on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. In essence, these conferences have succeeded only in wresting vague pledges from developed countries to reduce emissions, contribute funds to help developing countries adapt to climate change, and meet again to try to negotiate a binding treaty by 2015.
An Unworkable Premise
The problem is that the basic approach is unworkable. The Kyoto Protocol essentially placed the entire economic burden of addressing climate change on a few dozen countries while asking nothing from more than 150 countries. Perhaps this makes sense if the industrialized countries alone could address the issue by reducing emissions, but that is impossible.
The primary source of greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly the developing world. For a number of reasons—including sluggish economies and a shift toward energy sources (such as natural gas, nuclear, or renewable energy) that emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions—most industrialized countries have seen their emissions stabilize or fall. In fact, U.S. emissions are at their lowest level since 1996, according to the U.N.[2] China surpassed the U.S. as the largest source in 2006, and its emissions were 45 percent higher than America’s in 2009 (the most recent year available). Other developing countries are also rapidly increasing their emissions as their economies develop.
Developing countries, primarily India and China, have made it quite clear that they have no appetite to slow economic growth or stop using fossil fuels to curb emissions. In fact, according to a recent report from the World Resources Institute, there are proposals to build nearly 1,200 coal-fired power plants worldwide totaling over 1.4 million megawatts. China and India alone account for 76 percent of the proposed build.[3]
For this reason, Canada, Japan, and Russia refused to sign onto a new agreement committing them to emissions reductions unless major developing country emitters were also included. Understandably, they see little benefit in undermining their economic growth and their citizens’ prosperity for the sake of a symbolic gesture that, in the end, would not significantly alter the trajectory of emissions growth.
All of this leaves aside, of course, outstanding uncertainty about the accuracy of UNFCCC claims on climate change, the magnitude and pace at which the climate is changing, its causes, and whether the costs of emissions reductions might be better used in other ways. Specifically, the famous “hockey stick” used by the UNFCCC for years to illustrate global warming has been proven to be fabricated,[4] the models used to predict future temperatures have been unable to replicate past temperatures, and global temperatures have stabilized over the past 15 years.[5] Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and other experts suggest that the costs of emissions mitigation are prohibitive and that countries should focus on other, more urgent development problems.[6]
U.S. Should Be a Leader
Proponents of the U.S. taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions often argue that if the U.S. acts, the rest of the world will follow suit. As the developing world has made it clear, this is not the case. Instead, the U.S. is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars attending and financing these conferences and, ironically, encouraging unnecessary emissions from those sent to represent their countries, industries, or interests at these unproductive meetings. Instead, the U.S. should demonstrate real leadership by:
Efforts to address climate change do not need to be hammered out at a U.N. conference. Indeed, by working with a smaller group of key players, the U.S. is far more likely to negotiate a more effective and less costly strategy to address climate change without the tangents that bog down U.N. negotiations.
Instead of letting the U.N. funnel negotiations toward an unrealistic, grossly expensive agreement, the U.S. and other key nations should work outside the U.N. to hash out a realistic, effective strategy by which they are prepared to abide.
—Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and Nicolas D. Loris is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
By Brett D. Schaefer and Nicolas Loris
December 5, 2012
The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is currently holding its 18th meeting in Doha, Qatar. The two-week conference ending on December 7 is intended to jump-start the stalled negotiations on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Midway through the meetings, it is clear that very little of substance will transpire, which has been the case for years.
The past four years have demonstrated conclusively that there is no international consensus for action. The U.S. should refuse to attend future U.N. conferences on climate change, call for a moratorium on future conferences unless there is a fundamental shift in position among key countries, and focus its efforts on alternative forums involving key countries. Further, the U.S. should prevent and remove unilateral attempts to address climate change that have adverse economic effects and no environmental benefit.
Talking in Circles
The U.N. has been the central forum for discussing climate change issues for more than two decades. The U.N. led the effort to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, which released its first report in 1990 and, unsurprisingly, confirmed the global warming theory and laid the foundation for an international agreement to address the issue. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced the UNFCCC, wherein countries pledged to consider actions to limit global temperature increases and cope with the resulting impact of climate change.
The high point of UNFCCC efforts was the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which established binding restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialized countries, including principally the European Community, by an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008–2012.
The U.S. is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, and supporters of the pact point to this fact to justify its failure. In reality, even accepting all IPCC model assumptions, shortcomings of the agreement—particularly the exemption of major developing country sources of greenhouse gas emissions, loopholes, and other ruses that allow some developed countries to largely avoid emissions reductions—ensured that the Kyoto Protocol would do virtually nothing to reduce emissions and have no detectable impact on climate change.[1] The bottom line is that even with perfect compliance and U.S. participation, Kyoto would not significantly arrest projected global warming.
The past four years have seen successive annual U.N. conferences (Copenhagen in 2009, Cancun in 2010, Durban in 2011, and Doha this year) frantically trying to reach agreement among nearly 200 countries on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. In essence, these conferences have succeeded only in wresting vague pledges from developed countries to reduce emissions, contribute funds to help developing countries adapt to climate change, and meet again to try to negotiate a binding treaty by 2015.
An Unworkable Premise
The problem is that the basic approach is unworkable. The Kyoto Protocol essentially placed the entire economic burden of addressing climate change on a few dozen countries while asking nothing from more than 150 countries. Perhaps this makes sense if the industrialized countries alone could address the issue by reducing emissions, but that is impossible.
The primary source of greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly the developing world. For a number of reasons—including sluggish economies and a shift toward energy sources (such as natural gas, nuclear, or renewable energy) that emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions—most industrialized countries have seen their emissions stabilize or fall. In fact, U.S. emissions are at their lowest level since 1996, according to the U.N.[2] China surpassed the U.S. as the largest source in 2006, and its emissions were 45 percent higher than America’s in 2009 (the most recent year available). Other developing countries are also rapidly increasing their emissions as their economies develop.
Developing countries, primarily India and China, have made it quite clear that they have no appetite to slow economic growth or stop using fossil fuels to curb emissions. In fact, according to a recent report from the World Resources Institute, there are proposals to build nearly 1,200 coal-fired power plants worldwide totaling over 1.4 million megawatts. China and India alone account for 76 percent of the proposed build.[3]
For this reason, Canada, Japan, and Russia refused to sign onto a new agreement committing them to emissions reductions unless major developing country emitters were also included. Understandably, they see little benefit in undermining their economic growth and their citizens’ prosperity for the sake of a symbolic gesture that, in the end, would not significantly alter the trajectory of emissions growth.
All of this leaves aside, of course, outstanding uncertainty about the accuracy of UNFCCC claims on climate change, the magnitude and pace at which the climate is changing, its causes, and whether the costs of emissions reductions might be better used in other ways. Specifically, the famous “hockey stick” used by the UNFCCC for years to illustrate global warming has been proven to be fabricated,[4] the models used to predict future temperatures have been unable to replicate past temperatures, and global temperatures have stabilized over the past 15 years.[5] Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and other experts suggest that the costs of emissions mitigation are prohibitive and that countries should focus on other, more urgent development problems.[6]
U.S. Should Be a Leader
Proponents of the U.S. taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions often argue that if the U.S. acts, the rest of the world will follow suit. As the developing world has made it clear, this is not the case. Instead, the U.S. is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars attending and financing these conferences and, ironically, encouraging unnecessary emissions from those sent to represent their countries, industries, or interests at these unproductive meetings. Instead, the U.S. should demonstrate real leadership by:
- Undertaking independent efforts to more accurately determine the severity of climate change and verify U.N. claims.
- Working with a smaller group of nations through informal arrangements such as the Major Economies Forum to undertake appropriate steps that are both cost effective and effective in reducing warming.
- Refraining from attending future U.N. climate change conferences and calling for a moratorium on conferences that emphasize financial transfers and reinforce the flawed, ineffective Kyoto methodology of differentiated responsibilities.
- Resisting and ceasing attempts to address climate change unilaterally. This includes removing onerous and unnecessary regulations on fossil fuels that are driving up the cost of energy, stopping wasteful and ineffective attempts to subsidize carbon-free energy sources, and preventing an implementation of a carbon tax. Attempting to address greenhouse gases unilaterally comes at great cost to the taxpayer and energy consumer for no meaningful environmental impact.
Efforts to address climate change do not need to be hammered out at a U.N. conference. Indeed, by working with a smaller group of key players, the U.S. is far more likely to negotiate a more effective and less costly strategy to address climate change without the tangents that bog down U.N. negotiations.
Instead of letting the U.N. funnel negotiations toward an unrealistic, grossly expensive agreement, the U.S. and other key nations should work outside the U.N. to hash out a realistic, effective strategy by which they are prepared to abide.
—Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and Nicolas D. Loris is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Yannick Glemarec, the master mind behind the UNDP Carbon Certificates and the mechanism to maximise income for the organization
UNDP keeps secret the number of Carbon Certificates it holds or it has endorsed thru its projects around the world
Click here to view this video here @ UBRAINTV: http://www.ubraintv.com/watch.php?id=547
Interviews
Yannick Glemarec, Director of Climate Finance, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), UNDP-GEF Executive Coordinator
Yannick Glemarec
Director of Climate Finance, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
UNDP-GEF Executive Coordinator
www.undp.org
Yannick Glemarec, Director of Climate Finance, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), UNDP-GEF Executive Coordinator
Yannick Glemarec
Director of Climate Finance, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
UNDP-GEF Executive Coordinator
www.undp.org
Click here to view this video here: http://www.ubraintv.com/watch.php?id=547
Helping Africa by talking about it with rich Japanese donors ! No one knows the truth behind Administrative overhead that Helen Clark charges to cover her lavish style living at Trump towers in New York.
Helen Clark: Keynote Address at the JICA Symposium on The Tokyo International Conference for African Development
30 November 2012Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator
Keynote Address at the JICA Symposium on
The Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD)
United Nations University HQ, Tokyo, Japan
30 November 2012, 5pm (local time)
I am very pleased to be able to attend this symposium hosted by JICA, because of the strong partnership between UNDP and Japan, and our shared commitment to development in Africa. This co-operation takes place under the framework of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), and today we reflect on its two decades of support for Africa.
A fantastic interview of two main brains behind UNDP's REDD initiative. You need a consultant to explain the work that the full-time Analyst supposedly does.
These are the brains behind the upcoming Global TAX on Carbon
Click here to view this video here @ UBRAINTV: http://www.ubraintv.com/watch.php?id=548
Interviews
Nina Kantcheva & Silje Haugland, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
Nina Kantcheva, Consultant, Stakeholder Engagement
Silje Haugland, Programme Analyst, UN-REDD, Environment & Energy Group
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
www.un-redd.org
Nina Kantcheva & Silje Haugland, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
Nina Kantcheva, Consultant, Stakeholder Engagement
Silje Haugland, Programme Analyst, UN-REDD, Environment & Energy Group
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
www.un-redd.org
Click here to view this video here @ UBRAINTV: http://www.ubraintv.com/watch.php?id=548
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Pro-poor means this at United Nations
Click here to read the Decision of Executive Board of World Food Programme on housing subsidy for WFP Executive Director. Read on the last page how they refer to housing subsidy the FAO Director general receives.
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