Green Activists Close To Despair After UN Climate Confab

Click here for this in full @: http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/home/10808-green-activists-close-to-despair-after-un-climate-confab

Doha Climate Summit Ends In Disgrace 


At the end of another lavishly-funded U.N. conference that yielded no progress on curbing greenhouse emissions, many of those most concerned about climate change are close to despair. --Barbara Lewis and Alister Doyle, Reuters, 9 December 2012

The United Nations climate talks in Doha went a full extra 24 hours and ended without increased cuts in fossil fuel emissions and without financial commitments between 2013 and 2015. However, this is a "historic" agreement, insisted Qatar's Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, the COP18 president. --Inter Press Service, 10 December 2012

Climate negotiators at the most recent conference on global warming were unable to reduce expectations fast enough to match the collapse of their agenda. The only real winners here were the bureaucrats in the diplomacy industry for whom endless rounds of carbon spewing conferences with no agreement year after year mean jobs, jobs, jobs. The inexorable decline of the climate movement from its Pickett’s Charge at the Copenhagen summit continues. The global green lobby is more flummoxed than ever. These people and these methods couldn’t make a ham sandwich, much less save Planet Earth. –Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 9 December 2012

UN chief errs again on climate change

Click here for this in full @: http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/12/14/un-chief-errs-again-on-climate-change

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon often makes serious climate science mistakes. However, his December 5th statements at the UN Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar set a new low even for the UN chief.

“The climate change phenomenon has been caused by the industrialization of the developed world,” said Ban. “It’s only fair and reasonable that the developed world should bear most of the responsibility.” “Climate change is happening much, much faster than one would understand,” he added. “The science has plainly made it clear: it is the human beings’ behaviour which caused climate change, therefore the solution must come from us.” Ban is wrong on all counts.

The United Kingdom’s Met Office announced recently that there has been no overall warming, or cooling, of the planet for 16 years. As the November 29th open letter to the Secretary General from 134 experts “qualified in climate-related matters” explained, “Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.”

Stanford talk by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

By Sarah L. Bhatia

Click here for this in full @:  http://aparc.stanford.edu/news/un/

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will present a free public talk at Stanford on Thursday, Jan. 17.



Ban, who is the eighth secretary-general of the UN, will speak about the UN's role in creating opportunities out of the challenges posed by today's rapidly transitioning world.
"Times of transition are times of profound opportunity," he recently said during his acceptance speech for the Seoul Peace Prize. "The decisions we make in this period will have an impact for generations to come.”

Ban's initiatives as UN secretary-general have focused on promoting sustainable development; empowering women; supporting countries in crisis or instability; generating new momentum on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation; and strengthening the UN. Among his many activities as secretary-general, he has successfully raised major pledges and financing packages for aid and crisis response, established the agency UN Women, and introduced new measures to promote UN transparency and efficiency.

Ban Ki-moon is pro Lesbian and Gay Community, makes it clear in a twitter

UNDP Senegal: post 2015 Development Framework

UNDP: Statement by the United Nations Development Programme, on post-2015 development framework to take shape in Senegal

Click here for this in full @: http://www.polity.org.za/article/undp-statement-by-the-united-nations-development-programme-on-post-2015-development-framework-to-take-shape-in-senegal-11122012-2012-12-11

Representatives from government, regional and international bodies, the private sector and civil society from across Africa are gathering today in Dakar to discuss top priorities to be included in the global development framework beyond 2015, which will be debated at the UN General Assembly in September 2013.

While efforts continue across Africa to achieve the time-bound Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this two-day forum is part of unprecedented consultations to build a collective vision, to be endorsed by African Ministers and ratified by Heads of State at the African Union’s May 2013 Summit.

Ban Ki-moon needs translation...when uncle Helen speaks at Doha

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Joint Press Conference with UNDP Administrator Helen Clark and Deputy Mi...

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