In the post-2015 landscape universal food security and zero hunger can be achieved. To do this we must both better govern the balance between plant-based and animal-based foods and distribute food more equitably between and within countries. In addition, the drive for more efficient food
production must include recognition that animals are more than a simple commodity, and that high welfare standards in farming enhance overall productivity without the negative side effects delivered by low-welfare intensive livestock production systems.

To achieve this, the United Nations and its Member States must:
• include farm animal welfare in agriculture and food security assessments and policies
• recognise that the industrialisation of livestock farming is a major challenge to food security
• reduce the quantity of arable crops fed to livestock, especially cereals, and seek a sustainable balance between animal andcrop production
• promote sustainable diets and address food losses and wastein the supply chain
• protect food security in times of crisis by including animals in emergency response and recovery planning and policies at a national, regional and operational level
• consider how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), their targets and indicators can support specific and regionally-sensitive measures to ensure that global food production and consumption is sustainable and incorporates respect for animal welfare principles

1111_574_Animals and Food Security OWG SDG.pdf

Describe content...

1111_752_Objectifs de DD sur les villes.docx

The Rio+20 outcome document proposes the elaboration of a set of Sustainable Development Goals that will contribute to sustainably managing the world’s increasing resource use within the context of dwindling resource availability and prioritizes the eradication of poverty and hunger as a matter of urgency. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) believes that the introduction of animal welfare as an integral part of sustainable development is important, as global adherence to animal welfare principles will have significant positive impacts for poverty eradication and economic development, food security, public health, climate change and the preservation of biodiversity.

1111_574_WSPA Why animals matter in achieving The Future we Want.pdf

Whereas the Rio+20 Conference laid the foundation and charted the overall course for the desirable and needed policy action towards “The Future We Want”, the challenges ahead lie in rapidly and effectively implementing the above mentioned decisions. The Berlin High-level Dialogue on Implementing Rio+20 Decisions on Sustainable Cities and Urban Transport will coincide with the first anniversary of the Rio+20 Conference. The Berlin High-level Dialogue will also coincide with the 2013 Global Forum on Human Settlements and Awards Ceremony (GFHS).

The main objectives of the dialogue are to (a) highlight proven sustainable urban planning and transport policies and measures, (b) identify good and best practices in this regard, and (c) facilitate capacity building through national and international exchanges of information and experiences among relevant practitioners, experts and policy makers, in particular from developing countries. Whereas the High-level Dialogue is not a formal inter-governmental meeting, it provides a forum for national, regional and global information exchange and consultations among stakeholders, experts and decision makers.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently announced a Five Year Action Plan for his second term in office (2012-2016). Transport was identified as one of the six main building blocks for achieving sustainable development. The Secretary-General announced his intention to “convene aviation, marine, ferry, rail, road and urban public transport providers, along with Governments and investors, to develop and take action on recommendations for more sustainable transport systems that can address rising congestion and pollution worldwide, particularly in urban areas.” The Berlin High-level Dialogue on Implementing Rio+20 Decisions on Sustainable Cities and Urban Transport will provide an important contribution to this process.

Date: June 19-21, 2013
Venue: Gasometer EUREF-Campus, Berlin, Germany

The Missions of Thailand, Kenya and the Netherlands, in cooperation with UN-DESA, are organizing the third meeting in a series of lunchtime panel discussions on Sustainable Transport. The topic for the next meeting will be “Road Safety, an integral part of sustainable transport”.

Panel composition:
-Ms.Claudia Adriazola-Steil, Director, Health & Road Safety Program of EMBARQ- The World Resources Institute’s (WRI)Center for Sustainable Transport
-Mr.Dmitry Maksimychev, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN
-Mr.Esteban Diez Roux, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Transport Division Infrastructure and Environment Sector
-Mr. Werner Obermeyer, Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO), in its capacity as lead in the UN Decade for Action on Road Safety

Organized By:
-Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to United Nations
-Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of Thailand to United Nations
-Permanent Mission of the Republic of Kenya to United Nations

Date: April 12, 2013, 1:00pm-2:30pm
Venue:UN Headquarters North Lawn Building New York, United States of America

Events | www.slocat.net

A brief report. The 10 presentations are linked from the blog post. Most are highly informative. Others raise grave concerns.

The apparent dominant view from the sustainability sciences from #1 still seems to be that "decoupling" is a realistic objective, if we just "innovate". If asking the hard questions suggested by #9 we'd acknowledge "decoupling" is an idea to have ever growing wealth and ever shrinking resource needs as our future plan. One of many unasked questions is whether ever larger and faster changes in how we live would become unmanageable anyway... whether we had the resources or not. http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2013/03/23/sci-for-un-sd-goals/

Review of Science for UN’s SDG’s « Reading Nature's Signals

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature fully supports the positions taken by the Earth Law Center for inclusion in the Major Groups’ input on the development of the SDGs:
 Support for Earth-based SDGs, specifically through inclusion of commitments to recognize in
law the rights of ecosystems and species to exist, thrive and evolve.
 Endorsement, and promotion for adoption and implementation, of the Universal Declaration of
the Rights of Mother Earth, and active support for its implementation globally.
 Re-characterization of “sustainable development” as “sustainable communities,” a term that
includes both human communities and the wider communities of the natural world. Adoption of
SDGs with a focus on sustainable communities is necessary to ensure that all elements of
well-being are considered.

The current, neoliberal economics-based development approach
distorts communities to serve the economy. Elements of sustainable human communities
include not just the economy, but also culture, societal/familial relations, healthy food, clean drinking water, sanitation, housing, necessary medical care, democratic governance, education, meaningful and appropriately rewarded labor, spirituality, civic duty, volunteerism, etc. Sustainable environmental communities similarly require healthy nutrients, clean water, biodiversity, restoration in the face of destruction, and thriving, connected habitats. The economy must be viewed as serving human and environmental communities, not the reverse.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature is a worldwide network of individuals and organizations who support the recognition and implementation of Rights of Nature. http://therightsofnature.org

Robin Milam
Administrative Director
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature

1111_715_SDG Inputs ELC.pdf

I think the great problem with the SDG's is that they are development goals, not sustainability goals.

We should reverse the priority, to have top priority go to measurable progress toward hard targets for achieving sustainability. It's quite possible scientifically, but we’d need to use “The Commons Approach” organizationally (1). The tragedy now occurring, with the effort having the wrong order of priorities is that the implicit "sustainability goal" naturally becomes to make an effort to slow the rate of growing unsustainabiliy of the economy.

That is being achieved but fails as a way for the economies to become sustainable. It may well be thought of as an important step, but if we face the truth, it’s a total failure as a plan. You see that unfortunate trade-off in most agreements and metrics, a plan to slow the rate of growing impacts…. but it's a disaster for the earth and for the future of our complex societies.

1) The UN is Urged to Adopt “The Commons Approach” at All Levels Of Government and Throughout Society, to Achieve Real Sustainable Development and MDG goals
nhttp://www.worldwewant2015.org/node/274168#comment-41782

CALL FOR DISCUSSION NOTES (Now closed): TOPICS FOR POST-2015 THEMATIC CONSULTATION ON ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY | World We Want 2015

Two large practical problems with the UN's SD Goals.
1) The SDG's focus on development with seemingly little or no focused attention to rebound effects.
2) Projects that are intended to be sustainable are also widely using ill-defined standard measures that give misleadingly low indications of both present and future impacts.

1- lack of attention to rebound effects
The UN's SDG targets have the effects all development plans have, which is to increase human pressures on natural resources. The big "rebound effect" is the usual one, that "wealth breeds demand" because people using economic success to further invest in greater economic success. It should be but doesn’t seem to be factored into any of the plans, as if "unseen impacts don't count". We know they DO count, though, and are a quite genuine threats to success.

The development stimulus in less developed countries is one of the causes of the food crisis, for example. It both adds to the globally growing demand for resources, pushing up food prices. It also connects productive small farmers with foreign markets so they no longer sell their products in their own regions. There are lots of "back fire" effects like that. They are occurring because the SDG's are framed as development plans first, rather than as sustainability plans first.

The right step for the UN is to adopt The Commons Approach. That focuses everyone's attention on their mutual and common interests, so development avoids adding to the intensity of economic competition over resources that only speculators benefit from. In the present business climate focusing primarily on development interests is leading to plans that tragically backfire.

2 – need for a large change in our measurement methods
People need better measures of the real total effects of their choices. Better measures doesn't guarantee success but protect against failure, steering you to solutions that are much more likely to work and to last.

An unusual flaw was recently found, exposing a major source of misinformation in the design of the most familiar measures of economic impacts, the LCA and Scope 3 GHG measurement methods. Those and many other common methods use "economic accounting" not "environmental systems accounting". The two approaches are *radically different* as ways of counting the same “end product” or “whole business” externalities. The familiar methods count only the “consumption for production” of technology, and ignore the “consumption for production” for the human services needed to operate the technology(!). It's just left out.

It’s a BIG omission and a major inaccuracy for the physical measure of attributable impacts on the environment. The present LCA and Scope 3 GHG metrics are commonly leaving out 80-90% of the real environmental impacts for delivering business products and GDP! Two levels of peer-reviewed analysis of the problem are available, simple & complex, plus some collected “Slides & notes”.
- simple “Shining a light on dark energy”
nhttp://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/new-metrics/measuring-total-impacts-business
- complex “System Energy Assessment (SEA)"
nhttp://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1908/
- collected “Slides & notes”
nhttp://www.synapse9.com/SEA/

It will take a significant effort to understand this new information on how to accurately measure and attribute the impacts of business operations and products, and then integrate it into the various CSR and Sustainability Dashboard models. Given the scale of the error it would help correct it would also seem sure to have significant value, for redirecting our efforts toward more feasible solutions.

Shining Light on “Dark Energy”: Measuring the Total Impacts of Business | Sustainable Brands
The common practice of counting impacts as “zero” for lack of information, creating a very large blind spot in our perception of the world, can be hard to avoid. It can be hard to even think about what one is leaving uncounted. We found a way to define “uncounted” in relation to global totals that needed to be accounted for.

Sustainable livestock production, of which animal welfare is an integral part, is an example of a comprehensive approach to development and an effective way of achieving the desired objectives of food security, social stability and environmental sustainability as well as promoting job creation and equitable economic growth. Over one billion of the poorest people on the planet depend on their animals as their main source of livelihood and food security. In other words, their animals are their main productive asset and this should be considered by the Open Working Group on the elaboration of the SDGs.