Publications @en

Secret negotiations On June 29, 2019, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, welcomed the previous day’s signing of a “historic” agreement between the EU and the four Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay). While the full text of the agreement has not been finalised, a single document is currently available for the […]

Climate change poses two challenges to our societies: we should try and mitigate the climate breakdown by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, while preparing for the inevitable impacts our past emissions will have on climate, our ecosystems, and our societies. While the world cannot claim to have solved either challenge to date, mitigation tends to […]

Africa chooses trade with Africa Ever since Adam Smith and David Ricardo (18th and 19th century economists), it has become the norm to classify countries on an axis ranging from protectionism to free trade, according to their commercial openness. The trade doctrine of the African countries, gathered within the African Union (AU), seems to somewhat […]

Key messages What could be the post-2020 ambition? A strong focus on sustainable use of biodiversity everywhere and on addressing the drivers of biodiversity loss, accompanied with reinforced area-based measures, strong accountability mechanisms, and concrete commitments of all non-state actors concerned by actual transformative changes.   Strengthening cooperation among the biodiversity-related conventions, between the Rio […]

Financing more, and better The most important gaps concern developing countries. What assistance is provided to help them achieve their own Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? To date, no one knows: there are no international statistical standards to measure and monitor these resources. To fill this gap, several initiatives are emerging, such as the Total Official […]

Each component of this series is essential for the others. And it is this coherency that will maintain the political message of these negotiations: each country must design its own development model transformation pathway to simultaneously achieve all of the objectives (climate, biodiversity, inequality reduction…) but given the scale of the challenges in all of […]

Key Findings The United Nations (UN) High Level Political Forum (HLPF) in 24-25 September 2019 is a one-and-a-halfday event that for the first time since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) takes place under the auspices of the UN General Assembly (GA). This special event, called the SDG Summit, will be a litmus […]

Key Messages We are not on track to meet the Paris Agreement mitigation goals: the challenge is to better understand the nature of this gap and to feed political discussions at all relevant levels and across these different levels on how to address it. Studies on general abatement potentials or theoretical economic assessments have played […]

Citation Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Daniel C. Dunn, Matthew Gianni, Kristina Gjerde, Glen Wright & Patrick N. Halpin  Abstract States at the United Nations have begun negotiating a new treaty to strengthen the legal regime for marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Failure to ensure the full scope of fish biodiversity is covered could result […]