Felix Dodds is a Senior Fellow at the Global Research Institute and a Senior Affiliate at the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina and an Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute. He was the co-director of the 2014 Nexus Conference on Water, Food, Energy and Climate.
Most recently he has a member of an informal expert group for the President of the UN General Assemblies Brookings Report: “Links in the Chain of Sustainable Finance: Accelerating Private Investments for the SDGs, including Climate Action.” Additionally, Felix has partnered with Comics Uniting Nations and UNICEF to co-write Santa's Green Christmas: Father Christmas Tackles the Crisis of Climate Change, which was launched at the 2016 UN Climate meeting in Morocco in November. It will be a free downloadable comic.
He has written or edited fourteen books he had two books out in 2016:
• ‘The Water, Food, Energy and Climate Nexus’ (April 2016) which he edited with Jamie Bartram with a Foreword by Prince Charles.
• ‘Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals: A transformational agenda for an insecure world’ (November 2016) written with the co-chair of the negotiations Ambassador David Donoghue and Jimena Leiva Roesch with a Foreword by former Irish President Mary Robinson.
Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals: A transformational agenda for an insecure world is the final book in a trilogy (known as the Vienna Café Trilogy) of books on sustainable development at the global level from 1972 to now. The other two books being: ‘From Rio+20 to a New Development Agenda: Building a Bridge to a Sustainable Future’ written with Jorge Laguna Celis, Liz Thompson and ‘Only One Earth The Long Road via Rio to Sustainable Development’ written with Michael Strauss and the father of sustainable development Maurice Strong.
For the Sustainable Development Goals process he has advised the Ford Foundation, the Communitas Coalition, Article the World Animal Protection and the company AVIVA. He also set up and advises the government Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development.
Felix was the Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future from 1992-2012. He played a significant role in promoting multi-stakeholder dialogues at the United Nations and proposed to the UN General Assembly the introduction of stakeholder dialogue sessions at the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. In 2011, Felix was listed as one of 25 environmentalists ahead of his time.
For Rio+20 he was on the Steering Committees for the major global scientific conference Planet Under Pressure Conference (2012), the German intergovernmental Conference on the Nexus of water-food-energy (2011) which he also organized the stakeholder engagement for as he did for the two other German intergovernmental Conferences Energy (2004) and Water (2001).
For the UNFCCC he set up the Water and Climate Coalition which succeeded within three years to get water into the climate text.
In 2011 he chaired the United Nations DPI 64th NGO conference - 'Sustainable Societies Responsive Citizens'. It was the first event to put forward some suggestions on what the Sustainable Development Goals should be. From 1997-2001 he co-chaired the UN Commission on Sustainable Development NGO Steering Committee.
He has been active at the UN since 1990 attending and actively participating in UNFCCC, UNCBD, the World Summits of Rio Earth Summit, Habitat II, Rio+5, Beijing+5, Copenhagen+5, World Summit on Sustainable Development and Rio+20. He has also been to all the UN Commissions for Sustainable Development and many UNEP Governing Councils.
He is also an International Ambassador for the City of Bonn.
