Felix Dodds is a futurist and a consultant who offers consultancy and advisory specializing in stakeholder engagement, advocacy, and risk management for governments,and international agencies, NGOs and other stakeholders worldwide. He brings over 40 years of firsthand expert experience to lobby and also to deliver the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Agreement, and other multilateral environmental agreements.
He has been a leading thinker in the area of global governance for thirty years. Now an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) where he is the Principal Investigator for the Belmont Forum funded project Governance of Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Sustainable Development. At UNC he co-directed the 2014 and 2018 Nexus Conferences on Water-Food-Energy and Climate.
Felix was the UK government candidate to be the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (2019). He is also an International Ambassador for the City of Bonn.
He is secretary to the Member State Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development group in New York.
He chaired the first UN Conference to come outwith a set of indicative Sustainable Development Goals in September 2011. The conference Sustainable Societies Responsible Citizens occurred two months after Colombia first proposed the idea of the Sustainable Development Goals.
From 1992 to 2012 he was the Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future.
He set up and managed (with SIWI) the Water and Climate Coalition (2008-2012) at the UN Climate Conferences which secured in three years water for the first time into UN climate text.
Felix has written and edited over 20 books his next book Heroes in Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage out in July 2022. His last book was looked at 2030 and the impact of new technology in helping to deliver the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement - Tomorrows People and New Technology (2021).
His books include a trilogy that tells the history of Sustainable Development – Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals (2017), From Rio+20 to the New Development Agenda (2014) and Only One Earth (2012). He has another trilogy on Environmental Security these books were Human and Environmental Security (2005), Climate and Energy Insecurity (2009) and Biodiversity and Ecosystem Insecurity (2011).
Felix served on the President of the General Assembly’s Informal Expert Group on Sustainable Finance (2016). In 2018 he was asked by the Secretary General to be on the UN Global Compact Internal Review Team.
While at Stakeholder Forum, Felix set up a number of global stakeholder coalitions at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, Habitat II and the UNECE Health and Environment Conference. He also established the first global network for regional government (2002) and the first conference on sustainable tourism (2002). For the Sustainable Development Goals, he established with a colleague the global multi-stakeholder network for SDG 12 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).
Felix pioneered stakeholder engagement in the UN and proposed and helped manage the multi-stakeholder dialogues at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, also managing them and being part of the advisory boards for the Bonn Water (2001), Bonn Energy (2004) and Bonn Nexus(2011) Conferences. He was also on the Advisory Boards for the science conference input to Rio+20 Planet Under Pressure (2012). He also chaired the launch of Future Earth at Rio+20.
Felix was a member of Christiana Figueres' campaign team for UN Secretary General (2016), writing the background briefing documents for her campaign.