Felix Dodds is an Adjunct Professor and a Senior Affiliate at the Water Institute at the Environmental Science and Engineering within the Gilling School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. He is also Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute. He was the co-director of the 2014 and 2018 Nexus Conferences on Water, Food, Energy and Climate at UNC. In 2019 he was a candidate to be the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He has written or edited 20 books on sustainable development. His latest book “Stakeholder Democracy: Representative Democracy in a Time of Fear” published in July 2019 by Routledge. In 2016 he co-edited “The Water, Food, Energy and Climate Nexus” with Dr. Jamie Bartram, Director of the Water Institute and a Foreword by HRH Prince Charles. Also, in 2016 he was 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.” He has written or edited twenty books including: “Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals: A transformational agenda for an insecure world” (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. For the Sustainable Development Goals process he advised the Ford Foundation, the Communitas Coalition, Article 19, 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 (1996) 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 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change he set up the Water and Climate Coalition which succeeded within three years to securing water into the climate text. In 2011 he chaired the United Nations DPI 64th NGO conference - 'Sustainable Societies Responsive Citizens'. The outcome document was the first one 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 is also an International Ambassador for the City of Bonn.