Bellagio Center Opens Applications for 2024 Convenings

The UNEP International Methane Emissions Observatory convened its partners to take stock of progress and build strategies towards reducing methane emissions globally which could avoid almost .3°C of warming by 2050. This convening marked an important inflection point in the initiative and led to new support for the launch of the satellite-based MARS system to improve global monitoring of methane emissions.

Continuing The Rockefeller Foundation’s leadership on food, stakeholders of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative convened, resulting in a global kickoff with the WHO for a new approach to analyze the nutritional composition of the world’s food biodiversity. This new approach will be used to show how our food changes based on processing, agricultural methods, and other factors that affect human and planetary health. Notably, this convening occurred almost 40 years after the first food composition analysis meeting at Bellagio in 1983 which helped create INFOODS, now administered by the FAO.

Project Dandelion was incubated at Bellagio for a women-led climate justice campaign spearheaded by Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, and the cohort from Connected Women Leaders directed at a carbon-neutral future with moonshot thinking over the next seven years. Through a unified marketing campaign, Project Dandelion has been visioned to support all social justice organizations to apply public pressure on leaders, governments, investors, corporations, and empowered citizens to accelerate progress over the next seven years. This climate justice effort will unite women to lead the way to a clean energy world and to build a more equitable carbon-neutral future for all.

The Bellagio Center also seeded the Global South Impact Community which promoted a global south consensus statement at the G20, T20 and COP27, for an equitable post-Covid recovery. The group made calls to action on items such as the creation of a global framework for “development towards prosperity with decarbonization” – which countries can adapt at the national level and execute through South-South collaboration platforms and structured alliances.

Author, activist, and entrepreneur Claudia Chwalisz led a convening with Ieva Cesnulaityte and was joined by leaders – Mark Cridge, Vera Sacchetti, and Juha Leppanen – to launch DemocracyNext, a new organization working to create new democratic institutions that foster citizen participation, distribute power equally through selection by lottery, and leverage collective wisdom to find common ground through deliberation.

The Bellagio Center also hosted a new digital governance network organized by David Eaves, Emily Middleton and CV Madhukar and engaged leaders such as Audrey Tang, Digital Minister in Taiwan, and Anir Chowdhury, leader of a2i, the Government of Bangladesh’s digital innovation unit, to cross share approaches, standards, and expertise on building Digital Public Infrastructure. The convening led to a collaboration between the governments of Estonia and Ukraine, with ​​Ukraine supporting Estonia in the digital delivery of government Services.