Basic countries NGOs are bringing a new perspective to cooperation on Climate Change

10 December 2010

With the progress made in last two meetings in Bonn and Tianjin, NGOs in BASIC countries move forward beyond experience sharing and begin to discuss how do we see each other and how to build collaboration in coming future.

The first step is to identify what are the common challenges and differences we are facing now. And we do find many things in common. All these countries are emerging economies with remarkable divisions between the rich and the poor and rapid urban expansion, which has a huge and growing need for energy, often fossil-fuel based. Climate change is a common environment issue in these countries, while pollution, deforestation as well as other local environment challenges should also be deal with. Economic growth looks more important to governments than climate protection, none of these countries have a strong climate movement to face this problems and everyday more communication is needed on Climate Change with public. Beside these commonalities, these countries still have lots of differences, especially in politic system, economic structure as well as the relationship between government and civil society.

We believe that both commonalities and differences can be beneficial for future cooperation. About the future, we all agree that information sharing for good practices such as local actions addressing mitigation and adaptation actions is very important.

We really hope that with a regular communication mechanism, the cooperation among basic countries could bring a very different perspective from former international NGO cooperation and will enhance the global civil movement in addressing climate change