Credit: UNOSSC

By Jorge Chediek
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 2019 (IPS)

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time, and developing countries are recognized as hotspots for climatic risks. Through solidarity, peer-to-peer learning and collective self-reliance, developing countries are collaborating among themselves to address the threat.

Good practices in South-South cooperation are viable pathways to accelerate progress on the SDGs. Developing countries can benefit significantly from Southern solutions that can address both climate change as well as multiple other crosscutting development challenges through South-South collaboration.

At stake, if we don’t act together, are recent gains in the fights against poverty, hunger and disease, and the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the global South.

Despite international commitment to climate action, there is much work to do. Achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and related frameworks such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change will require engagement from all stakeholders, at all levels and in all countries, leveraging their diverse and unique advantages.

“We need more concrete plans, more ambition from more countries and more businesses,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said during the 2019 Climate Action Summit in September. “We need all financial institutions, public and private, to choose, once and for all, the green economy.”

The Secretary-General took the opportunity of the Buenos Aires High-Level Conference on South-South Cooperation to emphasize that crosscutting South-South collaboration is central to implementing the Paris Agreement.

Southern populations, including those in the least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing States, have been those most intensely affected by a changing climate. As such, adaptation and mitigation are not new practices in the South.

Jorge Chediek – Credit: UNOSSC

The International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation – working together with China and the Netherlands – is fostering the industrial use of low-emission climate-resilient bamboo in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. India has been leading the world in its pursuit of enhanced solar energy capacity through the International Solar Alliance.

BioInnovate Africa is developing a gel fuel from local organic fruit waste as an affordable and low-carbon emission alternative to firewood and charcoal. In Latin America, cities are working closely together – Santiago´s resilience office is working with its Mexico City counterpart to prepare risk maps for their respective communities.

Scaling up of South-South and triangular cooperation, as a complement to North-South cooperation, is vital for impactful climate action.

Increasingly the countries of the South are looking to the United Nations system for support to expand and capitalize upon the potential of their successes. Over 20 UN entities, including UNOSSC, are collaborating with China to ensure the sustainability, the ‘greening’, of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The India-UN Development Partnership Fund, among 40+ projects, is supporting 7 Pacific island countries to develop climate early warning systems, together with relevant UN counterparts.

UNOSSC is leading and coordinating the implementation of the South-South Cooperation Action Plan of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Change Engagement Strategy.

In this context, UNOSSC has created the South-South Galaxy global knowledge sharing and partnership-brokering platform, enabling sharing of home grown, contextually appropriate solutions in the spirit of mutual respect and understanding.

I look forward to co-hosting the annual High-Level Forum on South-South Cooperation on Climate Change during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid on 11 December and call on all development partners to join forces for advancing this important agenda together.

At the Forum we will showcase how bioeconomy and successful South-South and triangular cooperation contribute to the achievement of Nationally Determined Contribution targets in developing countries; we will discuss bamboo as substitute for plastics; and we will scale-up city-to-city partnerships to share evidence-based demand-driven good practices.

It is now time for the global community to move from ambition to action. The United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation stands ready to engage with all partners to ensure that South-South and triangular partnerships are supported towards building an equitable and sustainable future.

https://www.unsouthsouth.org/climate/

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By Jorge Chediek
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2018 (IPS)

On 12 September, the international community commemorated the UN Day for South-South Cooperation. This is an important acknowledgement of the contributions of Southern partnerships in addressing the many development challenges that confront the international community, such as poverty, climate change, inequality, contagious diseases and humanitarian crises.

Jorge Chediek

This year’s commemoration was particularly significant, as it marked the fortieth anniversary of an important milestone in international cooperation – the adoption of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Technical Cooperation Amongst Developing Countries (BAPA). BAPA institutionalized cooperation amongst developing countries, creating a strategic framework for furthering cooperation in technical and economic areas.

But cooperation amongst developing countries did not begin forty years ago – it traces its origins to the anti-colonial solidarity movement of the twentieth century. The practice gained further popularity in the 1950’s and 1970’s as newly independent States with limited capacities looked for independent ways to accelerate their development, away from the Cold War dichotomy of the day.

Forty years after the adoption of BAPA, the international system is undergoing a major systemic transformation, with new pillars of growth and influence emerging from the global South. Through collective voice and action, developing countries are actively contributing to the building of a more prosperous and peaceful world.

Developing countries today account for the largest share of global economic output and are playing an active, constructive role in traditional institutions of global governance as well as creating new institutions that are Southern-led.

In a noteworthy trend, development solutions increasingly originate from developing countries themselves. Harnessing the abundance of innovative solutions, brought about by its economic growth and advances in technical competencies, the global South now charts its own unique development path.

Developing countries are now drivers of innovation in ICT, renewable technologies, infrastructure development and social welfare. Pooled medical procurement is lowering costs and increasing access to life saving medicines. Southern-led mediation mechanisms for conflict prevention continue to prove especially effective in reducing violent conflicts.

Technical cooperation in agriculture is greatly improving the yields in agricultural output. Transfer of technologies and vast interregional infrastructure investments are facilitating access to international markets for medium and small-scale enterprises.

Southern-based centres of excellence and knowledge hubs have become key vehicles for promoting mutual learning, leading to reduction of poverty and the growth of an emerging middle class.

With this newly formed confidence, the global South progressively looks within itself for ideas, knowledge and skills for tackling many of its common challenges. This enhances its national and collective self-reliance, a major objective of BAPA.

As the capacities of developing countries have improved, there has been a corresponding expansion of the scope of South-South cooperation beyond technical cooperation to other areas. South-South cooperation today includes, amongst other instruments, technological transfers, knowledge exchanges, financial assistance, technical assistance as well as concessional loans.

As a consequence, interregional forums and summits for dialogue amongst developing countries have become an important platform for enhancing South-South policy coordination, launching joint initiatives, and committing resources for infrastructure development, trade and investments – vital for ensuring sustainable development.

Triangular cooperation – Southern-driven partnerships between two or more developing countries, supported by developed countries or multilateral organizations – is increasingly playing a role to ensure equity in partnership and scaling up of success.

In light of this, the United Nations General Assembly has decided to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the adoption of BAPA by convening a High-level conference (BAPA+40) to be held from 19-21 March 2019 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. BAPA+40 provides a great opportunity for the international community to further strengthen and invigorate cooperation amongst developing countries.

Although great strides have been made by developing countries in improving the living conditions of millions of its people, complex development challenges still persist. Global economic transformations and its corresponding consequences on production patterns present a particular challenge to developing countries.

Automation poses a great risk to job creation in the South; climate change has particularly adverse effects on Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries; traditional partnership models are re-evaluated and inequality continues to rise. The global South will play an important role in overcoming these challenges.

The United Nations system continues to support the collaborative initiatives of developing countries by advocating, catalysing, brokering and facilitating such collaborations across many spheres.

Drawing on its vast presence across the global South, the United Nations is well placed to identify development capacities and gaps existing in developing countries while collecting, analysing and disseminating best practices and lessons learned towards the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and other internationally agreed development goals.

As the international community enters the third year of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, concrete development solutions and resources from the global South are critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Effective development solutions that have worked in a few countries of the global South can be scaled up through South-South cooperation and triangular cooperation to accelerate sustainable development, particularly in countries that are lagging behind.

More and better South-South cooperation is essential to building a better world that leaves no one behind.

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