South-South Cooperation Stands Out in the Climate Change Challenge – An Exclusive Interview with UNEP Deputy Executive Director Ibrahim Thiaw

By staff reporter LIU YI

SOUTH-South cooperation (SSC) has been widely recognized in the past few years as a new dimension of international cooperation on climate change. The cooperative framework, initiated by developing countries in 1950s, has long been engaged in facilitating mutual support and collaboration in the political, economic, social and technical domains. However, serious environmental deterioration has aroused growing concern among the countries in the South most affected by climate change. In December 2014, the First SSC on Climate Change Forum took place in Lima, Peru, on the margins of the COP20, so signifying the strong volition of developing countries to combat this challenge to humankind.

Ibrahim Thiaw, UNEP Deputy Executive Director and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations, is a long-time advocate of the SSC's critical role in tackling climate change. He is also a veteran coordinator among governments and inter-government agencies in this regard. Thiaw attended last mid-November the Beijing Consultative Meeting on South-South Cooperation on Climate Change. More than 150 delegates from developing countries, international organizations, and financial institutes gathered at the event to exchange views on promoting SSC in the fields of energy, climate resilience, smart cities, and big data.

"The world economy, population and power have shifted southward," Thiaw told China Today in an exclusive interview. Nowadays, South-South cooperation goes far beyond the political emblem of a united Third World to real business and trade partnership. "Trade under the SSC framework accounts for almost half of the total among countries of the South," the UNEP deputy chief said, adding that the SSC is no longer supplementary to the traditional North-South cooperation. "Nowadays we are talking as much about South-South cooperation as North-South cooperation."