More than 30 Chinese and US nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have announced a cooperative agreement to tackle climate change.

The groups also collected a fast-start fund during the announcement on Thursday, one day before the Cancun talks are due to close, placing US dollar, 10 peso or even 20 yuan bills into a large plastic water bottle in front of the main conference building where climate change negotiations are taking place.

"We don't see a lot of progress in the negotiations, so we believe it is high time now for us to kick-start our own fast-start fund for long-term cooperation between our civil societies to act on climate change," Lu Sze Ping, the China national coordinator of the Global Campaign for Climate Action, said. The members named their agreement "long-term cooperative action", after the document that delegates from more than 190 countries are working on to give a legal framework for joint global actions in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing down global warming.

"We understand that China and the United States have evolved differently, but we share the common goal of reaching a low-carbon society," said Li Bo, executive director of Friends of Nature, one of the signatories of the deal.

"Obviously we face very different challenges, so it is very important for the civil societies of two countries to come together, to appreciate each other's challenges and to share our achievements.

"Only based on such cooperation can we encourage and urge our governments to act more timely."

Barbara Finamore, director of the China Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an NGO based in Washington DC, said: "We are here to urge our two countries - the largest GHG (greenhouse gas) emitters in the world - to work together to reach an agreement here in Cancun."

The deal may provide a model for activities that would look for win-win solutions to climate change problems, Finamore said.

"If Chinese and US NGOs work together, we can get a lot more accomplished," she said.

NGOs from the two countries will work together to understand each other better, and to "reduce our carbon footprint and enable us both to be more effective".

There will be workshops, events and joint actions to "make us more effective in combating climate change", she said.

Finamore said there would also be two-way exchanges, bringing experts from participating NGOs to each other's country to learn how they work in different contexts and taking the knowledge back with them.

(China Daily December 11, 2010)