miercuri, 8 februarie 2012

Top 10 global green NGOs



feature_photo_top_10_ngos

Top 10 global green NGOs


Civil society has long been at the forefront of the fight to protect and preserve the environment. We run down the top ten global NGOs pushing the green agenda today.

Carbon Disclosure Project
Combining a pro-business approach with its green mission, this relatively new NGO (it was founded in 2000) hinges its work on a simple premise: asking big companies how much carbon they emit and what they’re doing about it. And the CDP has come a long way in its short life span: of the biggest 500 companies in the world, over four fifths respond.
www.cdproject.net

Ceres
Formerly the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, this award-winning US-based non-profit has drawn up its own “Ten Commandments” for the corporate world, focusing on respect for the environment, energy and waste reduction. The overarching aim is to get the capital markets to sign up to sustainability.
www.ceres.org

Conservation International
Climate, food and freshwater security, health, cultural services and species contribution are the six themes of CI’s initiatives. It has involvement with projects in 45 mostly developing countries and works with local NGOs and indigenous people to put them into practice.
www.conservation.org

Environmental Defense Fund
Adopting market-based solutions to environmental problems where possible, in its 45 years of operations this advocacy group has campaigned again whale hunting, helped shape the treaty to phase out CFCs and persuaded McDonald’s to ditch its foam-plastic burger packaging, in what the EDF describes as the first corporate-NGO partnership of its kind.
www.edf.org

Friends of the Earth
One of the grandes dames of the green NGO scene, FOEI has bases in 76 countries to further its aims, which combine green principles with social, political and human rights tenets. With its reach having steadily shifted towards the developing world, the group’s current focuses are economic justice and resisting neo-liberalism, forests and biodiversity, food sovereignty, and climate justice and energy.
www.foei.org

Green Cross International
The baby of former Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev, GCI’s stated aim is “to help ensure a just, sustainable and secure future for all by fostering a value shift and cultivating a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility in humanity’s relationship with nature”. Now established in over 30 countries, its reach extends from lobbying governments to training individuals.
www.greencrossinternational.net

Greenpeace
With a mission to “ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity”, Greenpeace initiatives embrace a gamut of issues from global warming and deforestation via overfishing and commercial whaling to opposing nuclear power. Funded entirely by its supporters and grants, the NGO uses lobbying and research, but also direct action, to advance its ends.
www.greenpeace.org

Nature Conservancy
Fresh water, biodiversity, forestry and land management are where the Nature Conservancy’s, one of the biggest and longest-running NGOs in its field, expertise lies. Protecting flora, fauna and local communities by safeguarding the water and land on which they rely, the organization has seen more than 17 million acres in the US and 117 million worldwide come under its care.
www.nature.org

Natural Resources Defense Council
With offices in the US and Beijing, the NRDC draws on a staff made up of lawyers, scientists and policy experts plus 1.3 million members and activists around the world to combat urban sprawl, pollution, habitat destruction and global warming and promote the use of renewable energy. Its tactics have included lawsuits against big polluters and it won plaudits for its work following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
www.nrdc.org

World Wide Fund for Nature
Previously the World Wildlife Fund, by which name it is still known in the US and Canada, the WWF is the largest independent conservation organization in the world, backed by over 5 million supporters around the world and with about 1,300 projects in more than 100 countries. Biodiversity, forests, freshwater ecosystems, oceans and coasts, endangered species, pollution and climate change are all part of its goal, “to halt and reverse the destruction of our environment”.

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