Rebuilding solidarity ‘BRICS by BRICS’: Forging Global South unity for climate and prosperity

With the latest round of punitive, mostly arbitrary tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump on trade partners, President Lula of Brazil announced that he would be speaking to BRICS leaders about the dismantling of multilateralism by the US regime. It was a rare instance of the bloc’s leaders coming together to proactively address a common problem, but one that we should be seeing far more often.

Civil society must prioritise amplifying common struggles to foster Global South unity, enabling BRICS and other developing countries to lead in tackling climate change and today’s pressing challenges with their own agency, voice and needs at the forefront.

A history of ebbing and flowing solidarity 

Countries of the developing world, often grouped as the Global South or in multilateral fora as the Group of 77 (G77), share histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and unequal power in global governance. Despite internal differences and heterogeneity, moments of unity have precipitated crucial moments of political change.

The 1955 Bandung Conference was a foundational moment, bringing together Southern countries to oppose colonialism and affirm non-alignment. Termed as achieving “mythical status” by Filipino thinker Walden Bello, the conference united developing country leaders from a variety of political tendencies and geographies — Asian, pan-African, Arab, pro-Western, socialist, centrist, right-wing — to declare that “colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end”.

A few decades later at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, developing countries played a decisive role in achieving adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), pushing for the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to be enshrined in the Convention and placing development priorities at the heart of the environmental agenda.

The COVID-19 crisis again saw key acts of Global South power, including but not limited to India and South Africa spearheading the call for a TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization and Cuba sending medical staff to more than 40 countries. Subsequently, in 2022, at the 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) to the UNFCCC in Egypt, the G77 came together in fragile unity to win the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund, the product of a 30-year struggle led by island states. 

Around the same time, a series of Southern G20 presidencies — Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa — amplified key issues such as the debt crisis, the need to reform multilateral financial institutions and most recently, the imperative for green industrialisation and value addition. The 2025 BRICS declaration highlighted a commitment to multilateralism, greater voice for Emerging Market and Developing Economies in global governance and support for Palestinian self-determination.

Cohesion remains elusive

These moments have unfolded against a backdrop of fragmented alliances and shifting partnerships across the Global South — underscoring that the South is far from a monolith. Changing domestic leadership, evolving geopolitics and the constant recalibration of trade and economic ties with the North have kept any enduring, unified coalition just out of reach.

More often than not, these shifting affiliations are exploited by Global North actors, including the media, to further drive wedges in Southern coalitions. A classic example is the decades-long effort to split the G77 in climate negotiations by singling out large, emerging economies as ‘blockers’ inhibiting ambition at the cost of island states and Least Developed Countries (LDC), a phenomenon that Sunita Narain, director general for Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), terms as “pitting the poor against the poor”

At COP29 in Baku, a decisive summit attempting to negotiate a finance goal for rich countries to fund climate action in the developing world, a reporter from a prominent United Kingdom outlet cornered me in crucial moments, asking: “Why is India blocking a special carveout for LDCs and SIDS?” Setting aside the complexity of the talks in Baku, the playbook is wielded time and again to fracture Southern blocs.

This isn’t to say that Southern governments are faultless. Using the rapidly expanding BRICS+ bloc of 20 countries as a proxy for the wider developing world, there is much that is undesirable in building a progressive, justice-oriented climate and development agenda. Typical analyses highlight BRICS’ lack of coordination and mutual mistrust. A lack of transparency and civil society access to BRICS deliberations is often noted; as is the reality that many are not liberal democracies and are ruled by corrupt, autocratic regimes.

Climate analysts frequently lament BRICS’ fossil dependence, pursuing fossil-heavy growth paths in both production and consumption. Many critiques are legitimate, while others are pearl-clutching narratives that ignore the complexities of Global South development trajectories. Moreover, they are hardly unique to BRICS and could equally apply to many G7 nations today.

What is more interesting to me are the common struggles — growing energy demand, industrial aspirations — and opportunities, such as signs of movement on green technology and decarbonisation and highlighting the imbalance of power in global governance. These could unite BRICS+ countries.

The climate question

Taking the BRICS+ nations as a proxy again, ten members of the bloc account for 48 per cent of the world’s population. Per capita primary energy consumption from fossil fuels averaged 33,375.68 kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2024 (with data unavailable for Ethiopia), compared with 43,595.58 kWh in high-income countries (Russia and the United Arab Emirates included). For renewables, the average was 2,873.37 kWh, compared with 7,531.68 kWh in high-income countries.

Fossil fuels remain dominant in the BRICS+ energy mix and the bloc accounted for 48 per cent of global fossil fuel production in 2024, but renewables are rising fast.

BRICS members now generate 51 per cent of global solar power (up from 15 per cent a decade ago), with China leading 74 per cent of global solar and wind construction and India meeting one of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) targets five years early.

This is most likely what the energy transition will look like for developing countries with growing energy demand and growth aspirations — the addition of vast amounts of renewable energy to gradually displace fossil energy, rather than the overnight fossil fuel phase-out that many in the climate movement expect. Reflecting this, the 2025 BRICS Statement called for a just and inclusive energy transition while affirming fossil fuels’ ongoing role for emerging economies.

Green industrial policy is also gaining prominence, as clean energy and green manufacturing become central to BRICS’ economic and security strategies. Political economist Ilias Alami describes how these aspirations are propelling developing countries into a “new geopolitics of green connectivity” rooted in “polyalignment” rather than the Bandung era’s non-alignment.

China looms large in this geopolitics of climate: Leading in emissions, but also compelling in its role as a climate actor, “lighting up the world with solar panels” and exporting emissions reductions abroad. Economic historian Adam Tooze emphasised that if you’re not understanding the scale of what China has done and you reduce it to another middle income authoritarian story, you’re just not in the conversation at all. Chinese photovoltaics (PV) and BYD may well be the “tools of our salvation,” Tooze added.

For some developing countries, China is both a formidable giant that has outpaced all others in growth and a power whose economic and trade leverage must not be over-relied upon lest it be turned into a weapon; others are eager to engage.

Emerging from this landscape are new green partnerships among Southern countries that can form the skeletal basis for sustained political coalitions. To build and tie this together, we need a new Southern narrative on climate and development, with an updated set of principles to reflect the new realities. 

New Global South vision for climate and prosperity

The US is, and always has been, an unreliable partner — transactional, coercive and warmongering. The Western world is struggling through its own “polycrisis”, witnessing the failure of its institutions, policies and the horrors inflicted by its military complex abroad. The current moment has been characterised in various ways, as turbulent and uncertain, as ‘productive incoherence’ in global governance, and as a moment to turn polycrisis into ‘polytunity’.

For the Global South, that has always been battered by competing crises — debt, inflation, conflict and food insecurity — there is an opportunity to use this disruption to birth something new. 

But what should this Southern vision look like? There are multiple calls to action: A time to rewrite the rules, acknowledge multipolarity, focus on localisation, forge new green alliances, de-dollarise, promote regional integration, advance green industrial policy and more. The growing technological and industrial foundations discussed above can be used to shape a new, green development agenda.

But unity is essential to turn this fragile moment into lasting power — whether through BRICS+ or another grouping. As Bello notes, the “spirit of Bandung has been a constant spur to many political actors to reproduce it in its imagined pristine form”. That spirit will not return on its own — we must rebuild it. In climate talks and beyond, the South must close ranks.

The new and complex green agency of developing countries is still not taken seriously by much of the climate policy community, which maintains a singular focus on emissions monitoring, ambitious NDC targets (or lack thereof) and fossil phase-out inertia that the top-down, technocratic climate governance regime has been set up to do. All this, while sidelining calls for finance, technology transfer and recognition of development needs.

As civil society, rather than dwelling on fractures or repeating Global North narratives of obstruction, we must spotlight common struggles and green aspirations, amplify collective agency and build solidarities that strengthen South-South cooperation. Only by forging unity can developing countries transform today’s polycrisis into opportunity and build a cohesive vision of climate-proofed prosperity both for and by the Global South.