Unveiling of the NGO Climate Compact 2.0

Today, three years after the launch of the original NGO Climate Compact, InterAction unveils its second iteration committing to a renewed focus on addressing climate change in the NGO community.

The need for urgent action on climate change was readily apparent when InterAction launched the first compact in 2020. Since then, the world has experienced increasingly intense and frequent climate-induced disasters, reinforcing the imperative of unified action across all sectors.

The recently released Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that with mean global temperatures reaching 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, we are already experiencing unprecedented changes to the Earth’s climate. Though these shifting climatic patterns and extreme weather events harm us all, we continue to see that they affect poor and marginalized communities first and worst, even though these communities contributed the least to creating the crisis and have less capacity to adapt and respond.

Climate change has undone years of development gains, has fueled the complex humanitarian crises InterAction Member organizations respond to, and is rooted in power imbalances in the international system. It is intimately tied to goals for sustainable development and therefore must be a core consideration in our collective work.

Building on the foundation set by the first iteration of the Compact, the Climate Compact 2.0 aims to help guide signatories’ approach to the climate crisis. The principles and aims outlined in the original Compact remain, but this second version provides additional guidance around more concrete and robust organizational actions. It aims to refocus the INGO community’s response to climate change by strengthening commitments across three pillars: (1) external education and advocacy, (2) programs, and (3) internal operations. These pillars are supported by a commitment to cross-cutting internal learning and communications.

To ensure we are making progress, signatories will continue reporting annually to InterAction on steps taken to implement the Compact’s actions. We will review these commitments and examine the progress made at the end of 2025 to continue advancing this agenda. This iterative approach allows for a flexible, phased implementation at the organizational level, taking local context and operational realities into consideration.

For those organizations who joined us on the original compact, we hope to see your continued engagement. Please read through the Climate Compact 2.0 and let us know by May 31 if your organization has any concerns about continuing to serve as a signatory. Our power to make an impact relies on collective action, so we are hoping for broad participation. We will continue to use working groups, learning sessions, and CEO-level events to make progress together.

If your organization is new to the Compact, we also welcome you! To join, Member CEOs should simply email their interest to us. To learn more, please contact Claudia Sanchez de Lozada.

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Read the NGO Climate Compact 2.0 here.