China's national environmental ministry signed a partnership with Rare on October 29 in Beijing to promote a sea change in environmental values and behavior at the local level in China.
 
During a signing ceremony at Beijing's Xiyuan Hotel, China's Vice Minister for the Environment  Pan Yue said that, "Scientific development and ecocivilization are terms coined by China's President Hu Jintao to express the need to balance this country's rapid economic growth with careful planning and environmental management. The concepts were elevated to China's constitution at this month's Party Congress."  The Vice Minister also noted that this is the first time the China Environmental Culture Promotion Association of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA-CECPA) has signed an MOU to cooperate with a foreign environmental group.

Nigel Sizer, Rare's Vice President for Asia Pacific, based in Indonesia, added "Decisions on infrastructure, investment, trade and development surely influence the future of China's environment. But the daily choices made by ordinary citizens in tens of thousands of communities take a huge toll on plant and animal life.  Rare has shown that inspiring these communities to conserve nature reduces clearing of forests for farmland, poaching, burning grasslands, and overfishing."

"The SEPA-CECPA partnership with Rare is the kind of bold breakthrough needed to help to address the pending extinction crisis," said Brett Jenks, President and CEO of Rare. "China can lead the way through its partnership with Rare and others to provide local leaders with the tools to harness the creativity of countless communities. President Hu's vision then comes one step closer to becoming reality."

The Memorandum of Understanding between SEPA and Rare represents a commitment to jointly train local environmental leaders to foster local pride in rare animals and birds through a variety of marketing techniques, and leverage that pride into environmental protection.
 
The agreement builds upon the efforts of Rare, a rapidly-growing US-based charity, to catalyze a global movement for conservation, community-by-community. Over the past 20 years, Rare has systematically taken business-style marketing tools and crafted 100 different "Pride campaigns" throughout the tropics that fundamentally change the way local people feel about nature.
 
Rare and SEPA-CECPA now aim to train hundreds of local Chinese environmental leaders and give them the tools and mentoring they need to become effective communicators for conservation. Each campaign will focus on a priority site with globally unique biological riches.

Rare's signature Pride campaigns involve careful surveying of local attitudes followed by finely tuned messaging involving over forty different communications techniques such as conservation songs, festivals, beauty contests, puppetry, theatre, radio soap opera, billboards and school visits by campaigners dressed in giant animal costumes. Follow-up surveys have found that in rural regions where such sights are rare, such campaigns can engage people in environmental issues far more effectively than traditional education programs.
 
Many past Pride campaigns have had dramatic results. Rare-trained conservationist Sari Wirawan of Indonesia motivated remote fishing communities to stop destroying reefs and instead work with the government to create a huge new marine park conserving the biological treasures of the Togean Islands. Rare's first partnership in China, started four years ago, supplied training and resources to local leader Yanfang Cun in Yunnan Province, and led to measured reduction in forest clearing by local people which in turn helped to conserve the irresistible and highly endangered golden monkey.