The economic rise of Asia has been fueled in part by a 19th Century approach to industrialization, with coal-fired power plants going up almost weekly in China. This has pushed China into position to pass the United States as the world's biggest total emitter of greenhouse gases.
However, climate change may well strip Asia of any economic gains it makes, claims a new report.
The report - Up In Smoke? Asia and the Pacific - says Asia is "effectively on the front line of climate change", as it is home to almost two-thirds of the world's population.
And with half of this population living near the coast, billions are directly vulnerable to sea-level rise driven by a warming world.
The report says Asia is where the "human drama of climate change" will largely be played out.
The report's author, Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), said: "If those painfully won improvements in social and economic conditions can be blown away in a few but increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, we have to rethink about how we go about meeting people's basic needs."
The coalition's 21 members include ActionAid International, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Oxfam and WWF.
Nef, together with the International Institute for Environment and Development, organised the report's production.