Life and Death matter for Island States

[Grupo Gavilán]

Global warming has disastrous consequences for island atolls and this
explains why representatives from these states were strident at the
recently concluded climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

IN some ways, the unsung heroes of the two-week-long United Nations
climate conference in Bali that ended last weekend were the delegates
from the developing world, particularly those from small island
states, who have become the most vocal advocates in the quest to limit
global warming.

Noticeably, it was the delegate from Papua New Guinea who stood down
the lead US negotiator, Paula Dobriansky, at the final plenary session
when she threatened to block a deal that might lead for a new climate
treaty.

"If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest
of us," said the delegate, Kevin Conrad. "Please, get out of the way."

Indeed, the Alliance of Small Island States, or Aosis, has criticised
the UN goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius,
(3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), calling it "insufficiently ambitious".
During the year of negotiations that led up to the release last month
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change synthesis report,
scientists and politicians from developing nations "were playing a
much more active role" than ever before, said Rajendra Pachauri of
India, the chairman of the panel. They frequently argued that the
science be stated in the starkest terms and that its wording not be
diluted, observers said.

Why? Imagine what global warming looks like for countries like the
Maldives, Papua New Guinea and Grenada, and you quickly understand:
Climate change is a matter of life and death for them.

"Even a two-degree Celsius increase compared to preindustrial levels
would have devastating consequences on small island states," Maumoon
Abdul Gayoom, president of the Maldives, told the delegates in Bali.

First, such island states are low-lying places whose cities are often
ports. Their most populous areas -- in some cases their whole
territories -- are at risk of being swallowed up.

"We've already committed to 0.4 to 1.4 metres of sea-level rise even
if emissions are stabilised today," Pachauri told me at the release of
his panel's report. "That's a heck of a lot for some places."

A sea-level rise of 50 centimetres, or 20 inches, could lead to 60 per
cent of the beaches in some areas of Grenada being lost, according to
a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change report issued this year.

For the Maldives, a one-metre rise in sea level amounts to the
complete disappearance of the nation. Other countries on atolls like
Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu are also at risk of being
swallowed by the sea, since their land rarely reaches more than two
metres above sea level.

Even if they are not completely inundated, they will most likely
become uninhabitable because their "inland" fresh water supplies will
be contaminated by a storm surge and seepage from the encroaching sea.

Second, many island states are small and poor, so they have little
ability to adapt to climate change, either physically or financially.

"We have to do whatever we can now, because we don't want our reefs
and our island to disappear," said Banuve Kaumaitotoya, secretary of
the Fiji Ministry of Tourism and Environment.

Third, small island states are hugely at the mercy of big players in
the climate game, since the emissions that will drown them come from
far away.

"Small island developing states have contributed little to
concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, yet are directly
and negatively affected by the impacts of climate change," the Aosis
report said.

"The largest historical emitters must now take aggressive action to
facilitate the reduction of global emissions."

At the conference in Bali, Gayoom, the Maldives president, said that
half of the islands in the Maldives were eroding "at an alarming
rate".

Coral reefs that once protected the islands are dying from warming and
the resulting increase in flooding after storm surges had put many
people "in grave danger".

With the effects of global warming already acute, all these small
countries can do is go to conferences and make noise, hoping that the
international community will hear them. As Gayoom noted, they have
neither the money nor the technology to adapt on their own. They have
no direct means to force the United States or China to reduce
emissions.

Is the world listening? Will developed countries willingly transfer
money and new technology to these small island states to protect them
from rising seas, as the Bali Action Plan asks them to consider?

More important, will they work to reduce their emissions quickly, even
though they could adjust to two degrees of warming?

Or will they be like my daughter, who, when I first told her about
global warming and sea level rise some years back, said:
"It's not really a problem for us, since we live on the 15th floor."

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