Islanders Plead at Climate Talks to Be Saved From Rising Seas

Alex Morales, Bloomberg 8 Dec 08;

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Island countries from Grenada in the Caribbean to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are telling delegates at the United Nations climate-change talks this week that their lands may be swamped by rising seas and more powerful storms unless global warming is curbed.

Warmer temperatures are melting icecaps, expanding the volume of oceans and sending more intense hurricanes toward Grenada. Higher tides in the Tuvalu islands between Hawaii and Australia have started making groundwater too salty to drink for its 12,000 residents. The Maldives may buy land elsewhere and move all its islanders should rising waters engulf their land.

“We are already in danger -- it’s not that we Maldivians ever want to leave,” Amjad Abdulla, director-general of THE nation’s environment ministry, said in an interview at the UN global-warming talks in Poznan, Poland. Relocation plans for the 300,000 residents from the low-lying atolls south of India are being drawn up for “a worst-case scenario.”

Delegates at Poznan are negotiating a “shared vision” to open the way for a new global-warming treaty to be signed a year from now in Copenhagen. Island-state envoys say they fear an agreement struck before talks wrap up on Dec. 12 won’t ensure their survival, or be backed by pledges from industrialized nations that release the most heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year predicted sea levels will rise 18 to 59 centimeters (7 inches to two feet) by 2100, having risen 17 centimeters during the last century. The Maldives’s highest point is about 10 feet above sea level. The panel also said tropical cyclones are likely to increase in intensity as temperature warm.

2 Degrees Too Much

The 27-member European Union has proposed curbing global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre- industrial times.

A 2-degree limit won’t guarantee the future of the lowest- lying nations, said Leon Charles, a Grenadian delegate. “Two degrees is really not a safe level for small island states,” Charles said. “For many of them it would be like a death sentence in the long run.”

The EU, the biggest group of nations that already accepted binding emissions limits under the Kyoto treaty, also asks the developed world to cut them 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

The “shared vision” blueprint won’t likely include precise numbers on reductions by 2020, U.S. delegate Harlan Watson said at Poznan, which lies halfway between Berlin and Warsaw.

A 2-degree goal is “suicide” for islands that rise little above sea level, Selwin Hart, a spokesman from Barbados for the Alliance of Small Island States, told delegates on Dec. 2.

‘Our Extinction’

The 43-member Alliance of Small Islands group wants a 1.5- degree limit, and “agreeing to a goal that results in our extinction is not something we’re prepared to do,” Hart said.

A temperature gain of 2 degrees would kill off up to 85 percent of corals, raise sea levels, increase tropical diseases and intensify storms further, said Charles, climate-change adviser to Grenada’s finance ministry.

Ocean water expands when it’s warmer, occupying more volume as temperatures rise. The seas also have risen as the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets melt.

The UN climate panel also said temperatures have risen by 0.76 degrees since the 19th century and further gains of 1-2 degrees would result in the bleaching of most corals, a process that makes them more vulnerable to dying off.

“We’re living on coral reefs: The economy is fisheries and tourism and the coral reefs are the natural barriers from sea- level rise and storm surges,” Abdulla of the Maldives said. “If the coral reefs go, it means the death of a nation.”

As studies are carried out and the evidence stacks up that the small islands are in danger, politicians in richer nations may begin to change their stance, said Stephanie Tunmore, climate campaigner for the environmental group Greenpeace, in Poznan.

“The 2-degree target a few years ago was an incredibly radical position. It’s much more widely accepted now” and even 1.5 degrees may be endorsed, she said. “It’s very, very hard for them to say ‘we know this island and this island and these people will be obliterated.’ It becomes a moral imperative to act.”

Not waving but drowning: Island states plead at UN talks
Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 9 Dec 08;

POZNAN, Poland (AFP) – Dozens of small island nations threatened by climate change have taken their case to the UN talks here, saying rising seas are already lapping at their shores and may eventually wash some of their number off the map.

An alliance of 43 tropical island states has set down proposals for capping global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times.

The move is bold and could prove diplomatically troublesome at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, say some observers.

As it is, the conference is still a long way from endorsing an even more modest target of two degrees Celsius (3.6 F) championed by the European Union (EU) and most green groups.

"Two degrees is simply too high," said Grenada's Leon Charles, chairman of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), collectively home to 41 million people.

"It is not a sector that needs to be adjusted -- we are talking about the survival of countries," he told AFP in an interview.

The new president of the Maldives, Mohamed Anni Nasheed, has said his government will begin saving now to buy a new homeland for his people to flee to in the future.

Last year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that a rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 centimetres (7.2 to 23.2 inches) by 2100 would be enough to make both the Maldives and Tuvalu virtually uninhabitable.

Since then, the news has got worse.

"There is an informal consensus among climate scientists that sea levels will go up by about a metre (three feet) by century's end," said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

The problem, Charles said, extends well beyond rising water marks.

"A 2 C (3.6 F) increase would cause a significant bleaching of coral reefs, which would devastate our food supply and our livelihoods," he said. More intense and frequent hurricanes would ruin low-lying agricultural land.

Albert Binger of Antigua and Barbuda, an adviser to the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, points out that tourism -- underpinning the region's entire economy -- could be devastated.

Other nations, he said, should take note.

"We will be the canary in the coal mine. If we go, so will others," Binger said. "It is incumbent on our fellow citizens of the planet to keep the canary from dying."

AOSIS hesitated a long time before raising the bar by calling for the 1.5 C (2.4 F) cap.

"One of the problems was the lack of scientific work on lower stabilisation levels," said Charles, referring to projections of how different concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might affect temperatures.

"AOSIS asked us to provide a briefing ahead of the Poznan meeting," recalled Bill Hare, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and an IPCC lead author.

Hare reviewed the most recent findings and created a new model, which showed oceans rising by up to a metre (3.33 feet) by 2100.

"In the longer term -- a couple of centuries -- it is very difficult to limit sea level rise below a couple of metres, even at 1.5 C," he said.

The main culprit, say scientists, are continent-sized icesheets covering Greenland and Antarctica that appear to be melting far more quickly than thought only a few years ago.

The Greenland ice mass alone would boost ocean levels by seven meters (22.75 feet), although this process would take centuries, even in pessimistic scenarios.

For the island states, Charles insists, 1.5 C (2.4 F) is not a negotiating position.

"For some of us it is an issue of survival. When you have to move to another country, how do you place a value on the loss of culture and livelihood?", he said.

"The challenge is not discussing relocation, the challenge is to get the Convention to take positions that will prevent us from dying."