AOSIS leaders declare ‘island survival’ benchmark for new climate deal

Pacific Press Release – Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)
21 September 2009

AOSIS LEADERS DECLARE ‘ISLAND SURVIVAL’ THE BENCHMARK FOR A NEW CLIMATE DEAL
Island states demand a global warming limit of ‘1.5°C to stay alive’

New York – Leaders of the world’s island states have demanded that the new post-2012 international climate agreement guarantee their countries’ livelihood and survival by ensuring that global warming be kept well below 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C).

In a Declaration adopted today in New York at the ‘Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) Summit on Climate Change’, leaders and ministers of the 42-member negotiating group expressed ‘grave concern that climate change poses the most serious threat to our survival and viability’, and disappointment at the current slow pace and lack of resolve in international climate talks.

AOSIS Leaders heard that current targets from industrialized countries add up to emissions cuts of only 11 to 18 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, which would put the world on a path to 3°C or more in temperature rise. Current targets are about one third of the 45% cuts by 2020 required to keep global warming and associated losses and damage – already estimated at $125 billion annually – under control.

Recent science indicates that 3°C of warming will result in substantial loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, resulting in one or even two metres of sea-level rise by the end of the century. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees has already warned that some particularly low-lying island states are ‘very likely to become entirely uninhabitable’.

Prime Minister Tillman Thomas of Grenada, the Caribbean island state which currently holds the AOSIS Chairmanship, called the current targets “unacceptable”, adding that no state or group of states has the right to condemn another to the tragedy of statelessness.

“Our people are already suffering devastating impacts and losses at the current 0.8 degrees Celsius (°C) of warming – coastal erosion, coral bleaching, salty drinking water, flooding, and more intense cyclones and hurricanes” said President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. “Should we, leaders of the most vulnerable and exposed countries, be asking our people to sign onto significantly greater degrees of misery and livelihood insecurity, essentially becoming climate change guinea pigs?

The limit must be 1.5°C to stay alive!”

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FROM: Pacific Scoop