BUSINESS OF GREEN

For some, climate fight is about survival

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

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 U.S. 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 criticized 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.

"Small island developing states are some of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change," said a recent report by Aosis, due to "sea level rise, coral bleaching, coastal erosion, changing precipitation patterns, and the impacts of increasingly frequent severe weather events." Small island states are the canary in our global coal mine. How can they not be impassioned?

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 meters of sea-level rise even if emissions are stabilized 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 centimeters, or 20 inches, could lead to 60 percent 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-meter 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 meters 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 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. Australian farmers can sell their farms in the South and move to Tasmania if the southern drought continues. The Netherlands can build sea walls and move its coastal population inland if seas rise. "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 has 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.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)