Climate Change and Small Island States The Alliance of Small Island States

Ministerial Conference on

Environment and Development

in Asia and the Pacific 2000

Kitakyushu, Japan 31 August - 5 September 2000

Climate Change and Small Island States
The Alliance of Small Island States
(AOSIS)

One of the greatest environmental threats to all island countries is global climate change. Relatively conservative scientific predictions include a rise in sea level of a metre or more over the next century. With some island countries being little more than a metre above the existing sea level, even the smallest rise is a potential threat to their survival. The modest rise in sea level that is accepted in the scientific community will inundate at least four low-lying Pacific island countries, and damage many more.

Global warming and rapid sea level rise will make all island countries less habitable because of increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms, heightened storm surge risk, and the disruption of limited fresh water supplies as the rising sea intrudes into fresh ground water that is the principal reservoir for many island countries. Warming of sea water by even a few degrees may disrupt some shallow-water corals that contribute to the biological basis of tropical fisheries, threatening to reduce the already narrow economic base of island countries.

This vulnerability, shared by island countries around the world, has stimulated one of the potentially most important developments in international environmental diplomacy of the decade, namely the formation of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). AOSIS was established in 1990 during the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva and has since played a central role in shaping international policy on climate change.

The 36 countries that comprise AOSIS include, in the Pacific Ocean: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Western Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu; in the Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago; in the Atlantic Ocean: Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe; in the Indian Ocean: Comoros, Maldives, Mauritius, and the Seychelles; in the Mediterranean: Cyprus, and Malta; and Singapore in the South China Sea. AOSIS observers include American Samoa, Guam, the Netherlands Antilles, Niue, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Together they represent one fifth of the total membership of the United Nations. And with the increased heterogeneity of the traditional groupings within the United Nations, AOSIS now represents by far the single largest, unified voting block.

The history of AOSIS during its first six years is closely interwoven with climate policy, and particularly the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the 'Climate Convention'). Negotiated on the basis of a UN General Assembly Resolution adopted in 1989, the Climate Convention was fashioned in six intensive, two-week negotiating sessions in the 14 months leading up to the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where it was opened for signature.

AOSIS, supported by the UN coalition of more than 100 developing countries known as the Group of 77 and China, made significant contributions to the Climate Convention despite the limited economic and political clout of its individual member states.

AOSIS countries worked intensively, for example, to achieve the wording of the Objective of the Climate Convention, namely to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that would not present a danger to the global climate system. Toward this end, AOSIS submitted a draft protocol to the first Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention held in Berlin in April of 1995. This protocol established a goal of a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse gasses by the year 2005. The AOSIS protocol, as it is now called, has become a centrepiece of continued international negotiations on climate policy known as 'the Berlin Mandate'.

The unity of purpose of AOSIS stems simply from the common threat to the survival of island countries that is imposed by global climate change. The threats are now fully substantiated by the scientific community. Leadership has also been a vital factor in the success of AOSIS. The first chair of AOSIS, Ambassador Robert Van Lierop, represented Vanuatu for more than a decade at the United Nations. On one particularly dramatic occasion, Ambassador Van Lierop led AOSIS on an indignant, late-night walkout from a particularly contentious meeting of the Group of 77 and China in Geneva, in which a single oil producing member of the Group stubbornly blocked all discussion of key planks in the AOSIS proposals. Significantly, a little over a year later, AOSIS under his leadership was handed the full authority of the Group of 77 and China to negotiate a separate agreement in preparation for the UN Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States in Barbados.

Perhaps the most significant factors affecting AOSIS's emergence as the powerful and widely heeded conscience of the international community on climate policy has been the recognition of the truth and justness of its cause by the rest of the world and the corresponding commitment of its member countries. From the establishment of AOSIS, some of its members have argued that island countries should have a central role in the formation and governance of the international climate negotiations, on the basis that they incur the greatest risk from climate change. Otherwise, AOSIS countries faced destruction without representation. The principle of representation proportionate to risk struck a sympathetic chord at the Second World Climate Conference, and culminated in the inclusion of AOSIS members, including Ambassador Van Lierop and later Ambassador Slade, on the governing bureau of the climate negotiations.

Both AOSIS and international climate policy are now at an historic crossroad. A failure to reduce the global emissions of greenhouse gases soon will amount to a failure to arrest global warming and the attendant damage to the global climate system. The urgency stems from the physical inertia of the climate system; greenhouse gases emitted today contribute to global warming up to a century hence . The global climate can be spared only by immediate efforts to reduce emissions, as the AOSIS protocol specifies.

If even a decade passes before beginning the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we will be forced either to make far more drastic cuts later, or to incur unacceptable damage to the global climate system. According to Charles Fleming, the Ambassador of the island state of St. Lucia: "If we wait for the proof, the proof will kill us".

Statement by Tuvalu on climate change

Ministerial Conference on

Environment and Development

Last updated: May 18, 2000.