Islanders blocked in bid for tougher action

Copenhagen: Declaring "it's a matter of survival," one of the world's tiniest nations, speaking for imperiled islands everywhere, took on global industrial and oil powers at the UN climate conference — and lost.

"Madam President, the world is watching us. The time for procrastination is over," Ian Fry, delegate of the mid-Pacific state of Tuvalu, declared Wednesday as he asked the full conference for more aggressive curbing of greenhouse gas emissions than is being considered.

The rejection illustrates the rich-poor divide that overshadows the conference, a reality that has already led some islands to consider evacuation should international action on climate ultimately fall short.

Specifically, Tuvalu asked to amend the 1992 UN climate treaty to require sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, deeper than major powers are considering.

The amendment would have obliged the world's nations to keep global warming — the rise in temperatures accompanied by rising seas — to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That's just 0.75 degrees C higher than the increase to this point. Rich countries are aiming for emissions cuts that would limit warming to 2 degrees C.

It also would have made controls on fossil-fuel use legally binding for the US and for China, India and other developing nations that until now have not faced such obligations.

Opposition

Tuvalu's gambit, seconded by Grenada, the Solomons and other island states one by one on the floor of the cavernous Bella Centre, quickly ran into stiff opposition from oil giant Saudi Arabia, which would be hurt by sharp rollbacks in fuel use, and from China and India. The US delegation remained silent.

Connie Hedegaard, Danish president of the conference, said her decision on the motion would be "very difficult and yet also very easy," since action to advance the proposal would have required consensus approval. She refused to refer it to a "contact group," the next step in the process.

"This is a moral issue," Fry objected. "It should not be put off any longer."

Later Wednesday, hundreds of young international climate activists, chanting "Tuvalu! Tuvalu!" and "Listen to the islands!" thronged the conference hall entrance as the Americans and other delegates filed in for an afternoon session.

The dramatic showdown over basic issues came in the third day of the two-week conference, widely expected to produce no better than a political agreement on emissions reductions — obligatory for industrial nations, voluntary for China and other emerging economies — to be formalised in a treaty next year.

Those reductions would replace the quotas set for 37 industrialised nations by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expire in 2012. The US rejected the Kyoto pact.

The Copenhagen conference's finale comes late next week when President Barack Obama and more than 100 other national leaders converge on the Danish capital for the final hours of what may be tense, down-to-the-wire talks.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-sponsored scientific network, says seas are rising by about 3 millimetres a year. Its worst-case scenario sees the oceans rising by at least 60 centimetres by 2100, from heat expansion and runoff of melted land ice. British scientists note that current emissions are matching the IPCC's worst case.

Such sea-level rises particularly threaten nations on low-lying atolls, like Tuvalu and Kiribati in the Pacific, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

"Sixty centimetres can make a really, really big difference in a place like Kiribati," Australian coastal management expert Robert Kay said Wednesday in a presentation on the sidelines of the Copenhagen conference. Kay displayed time-lapse projections of to make his point.

The rejection of these smaller countries illustrates the rich-poor divide that overshadows the conference as nations seek to protect their interests, a reality that has already led some islands to consider evacuation should international action on climate ultimately fall short