“Talks cannot go on forever. The seas are rising, the world is warming, the ice is melting. Seventeen years since the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we are still waiting for global emissions to peak. This must occur by 2015 at the latest. We need to move beyond blame games and the divisions of the past and achieve a new global consensus”, said Ambassador Dessima Williams, Permanent Representative of Grenada to the UN in New York and current Chair of AOSIS.
“All countries must play their part now if we are to keep climate change to less than a 1.5 degree Celsius (°C) temperature increase so as to safeguard all island states” she added. “The science and the economics tell us that we are nearly out of time to get emissions down fast enough to save the planet. Delay will cost us our islands in the future. We heard yesterday from the International Energy Agency that every year of delay adds $500 billion to the bill for reducing emissions between now and 2030. We must accelerate action”, she said.
Recalling the ‘1.5 to stay alive’ mantra adopted by AOSIS Heads of State in New York at their own Summit on 21 September, Ambassador Williams noted recent natural disasters as a sign of things to come. “Our people are already suffering devastating impacts and losses at the current 0.8°C of warming – coastal erosion, coral bleaching, flooding, and more intense cyclones and hurricanes. We can not and will not sign a deal that commits our countries to devastation”.
Limiting warming to below 1.5°C would require that long-term concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere be limited to below 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide-equivalent. This is well below the 2°C and 450 ppm targets promoted by many industrialised countries, which would commit the world to one or more metres of sea-level rise, devastating island states and lowlying coastal areas. The AOSIS targets are now supported by close to 100 countries, more than half the UN membership.
“No country is immune from the impacts, so it is in all our interests to move now towards a lowcarbon global economy”, said Ambassador Williams. She noted a pledge by the Maldives to move its economy to carbon neutrality by 2020, and the commitment by eleven Pacific Island nations to reduce emissions by 33% below business as usual by 2015.
At their Summit in New York, AOSIS Leaders stressed that the provision of finance for adaptation by small island states and other vulnerable countries ‘must be an urgent and immediate global priority’, and that the new global deal must include a comprehensive insurance facility to address the now-inevitable loss and damage to fall on vulnerable countries as a result of climate change. “Climate change is already delivering damage not of our making. Our countries need adaptation funding urgently – not in 2020, not in 2030, but now”, said Ambassador Williams.