As UN meets on climate, islands fear extinction

As the UN General Assembly meets to discuss climate change, small island states cry out that they are threatened to extinction by the effects of global warming.

Leaders of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which has 42 member-states, said Monday that the rest of the world had a responsibility to cut emissions.

Rising temperatures mean natural disasters in form of storms and floods to these nations, and threaten their very survival in the long term.

Touting the “1.5 to stay alive” as the AOSIS mantra for the negotiations, the alliance says industrial country's must work to limit temperature increases to as far below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F) as possible in the new Copenhagen climate agreement.

Statistics show that due to industrialization, temperatures have already risen about 0.8 degree C.

"We see climate change as ... a threat to our survival,” Tillman Thomas, prime minister of AOSIS-member Grenada, told reporters, adding that rich countries would be guilty of a kind of "benign genocide” should they fail to curb global warming.

Earlier this year, the G8 countries and a group of the world's 17 biggest greenhouse gas emitters agreed in Italy to put the milestone of global temperature rise at an average of 2 degrees C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times, saying it should not exceed that limit.

A UN summit in Copenhagen this December will seek to ease negotiations between 190 nations on a new deal to stop global warming.

Negotiations remain deadlocked over how to share the burden of the costs, with the US blamed for prioritizing other concerns and not contributing enough as the world's top energy consumer and polluter.

France has introduced “green taxation” in the country, with the 2010 tariff set at €17 ($25) per ton of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2), which could cover of 70 percent of the country's carbon emissions revenue.