Wellington - For tiny island states in the Pacific, some with their highest points no more than a few metres above sea level, climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. Global warming not only threatens their coral reefs, fisheries and the already scarce supplies of water they rely on for drinking and tending their meagre food crops, but their very existence.
Tuvalu - with 12,300 people on nine islands covering a total of 26 square kilometres, none of it higher than 5 metres above the water line - and Kiribati's 33 atolls, which straddle the equator at an average height of 2 metres above the ocean, are most at risk.
Leaders of both states have appealed, unsuccessfully so far, for Australia and New Zealand to guarantee new homes for their people if the worst should happen.
President Anote Tong, of Kirbati, told a United Nations World Environment Day conference in Wellington last year that some of his 113,000 people had already been relocated because of rising sea levels and coastal erosion and the country could disappear under the sea this century.
Noting that some countries were still debating whether they needed to do anything to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, Tong said: "It's for us a non-debatable issue. We are talking about human survival."
Kiribati already has serious problems with drinking water, sewage and waste disposal, coastal erosion, overfishing and health issues. With nearly 40 per cent of people aged under 15 and the population expected to double in the next 20 years, these problems will get worse.
The fragility of Tuvalu's existence was highlighted in 1997 when two cyclones washed away nearly 7 per cent of the island group's total land mass.
The New Zealand government says it recognizes that climate change poses a significant threat to the small island states in the Pacific but denies rumours that it has agreed to accept people displaced by rising sea levels.
A summit of the 16-member Pacific Islands Forum in August called on the Copenhagen meeting to agree upon a post-2012 outcome that would limit the increase in global average temperatures to no more than 2 degrees. Some in the region say a rise of well below 1.5 degrees is the most the Pacific can take.
They urged developed economies to set "ambitious and robust" mid- term targets to reduce greenhouse gases and ensure that global emissions peak no later than 2020 and are reduced by at least 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
Island states began to focus on the issue of climate change 21 years ago with a conference in the Marshall Islands, a chain of 29 atolls with the highest point 10 metres above sea level. Its 64,500 people live precariously on a total land area of 181 square kilometres set in lagoons covering 11,673 square kilometres of sea.
In 1988, then President Amata Kabua said: "It's truly frightening to think that our ocean will turn against us ... I hope that the appeal of the peoples of the Pacific can help convince the industrialised nations to discontinue their profligate contamination of the atmosphere."
The University of the South Pacific's Patrick Nunn, who was at that conference 21 years ago, said the Marshall's clarion call was virtually ignored.
"I think it's really only in the last few years that the rest of the world has realized that the Pacific islands are facing an unprecedented situation because they are uniquely vulnerable in many ways to the various aspects of climate change," he said.
In 1988 it was believed that climate change was a problem that could be solved and would go away in time. "Now, we realize this problem is going to be with us for our lifetimes, our children's lifetimes and possibly even our grandchildren's," Nunn said.
