Small islands urge deep CO2 cuts, fear rising seas

BONN, Germany (Reuters) – Small island states have sharpened their calls for the rich to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying low-lying atolls risk being washed off the map by rising ocean levels.

An alliance of 43 island states, backed by more than a dozen nations in Africa and Latin America, urged developed countries at U.N. climate talks in Bonn on Thursday to cut greenhouse emissions by “at least 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”

“The scientific findings about climate change are frightening,” M.J. Mace, a legal advisor to the Federated States of Micronesia who presented the demands at the March 29-April 8 meeting, told Reuters.

A group of leading researchers last month projected a quickening pace of sea level rise this century, of about a meter (3 feet) or roughly double the projections by the U.N. Climate Panel in 2007.

The small islands had called at a U.N. climate meeting in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008 for cuts of “more than 40 percent” in industrialized nations’ emissions by 2020.

Reuters