THE Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) yesterday presented a proposal for a Copenhagen Protocol to enhance the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The distribution of the proposal, which also makes allowances for the survival of the Kyoto Protocol, signals the resolve of the 43-member negotiating bloc — of which Jamaica is a part — to realise success at the end of the two weeks of talks here.

It takes into account the four big ticket issues under negotiations — adaptation, mitigation, technology and financing — in addition to capacity-building support.

Central to the 26-page document is the provision for a long-term goal to “limit global average temperatures to well below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to long term stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to well below 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent”.

Beyond that, it stipulates that “parties agree that global emissions should peak by no later than 2015 and will need to be reduced by at least 85 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050”.

Ambassador Antonio Lima, vice president of AOSIS, said they were compelled to put out the text as one option for formal adoption or otherwise for use to guide the negotiation process. Climate change — which threatens increased global temperatures associated with disease such as dengue and malaria, and more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts — is already being felt in small island states, he noted.

“We are an alliance of small island states and sometimes we feel very alone. Some years ago, there was a civil servant from a big country who said, ‘They are going to disappear, so what?’. This so what is very dangerous for us because we are afraid they (developing countries) are not going to take care of us. That is why you hear us a little bit more than the others. We are small and we have to yell sometimes to make them understand that we are not negotiating economics, we are not negotiating business, we are negotiating our survival,” Lima said at a press conference to discuss the text.

“We are experiencing climate change now, and we want to tell them (developed countries) that we are on the frontline. Some of our countries like the Cook Islands, like Maldives, like Tuvalu are trying to understand and trying to find a way to survive. If they do nothing and if this (conference) results as a business as usual, tomorrow it is your business that is going to suffer,” he added.

The AOSIS vice-president said that it was inconceivable that an agreement would not be reached in Copenhagen, certainly not given the implications for the developing world.

“I don’t believe that they are not going to take care of this. Those who put the waste in the atmosphere, they have to clean it! They have to clean it!” Lima said to cheers from some members of the audience.

The AOSIS proposal has been endorsed by the global grassroots climate change campaign 350.org as the first real option for an outcome of the talks.

“Three hundred and fifty parts per million (is a number that) millions of people around the world have been endorsing over the last 18 months, precisely because scientists have told us that if we get carbon back to that level, we can have… a planet similar to the one on which civilisation developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That means that the text presented by AOISIS today is the first really rational text we have had… It conforms perfectly with the science. It is entirely clear from the scientific record that that’s where we need to go,” said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org.

“We don’t know what will happen this week. We don’t know whether this will carry the day here at Copenhagen. We do know that this fight will continue; that we will not back down. This work to support this kind of effort to speak the real truth of this situation over and over again is precisely what we are committed to doing until we have won this fight,” he added.