BALI
When your country is just 100 yards wide at points, where do you run when the water rises?
"There's nowhere to move back to," Kiribati's President Anote Tong told climate conference attendees. "Because if you move back, you're either in the lagoon or in the ocean."
The leader of the central Pacific island nation spoke via videotape yesterday in a stepped-up campaign by victims of climate change, real and potential, to win vastly greater international aid to deal with rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely impacts of global warming.
The two-week Bali conference of 190 nations, considered pivotal to efforts to reduce industrial and other emissions warming the planet, will also likely decide on the future of the Adaptation Fund, being developed under UN agreements to enable poorer countries to adjust to climate change.
The fund is expected to finance projects ranging from sea walls to guard against expanding oceans, to improved water supplies for drought areas, to training in new agricultural techniques. Thus far, however, it has drawn a mere $67m (£33m) for a task the World Bank estimates will cost tens of billions of dollars a year.
The nations assembled here for the annual climate meeting are focused chiefly on launching a two-year negotiating process to seal a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
That 175-nation accord requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a key source of global warming, by an average 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
The United States is the only industrial nation to reject Kyoto. - AP
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