Pacific leaders' call to action on climate change

Climate change is at the top of the agenda at the 40th Pacific Island Forum Leaders' Meeting in Cairns, Australia. Participants are urging world leaders to take global action to deal with the big challenge of climate change. CRI's Australia correspondent Chen Feng has more.

Reporter:
At the press conference on the closing of the meeting, Forum Chair and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said climate change is the real practical challenge affecting the Pacific Island States. It threatens not only their livelihoods and living standards, but the very viability of some of the communities.

"The very viability of certain small island states is a stake on the question of how we deal, or choose not to deal, with climate change. As I said to some of you yesterday here, it's a stark and somber statistics that fifty percent of the population of the Pacific Island countries lives within a kilometer and a half of the coast line. Therefore the impact of coastal inundation is huge, potentially huge, if climate change is allowed to continue unabated."

The Forum issued a call to action to all leaders in the global community, and urgently seeks their support in addressing this grave threat.

"We call on world leaders to increase their level of ambition and seek an agreement to put the world on a path to limit the increase in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius or less. We call on all countries to agree to reduce global emission by at least 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. We call on all countries to agree that global emissions peak no later than 2020. And we call also developed economies to put in place domestic policies and legislation now to achieve the emission reduction target."

As the host country and the chair of this year's forum, Australia itself also pledged to help Pacific Island countries in this regard.

Asutralia's Minister of Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, announced on Thursday the funding priorities for assisting Pacific Island countries in meeting the immediate challenges of climate change.

"As you may be aware, we have a program of 150 million dollars towards the International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative. We have previously announced some 75 million of that initiative, and today I'm announcing the allocation of 50 million dollars."
Wong adds that the new funding will be allocated to help implement high priority, practical adaptation programs in the Pacific Island countries, such as water supplies, disaster preparedness, and coastal zone management.

Chen Feng, CRI news, Cairns.