AOSIS Climate Change Summit

Download the AOSIS Climate Change Declaration
Download the Press Release
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On 21 September 2009, on the eve of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit, AOSIS will meet at Head of State and Ministerial level to set a course for their negotiators in the crucial final months of talks on a new international agreement for the post-2012 era.

The AOSIS Climate Change Summit will represent an important opportunity to review the current status of negotiations on climate change, only three months before the UNFCCC COP-15, which will take place in Copenhagen from 7 December to 18 December 2009. The main highlight of the Summit will be the adoption of the AOSIS Climate Change Declaration.

At the front line of climate change's impacts, AOSIS is the moral voice of the negotiations, and was recently joined by the Group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in demanding that the new Copenhagen climate agreement limit temperature increases to as far below 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible. AOSIS targets have been supported recently by IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri and leading UK economist and climate expert Lord Nicholas Stern.

Serious adverse impacts are already being felt by island states at the current 0.8°C of warming, including coastal erosion, flooding, coral bleaching and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. The U.N.'s lead agency on refugees has already warned that some particularly low-lying island states are 'very likely to become entirely uninhabitable' as a result of climate change. AOSIS is therefore calling for the negotiations to produce an ambitious and environmentally credible outcome sufficient to safeguard the livelihood and survival of its member countries.

The AOSIS Summit will be held the day before what is expected to be the largest-ever gathering of world leaders on climate change, to be held at UN Headquarters on 22 September. According to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Climate Summit's objective is to 'mobilize the political will and vision' required to achieve a successful outcome in Copenhagen.

The AOSIS High-Level Summit on Climate Change will take place from 2pm to 8pm at the Rose Centre, American Museum of Natural History, New York.