AOSIS Chair Carlos Fuller speaks to Climate Action Studio in Bonn, Germany

Carlos Fuller

The fiftieth session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice is being held in Bonn, Germany. The climate change conference kicked off last week where, for the first time in almost fifteen years, delegates gathered for a smaller session in Bonn with only the two bodies convening to work on their agenda items. Parties are pressed to keep momentum generated in December of last year when they adopted the rulebook to implement the Paris Agreement. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, other partners and developing countries continue to draw attention to the impacts of climate change on the environment, people, and livelihoods, several parties urged more ambition in pledges to the Paris Agreement; many developing countries called for greater financial resources. Belize, as a member of the Alliance of Small Island States, is represented at the climate change meeting. Chair of AOSIS, Carlos Fuller, was interviewed to share more from the small islands developing states’ perspective. Here’s a snippet of that interview.

Carlos Fuller, Chair, AOSIS

“The IPCC special report on 1.5 tells us that we still have a chance of meeting the 1.5 degree target, however, we must cut emissions by fifty-percent by 2030 for that happen and we have to go to net zero by 2050. The only way we can get that fifty percent cut in emissions by 2030 is in this upcoming round of NDCs. The present round of NDCs has us towards a three degrees target so obviously we need to have much more mitigation action for us to be able to do that. We have only this year to do those news NDCs and then submit them in 2020, so that is why we are saying this is the year for ambition. As you know, loss and damage was the brain child of the AOSIS. We recognize that we have to do as much adaptation as possible, however, regardless of that at some point there are certain things you cannot adapt to, so that is when loss and damage occurs. In fact, I believe the UK has now declared a climate emergency that is loss and damage. When we have all these devastating impacts of hurricanes in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in India, and the effects of that, that is loss and damage. So, obviously we have to strengthen our early warning systems. We have to have an educated public who can use the outputs of the early warning systems to then take refuge to avoid loss and damage and then also have the infrastructure in place; good shelters that people can go to in the event of this loss and damage.  So, that is certainly one aspect of it. However, the other aspect also has to do with slow effects, so for example, long episodes of drought leading to desertification. When you lose arable land what you do for the people who depended on the agriculture – you have to find some other alternative to address and that is loss and damage. Sea levels are rising and we have erosion of beaches. We now know that in some villages the cemeteries are being washed away because of this erosion. We know that the aquifers that we depend on get salinised. Again, how do these people survive? What can we do? In fact, local people are being affected by an international problem and so what mechanisms can the loss and damage we do help these people who are being affected.”