Sinking islands float legal challenge

Talake has appealed to the international community for help to save his country from becoming submerged by the sea.

SYDNEY, Australia -- The chief U.S. climate negotiator has said that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change abandoned by his country would not save tiny Pacific islands from rising sea levels.

This came as low-lying nations such as Tuvalu, who says it is sinking beneath the waves, may use lawsuits as the next weapon against global warming.

Chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson cast doubt on the degree of importance put on greenhouse gases for rising sea levels saying it was likely regional volcanic instability was playing just as big a part.

Law experts and environmentalists say that suing the U.S. and Australia over their failure to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Treaty would be prohibitively expensive, drawn out and hard to win.

The Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Koloa Talake, told media at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting Monday that his country was exploring this and other legal options for his low-lying Pacific nation.

Watson has argued that rising temperatures are inevitable and that no amount of debate over the Kyoto protocol or the U.S. position would stop that.

"I would say to them that if they do have a problem with sea levels rising, Kyoto will not stop that," Watson said.

"The overall temperature of the Earth has been warming for the last 10,000-plus years...Kyoto will not slow that down one whit," he told Reuters news agency.

Talake has already disputed scientific studies, supported by Australia and the United States, which suggest there had, as yet, been no discernible rise in sea levels.

He said the hard fact of life in Tuvalu disproved this alternate theory.

Seeking ways to fight

In response, desperate Pacific states are seeking ways to fight back against rich polluting nations and multinational concerns whose emissions of greenhouse gases they say are wiping them out.

Already the Tuvalu government has said it is working with a United States law firm on how it could take legal action in the International Court of Justice to force nations to reconsider their position on greenhouse gas emissions.

The island leaders are believed to have voiced concerns over Australia's scientific agreement with the United States on global warming.

While not expecting to win, observers say that Tuvalu would at least draw global attention to its plight.

However, Watson said it would be impossible to prove that other factors were not involved in rising sea levels.

"The South Pacific is very volcanically unstable on the sea floor...so you have some natural subsidence occurring anyway. Islands are appearing and disappearing all the time," he told Reuters news agency.

Environmental groups like Greenpeace argue that the Kyoto protocol might at least slow the pace of climate change so that low-lying nations might have more time to react and adapt.

Talake said he was disappointed that Australia was not championing the cause of the small Pacific nations and instead siding with the United States on the greenhouse issue.

However Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the agreement with the U.S. was not designed to undermine the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emission.

"We are a net exporter of energy and our view remains very strong that unless you have the Americans and the developing countries in, you will not have an effective arrangement," Howard told Reuters.

Tuvalu, a string of nine coral atolls five meters (16 feet) above sea level at their highest point, fears its last palm tree could sink beneath the Pacific within 50 years.

Other threatened Pacific islands include Kiribati, Niue and the Marshall Islands and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.