World's island states meet to confront climate, fiscal challenges

Extremely vulnerable to climate change, not rich enough to stop it on their own, and not poor enough to depend on aid and development financing: the world's small island countries are bracing for both fiscal and climate shocks.

Both will be high on the agenda this week as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), as they're formally known, meet Monday at their fourth U.N. Conference, in the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

Caught between rising debts and rising oceans, from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific, many SIDS share characteristics that make them especially vulnerable to external shocks: small landmasses home to scattered and isolated populations, with import dependent, non-diversified economies.

And climate change — with its brutal droughts, powerful hurricanes and rising seas — is threatening to erase some of them from the map altogether.

"The next ten years are critical for SIDS," reads the draft document set to be adopted at the U.N. conference, which will bring together countries ranging from Asian economic heavyweight Singapore to Cape Verde in Africa to the Bahamas.

High on the agenda for the 39 states, whose populations number roughly 65 million people: increasing climate financing, even as many criticize the slow pace of fulfilling previous U.N. aid pledges.

"The harsh truth is for these countries, climate change is already a reality," Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), told AFP. "Because of their smallness as economies... one extreme weather event can literally throw a country back 5-10 years in its development."

"One hurricane, one typhoon that crosses — by sheer lottery of bad luck — the terrain of a small island developing state can wipe out a third or more of...