The role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was signed by some 153 countries at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, represented a singular triumph for the geographically dispersed group of island states and low-lying coastal developing countries, located in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as in the Caribbean, South China and Mediterranean Seas, and known as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). This article focuses on the goals of AOSIS during the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the UNFCCC. For the first time in the history of the United Nations, a group of small states, hitherto relegated to the sidelines, was able to develop a specific negotiating agenda addressing areas which are of overriding concern to them and succeeded in having those concerns incorporated in a legally binding Convention of historic importance. As this article reveals, AOSIS set itself 12 negotiating goals during the negotiating rounds leading up to the UNFCCC, and 10 of these 12 goals were realized. Nevertheless, AOSIS, whose member states are most vulnerable to the possible adverse effects of climate change, was particularly concerned about those provisions of the UNFCCC that were either watered-down significantly, made largely meaningless or excluded altogether. These include: the absence of definite targets or specific timetables for the significant reduction of carbon dioxide by the industrialized countries of the North; the lack of permanent and clear financing arrangements in particular the lack of definitive financial provisions for adaptive response measures to the adverse impacts of climate change such as sea-level rise; and the absence of a specific provision for the implementation of coastal zone management schemes for those countries most vulnerable to sea-level rise. As the UNFCCC moves into the implementation phase, AOSIS should and must build on its past success. To do so, it will need to develop clearly defined initiatives aimed at strengthening the commitments for financing and insurance, and to seek inclusion of a provision to develop and finance coastal zone management schemes for the most vulnerable small states. While the article covers the AOSIS negotiating period up to and including the Earth Summit in June 1992, we nevertheless postulate some possible objectives which the AOSIS group might wish to consider in what is sure to be an intensive post-Earth Summit phase of the UNFCCC, leading up to the first Conference of the Parties of that Convention.