| 英文摘要: | With the charismatic former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, behind bars on a widely derided terrorism charge, Anna Petherick asks whether small island states can really make themselves heard in Paris. The 2009 meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is hardly recalled as a resounding success. Held in Copenhagen, it marked the last serious attempt — prior to the upcoming Paris meeting in December — to settle on a legally binding global climate agreement. Such a deal proved beyond the reach of the big-hitting politicians in attendance, and the meeting revealed the surprising extent of Chinese obstinacy at the time1. But it was not entirely devoid of positive outcomes. Among them was the attention paid to the cause of Mohamed Nasheed, then president of the Maldives, who took to the stage promising a carbon-neutral future for his nation of tiny, low-lying islands and just 340,000 people. This irked many G77 members wedded to a discourse of payments in accordance with historical responsibility. Nasheed's influence in Copenhagen was captured in the documentary film, The Island President, which — through awards and the telegenic former president's ability to capitalize on media attention — brought the peculiar challenges of small island states facing rising seas and ocean acidification to audiences in high-emitting wealthy countries. For a while after that, things went fairly well. The Nasheed government — the first to be elected democratically in the Maldives' two-thousand-year history — worked closely with the climate movement 350.org (http://350.org), and set up a carbon neutral club to celebrate countries prepared to join the Maldives in decarbonizing their economies. “A lot of small island leaders started to jump on the bandwagon: Samoa, the Marshall Islands, other Pacific islands... then there was also Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya,” recounts Paul Roberts, who handles Nasheed's media. Meanwhile, Mike Mason, an Oxford-based engineer, ironed out the details of the Maldives's own carbon neutral plan. Even China appeared to warm to the Nasheed government, sending delegates on various trips to Malé, the Maldives' capital. But just as the sails of this strategy for an expanded moral authority for small and environmentally vulnerable nations began to fill with the winds of change, Nasheed was forced to resign at gunpoint. Roberts, who was in the president's office on the day of the February 2012 coup, fled to the Holiday Inn. Today, as other island nations prepare for the Paris conference, the former president is stuck on the Maldives' prison island, serving 13 years for 'terrorism' (a conviction which Amnesty International has called a travesty of justice). The current head of the government is the half-brother of the country's dictator for 30 years, and political protest in the Maldives is now routinely met with thuggery2. For other small island states, the timing is inauspicious. With the US and China signalling that they are finally ready to act on climate change, the chair of AOSIS — the Alliance of Small Island States — is for the first time, the Maldives. Many AOSIS members hoping for adaptation payments at some point in the near future must realize that it cannot help their cause to be represented by a government so seemingly unlikely to channel outside funds towards their intended destination, and with a record of swiftly removing from office anyone who accuses its ministers of embezzlement2. This is a shame because AOSIS has much to fight for in Paris. In many ways it is an odd club. Its members have very high (Singapore) and very low (Guinea Bissau) per-capita gross domestic products. They are mostly small (Tuvalu has just 26 km2 of land), but not in every case (Papua New Guinea is more than twice as big as New Zealand). They are mostly islands, but not always (Belize and Guyana). And sometimes those involved are not states with formal sovereignty, but territories of more powerful countries (Netherlands Antilles). What unites them, however, is an unusual reliance on the sea for economic activity, and often for cultural identity. The organization is thus pushing for a future warming cap of 1.5 °C, not 2 °C (ref. 3), to avoid sea-level rise that threatens to overwhelm some of its members (see Fig. 1), as well as for formal acceptance of proposals to address loss and damage.
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