Apisai Ielemia is the prime minister of Tuvalu, a small island state located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia. A barrel-chested man with a deep voice, Ielemia at the high-level summit of the climate conference on Thursday called on the world to "act before it is too late for us. … Our future is in your hands."

At its highest, Tuvalu is less than 5 meters above sea level, making it especially vulnerable to ocean level rises caused by global warming. Not only could parts of the island be flooded, the rising saltwater table could also destroy food crops and damage coral reefs providing shelter to local marine life.

Climate-protection negotiations over the past years often have pitted rich against poor, with both parties agreeing that action needs to be taken but often diverging on when and how. The same has been true for this conference in Poznan, where delegates from 189 countries are trying to pave the way for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

Developed economies are aware of the threat that climate change poses to global security; scientists say that a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius would seriously destabilize the global weather system. The result:

"Huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, tropical disease pandemics, a dramatic decline of biodiversity," Maciej Nowicki, Poland's environment minister, warned at the start of the Poznan conference last week. "All these can cause social or even armed conflicts and migration of populations at an unprecedented scale."

For many countries the threat is more specific -- and more immediate.

Mauritania, in northwest Africa, is "in the triple stranglehold of a growing desert, encroaching ocean and worsening floods," said Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate official. The Maldives, a nation of atolls in the Indian Ocean and a popular tourist destination for the affluent, "are saving up for exodus because of rising seas," he added.

That's why the Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 43 countries comprising 41 million people most vulnerable to climate change, is calling for greater action to stop global warming.

The ASIS wants to stop the rise of global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius and calls for greater financial support for developing countries troubled by the effects of a phenomenon they have done least to create.

Most countries have said they want to limit the temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, a target most experts say will be hard to meet with the currently planned reduction goals.

Yet even a 2-degree cap could prove catastrophic for many ASIS islands. Scientists say sea level rises of between 20 and 60 centimeters are enough to make the Maldives or Tuvalu inhabitable. A 2-degree cap may cause the polar ice caps to melt, with the sea level rising by at least 1 meter.

No wonder Grenada's Leon Charles, the chairman of the ASIS, is frustrated.

The Poznan talks so far have been "a disappointment," he said Thursday.

Some of the developed countries, he added, had not been at all "sensitive" to his group's needs.

"The survival of our cultures and our islands depends on the decisions made over the next 12 months," Charles said in reference to the coming year that likely will see a decision on a post-Kyoto treaty at a summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.

The main conflict revolves around the new Adaptation Fund, which would distribute money to poor nations to help them adapt to the effects of extreme weather.

Ielemia called it the "survival fund" for Tuvalu and many others, yet industrialized countries, he said, are planning to make the fund "inaccessible" by burying it in red tape. Instead, developing countries should get quick and direct access to the fund's resources, he said.

"We do not want the Adaptation Fund to turn into all the other funds … where the only countries that can properly access the funds are the ones that can afford consultants and U.N. agencies to write lengthy and endless project proposals," he said.

As of Friday the look of key components of the Adaptation Fund was still unclear, with observers predicting lengthy and tough negotiations. Understandably, for island states like Tuvalu, the stakes are high.

"We are not contemplating migration," said Ielemia. "We are a proud nation of people, we have a unique culture which cannot be relocated to somewhere else. We want to survive as a people and as a nation. And we will survive -- it is our fundamental right."

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