Friday, the UN General Assembly is to elect five of the 10 non-permanent seats on the 15-member council for a two-year term beginning January 1. And tiny Iceland is vying with Turkey and Austria for the two European seats that will be left vacant by Italy and Belgium.

The Nordic nation of 313,000 people is reeling from a financial meltdown that has forced its government to nationalize the country's three biggest banks and to begin talks in Moscow about a possible loan from Russia.

In a video address to a UN seminar Tuesday, Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson however stressed his country's resilience and said it could serve as a model for solutions to the energy and climate change crises.

"In the current global financial hurricane, Iceland and others have been reminded, to use an analogy, that when a hurricane passes over the ocean toward powerful mainlands it usually crosses small islands where the destruction can be substantial."

But he said that experience had shown that "small states, due to their flexibility and the closely knit networks of cooperation which characterize their societies can recover surprisingly quickly."

"Icelanders are fortunately aware that despite the current financial challenges, our long-term resources are fundamentally strong," he told the seminar on the theme "Small States - Emerging Powers."

He pointed to Iceland's "enormous wealth in the potential for clean energy production, both geothermal and hydro, strong fish stocks, large reservoir of fresh drinking water, plus the beautiful natural wilderness, valleys and rivers."

At a conference in Reyjavik last June, Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Gisladottir vowed that if elected to the powerful Security Council, Iceland "will strive to ensure that the Council take the interests of small states into consideration in all its deliberations."

"Iceland would in the Security Council strive to act as ... a bridge between small states and communities and the large powers which have traditionally taken the liberty of shaping world affairs for the purpose of their own interests," she noted.

Some diplomats say Iceland's chances in Friday's vote may have been hurt by the financial meltdown which has turned a once prosperous country into one on the brink of bankruptcy.

But Reykjavik can count on the active support of fellow Nordic countries -- Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden -- and appears to have generated some sympathy among many of the small states that make up the majority of the UN membership.

Icelandic diplomats also played up their country's "strong commitment to the sustainable use of natural resources and clean, renewable energy."

On climate change, Grimsson he noted that his country is witnessing "the alarming rate of melting of our glaciers, which are the largest in Europe."

"We also struggle with the largest desert in Europe, fighting for a century with systematic scientific projects in soil preservation and soil reclamation, producing lessons and experience which have now become increasingly relevant for nations in Africa and Asia, and even for the United States," he said.

"The fight against irreversible climate change is fundamentally about the future of energy," Grimsson noted.

"If the Icelandic model were followed on a global scale by utilizing the variety of clean energy resources available to every country, global warming could be clearly slowed down or even averted," he said.

In addition to the 10 non-permanent members, the prestigious Security Council includes five, veto-wielding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

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