Paris—After meeting ahead of the second week of United Nations climate change negotiations, the Ministers and heads of delegation here representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a coalition of 44 small island, low-lying, and coastal nations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, released a joint statement outlining the group’s priorities for the final Paris agreement.

“Last week, the international community moved another step closer to adopting an effective and durable climate change agreement, but, make no mistake, our work is far from complete. “We are acutely aware the survival of our members is hanging in the balance in Paris and that a bad deal may be worse than no deal at all.”

To ensure success, we must accelerate the pace and ensure the final agreement maintains meaningful outcomes on all of the pillars from the Durban mandate:

“First, on mitigation, it is critical that the Paris Agreement establish long term temperature goal of well below 1.5-degrees, supported by appropriate and ambitious medium and long-term emissions reduction pathways.

“Second, Loss and Damage should be a stand-alone article in the agreement. Parties should agree to a permanent framework to address Loss and Damage that is anchored in the agreement and establish a process or system that is actually capable of doing so.

“Third, in terms of finance, tackling climate change and adapting to its impacts will require significantly scaled-up, new, additional and predictable financial resources, starting from a floor of $100 billion USD per year in 2020, with provisions to enhance SIDS access, especially to public, grant-based support for adaptation, given our unique challenges and the existential threat that climate change poses to us.

“Finally, we welcome the significant progress that has been made with respect to pre-2020 action over the past two years. We have seen broad engagement on the current text, and, in particular, on strengthening the technical expert meetings, enhancing the high level event, and appointing high-level champions to dramatically scale up pre-2020 action. This is absolutely essential work if we are to keep our long-term goals within reach. We expect that this will lead to an effective Action Agenda that produces tangible results over the coming five years.”