Fiji, Oct. 5 -- What happens when you wake up one day and your receding coastal land has now disappeared? Or the king tide last week, the week before and last month has made the drinking water supply from the well salty, and root crops can't grow as big as before.

For small islands states like the Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands and Tuvalu this is their reality, that will only get worse if we go over 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Pacific Climate Envoy, Kristina Stege, in her keynote address at the 1.5 to Stay Alive Forum hosted by the University of the South Pacific, highlighted "How even small increases in sea level rise leads to disproportionately large increases in coastal flooding for atoll nations like Tuvalu."

"Thirty-centimetre se...