Spread across the earth's oceans, the planet's tiniest members grouped as part of the Alliance of Small Islands States (AOSIS), are hoping to make their voices heard 100 days before UN-hosted climate talks in Copenhagen.
Climate negotiators have spent the last two years working towards a make-or-break summit in Copenhagen this December, expected to ink new targets for global emissions beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.
AOSIS has dubbed itself the "moral voice of the negotiations" while the EU prides itself on taking the lead, with member states agreeing to make 20 per cent cuts in CO2 emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels.
EU leaders have said they are ready to commit to 30 per cent cuts if the rest of the world does likewise to attain the overall goal of restricting global warming to 2˚C.
But such a cut in rising temperatures is still too warm for many low-lying and island nations.
"Small island countries need to say that it is tantamount to declaring their extinction, because the consequences of going to a 2˚C increase are such that whole nations are to disappear," said UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer.
Instead AOSIS is demanding that the new Copenhagen climate agreement limit temperature increases to as far below 1.5˚C as possible, drumming home their mantra "1.5 to stay alive".
The group's president, Dessima Williams, who is also the permanent representative for Grenada to the UN, said last week: "More recent science shows that we are on track for a sea level rise of at least one and maybe two metres by the end of the century.
"That would spell disaster, even disappearance, for some of our islands."
She said even just a 0.8˚C rise on the world thermometer was having dire consequences for island nations already witnessing severe coastal erosion, floods, dying coral reefs and extreme weather.
The alliance is urging industrialised nations to cut gas emissions by 2020 by 45 per cent compared with 1990 levels.
"Sometimes in this debate, like in many others, you forget what it is all about; people forget the main driver for ecosystem losses and for the disappearance of species is climate change," added Mr de Boer.