Leaders of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) - a group of 42 island countries - have urged industrialised nations to sharply curtail global temperature increases.

AOSIS met this morning before today's one-day Summit on Climate Change to be held at the United Nations in New York. World leaders will try to agree on the general conditions of a new deal to combat global warming due to be hammered out in Copenhagen in December.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will lead today's discussions. US President Barack Obama is to address the summit. It is expected that Chinese President Hu Jintao will unveil measures to tackle his country's emissions, the "carbon intensity targets".

The small island nations of AOSIS, which include the Maldives, Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea, are some of the most vulnerable countries - subject to flooding from rising seas as ice melts from global warming. They are also among the least responsible for the emissions blamed for warming the planet.

The small island countries could also face more frequent devastating storms as a result of temperature increases. Prime Minister Tillman Thomas of AOSIS-member Grenada said that a failure to act by rich countries would be tantamount to a kind of "benign genocide".

In July of this year, the G8 countries and a 17-country group of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, the Major Economies Forum, agreed in Italy that average global temperatures should not be allowed to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.