"When the sea starts coming up through the floor you know global warming is real," Ehele Sopoaga told the Bali climate change conference today.

Sopoaga come from Tuvalu , among the world's lowest-lying countries. It comprises nine coral atolls lying just south of the equator north east of Australia.

The islands may be thousands of miles from the industrialised countries where most greenhouse gases are emitted but they are becoming the first to feel the effect of global warming.

Sopoaga said: "We are suffering two kinds of damage. One is from higher sea water levels that erode our coastlines. The other is from sea water penetrating the atolls, contaminating our wells and farmland and sometime even rising up through the floors of our homes. Sometimes it just appears and we have to rush around moving ourselves and our possessions to safety."

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In Tuvalu such surges are now known as "King Tides" and they can occur even when the weather is calm. "It is getting really scary," Sapoaga told a press briefing. "We have no high ground to hide on."

Tavau Teii, former deputy prime minister of Tuvalu, now minister for the environment, said life on the islands had been idyllic but now the 10,000 islanders lived in fear of the future.

"The thousands of people attending this conference still do not understand that climate change is more than a future threat. For us it is already a real emergency."

For Tuvaluans, the biggest threat comes from cyclones, as hurricane-force storms are known in the Pacific. Climate experts have long predicted an increase in the number and intensity of such storms worldwide and Teii believes that this is already happening in the Pacific.

"Tuvalu has been hit by a cyclone recently. Last year a storm hit the Solomon islands and destroyed their livelihoods and recently Fiji was hit by another. Small island states like ours are very vulnerable to such events. A single storm can destroy crops across the whole island."

Some go further. Sateeaved Seebaluck, permanent secretary at Mauritius' environment ministry, sees greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised countries as akin to warfare. "What we are seeing is nothing less than low intensity chemical warfare in the form of climate change emissions that now threaten the very survival of many small island states," he said.

As in all aspects of climate change, however, contradictions abound. Tuvalu and Mauritius are just two of the many small island states that have become increasingly dependent on tourism – and the only way of getting to such faraway places is, of course, by air.

How do the governments of such states reconcile their anger and fear over the impacts of climate change with their drive to boost tourism and hence jet travel? Long haul air travel is among the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Ambassador Angus Friday, who represents the Caribbean island of Grenada at the United Nations, had no easy answers. "For islands like ours tourism has replaced agriculture as the main form of income and it brings many benefits, including generating increased understanding between people from different parts of the world. We need it but we also need to manage the negative aspects such as the effect on climate change."

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