Tuvalu hit the headlines in cyberspace when it sold its domain name, tv, for £68 million sterling (£87 million). Though it was described by Computimes as an "obscure, isolated and impoverished Pacific island", the country received another £7.5 million in royalties this year, doubling its national income.
It needs the money - badly. For Tuvalu is one of numerous small island states in the frontline of climate change. If sea levels were to rise by a metre because of global warming, it would be inundated. As one hard-bitten journalist at the Hague summit on climate change quipped: "It's a case of toodaloo Tuvalu!"
A draft report sponsored by the World Bank, which surfaced at the summit, shows that small island states in the Pacific are among the most vulnerable nations in the world to the impacts of extreme weather events, such as cyclones, and that climate change will make their position even more precarious.
In the absence of adaptation measures, Fiji could experience damages of $23 million (£25.8 million) to $52 million a year by 2050, equivalent to 2-4 per cent of its current GDP. Kiribati, even more low-lying, could face average annual damages of more that $8 million to $16 million, equivalent to 17-34 per cent of its current GDP.
Not surprisingly, Kiribati has reserved its right under international law to pursue compensation against such losses. "In the West, you spend millions of dollars a year protecting endangered species. Soon, we will be endangered too," its climate change co-ordinator, Nakibae Teuatobo, told New Scientist.
Rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten 10 million people living in low-lying areas in countries such as Bangladesh, the Maldives, Egypt and China. Global warming may also affect water supplies and reduce food production in the tropics, putting an additional 50 million people at risk of hunger by 2100.
According to Just a Lot of Hot Air?, a climate change briefing by the Panos Institute, Bangladesh "will suffer more from climate change than almost anywhere else in the world", even though its own emissions of the greenhouse gases causing the problem are less than 0.1 per cent of the global total.
Between 20 million and 30 million people in Bangladesh are likely to be hit by drought, increased floods from rainfall and snowmelt, more severe (and probably more frequent) cyclones, and rising sea levels causing erosion, salinisation of coastal croplands and damage to mangrove forests. In short, disaster.
Dr Saleemul Huq, director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, knows that the cost of coping will be huge. "The international community has a moral obligation to assist Bangladesh in adapting to climate change, as the problem is not of our own making but is clearly caused by others."
Worldwide, the costs of climate-related natural disasters have doubled every decade, from $50 billion in the 1960s, when there were just 16, to $400 billion in the 1990s, when the number rose to 70. Between 2000 and 2020, another 245 major disasters are predicted, though the costs can barely be calculated.
The insurance industry has made a stab at it. Andrew Dlugolecki, director of CGNU, told a press briefing in The Hague that the cost of natural disasters is increasing by 10 per cent per annum and, once climate change kicks in, it may outstrip global GDP by 2065. In simple terms, it could bankrupt the world economy.
The richer countries will be able to take counter-measures, such as strengthening sea defences, but what about the poorer countries? A house in the Bangladesh flood plain cannot even be insured. If it is swept away by a cyclone, the occupants lose everything. Indeed, insurance is unknown in much of the developing world.
There is something uniquely unfair about the fact that the poorer countries least responsible for belching out greenhouse gases are the most vulnerable to climate change. And the disproportion is stark: in 1996, one US citizen was responsible for producing as many emissions as 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis or 269 Nepalese.
The US, with less than 5 per cent of the world's population, produces 24 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1990 and 1996, its 8.8 per cent increase in emissions amounted to more than the total combined annual emissions of Brazil and Indonesia, two of the largest developing countries. At the Hague summit, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from all over the world, led by Friends of the Earth International, signed a declaration demanding that most of the burden of reducing emissions be borne by developed countries. It also said that nobody "has a right to pollute more than any other".
Unfortunately, fossil fuels provide 75 per cent of the world's energy. Given their use as an engine for industrialisation over the past 200 years in the rich North, many developing countries in the South insist that they too have "a right to pollute", at least until they have achieved a certain level of development.
Nonetheless, they are not ignorant of the dangers inherent in global warming. Indeed, a report by the Washington-based National Environmental Trust found that some developing nations are doing as much, if not more, than most developed countries, including the US, to promote the use of renewable energy.
India, for example, has overseen a 30fold increase in wind generation between 1992 and 1999, and plans a further 50fold increase over the next 20 years, while the Philippines aims to provide most of its remaining 9,000 unelectrified villages by 2004 with electricity generated using only renewable sources. This movement away from fossil fuels should be assisted by the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), under which developed countries will be able to claim credits against their own emissions for assisting their poorer cousins in promoting energy efficiency and other environmentally-sound projects.
Additional funding of at least $1 billion a year has been pledged for the CDM. The only contentious issue revolves around whether it will also include "sink" projects - large forestry plantations in the South that would soak up a portion of the North's carbon dioxide emissions, characterised by Greenpeace as "responsibility dumping".
If the use of forestry as a "carbon sink" is included, it says the CDM "will simply become a mechanism for industrialised countries to avoid their reduction commitments at a rock-bottom price"; compared to the estimated $50-$100 per tonne for domestic emission reductions, sinks could be bought for as little as seven cents per tonne.
Without environmental safeguards, as even US-based NGOs have pointed out, a landowner in the Amazon could cut down pristine old-growth forest, plant eucalyptus on it and sell the new tree plantation as a "sink" to some country or company in the North looking for a cheap and easy way to meet its Kyoto obligations.
The only equitable way forward in tackling climate change is through "contraction and convergence" (C&C) - contraction of carbon dioxide emissions, which is an obvious imperative, and convergence over time towards equal per capita emission rights for all countries, whether rich or poor.
According to the New Economics Foundation, such an approach - endorsed in The Hague by President Chirac of France - would provide "a clear global framework for stabilisation of COs2] emissions". It sees C&C as "the only logical and fair basis on which to allocate emissions entitlements and reduction commitments".
In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, the Africa Group of developing countries said: "A globally agreed ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions can only be achieved by adopting the principle of per capita emissions rights." But if this became a goal, the cuts developed countries would have to make would be enormous.
That's one of the reasons why the equity issue is only creeping up the agenda. Associated with this reticence is a fear that it would become a major obstacle to the US Senate ratifying Kyoto; after all, in 1997, it passed a resolution - by 95 votes to nil - calling for simultaneous commitments by developing countries to cut emissions.
With some force, the poorer nations insist that the world's biggest polluters must be the first to take action - by reducing their own emissions and by providing financial and technological resources to enable countries in the South to do likewise, on a voluntary basis. For them, it is a simple question of "climate justice".