The world was drawing a line between talking and doing on climate change in 2026. That was the message from Fiji. Speaking at a press conference in the final hours of the four-day pre-COP meeting in the Pacific, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Simon Stiell warned “every nation is on the frontlines of the climate crisis” and explained how “every economy is already getting hammered”, especially with El Nino “upping the ante and super charging these climate costs.” Anyone who may have doubted him had only to walk out of the room and across the road to the golf course. What should have been a sea of green ringed by palm trees, had turned into a scene more familiar to mainland Australia in the height of summer thanks to lower than average rainfall associated with the monster El Nino.
Having established the stakes, Stiell called for action: the upcoming COP31 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, he said, would be a test of the world’s willingness to “convert promises into more real-world results.”
“We spent ten years negotiating the outcomes from Paris,” Stiell said. “The Paris Agreement, the rule book, is now complete, and that was the very clear signal when we left Belém COP 30 last year. There will always be technical issues, political issues that need to be negotiated. Negotiations are at the center of process, but that very clear shift now to implementation is clear.”
Stiell’s rhetoric—consistent with repeated messaging from the UNFCCC over the last few months—was reinforced by Fiji’s Climate Minister Lynda Tabuya, Turkish Environment Minister Murat Kurum, and Australian Climate Minister Chris Bowen. Each represented the motley collection of governments running the show in Fiji, and together they spoke about the need for governments to actually step up. Tabuya—who has spoken previously about how her village has been partly washed away by rising oceans—reported on the commitments her government had received for climate finance. Bowen spoke about the need for electrification. Kurum said there could be no more excuses. No one mentioned fossil fuels.
The COP process is typically where the politics of climate change collide with the scientific reality and in some ways that was unconventionally true of the four-day pre-COP meeting in Fiji. Drilled was among the 4000 or so registered attendees from ministerial delegations, civil society and media on hand to witness events play out at the “little COP”.
The highlight came when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew into Fiji on Tuesday to lead a contingent to Tuvalu. What was supposed to be a centrepiece of the event ended up somewhat more dour as only 13 national leaders joined Albanese, most from the Pacific itself. Once on the ground, Tuvaluan leaders consistently reinforced a single message: commitment to a phaseout of oil, gas and coal was non-negotiable and must be defended. Pacific leaders have been repeating a similar message again and again over the last several years. There were, of course, other announcements: pledges from Australia to join an initiative to get 300 million solar panels on rooftops by 2030, offers of financial support to Tuvalu from Papua New Guinea, a few million dollars pledged for the Pacific Resilience Fund by the governments of the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and the UK. Other announcements included plans to make access to this sort of finance easier and confirmation that COP31 in Antalya would conclude with a Presidential cover decision—a summary drafted by the hosts that is not negotiated over word-by-word like official COP agreements.
None of this was headline-grabbing but what made the gathering in Fiji interesting was both the context of the meeting and the unusual spectacle on offer. Pre-COP is not normally a significant affair. Officially, it is a meeting about a meeting—the gathering which sets the agenda. This particular meeting in October 2026 was different in that it came with its own stakes. For a start, it was happening at a time when the Trump administration’s “might makes right” approach to global affairs and efforts to establish “carbon dominance” mean multilateralism is under strain. Naturally, cynicism has spiked higher than in previous years, making it heroic for anyone to have hope in the ability for multilateral diplomacy to solve any problem, let alone climate change. There was also the added dimension, easily lost on those from outside the region, that the meeting was taking place in the Pacific at a time of increased geopolitical competition between China and the United States. And then there were the regional tensions between Australia, a major fossil fuel exporter, and its Pacific neighbours, who are heavily reliant on Australian foreign aid, over the existential threat posed by climate change.
Some of these tensions have played out in recent years. The Pacific had pushed for Australia to host COP31 in Adelaide, but it was not to be—the official position of the Australian government, right up to the bitter end, was that “negotiations were ongoing”, even as the Turkish delegation could be heard celebrating and Bloomberg news reported the bid was lost. Under the compromise Australia hammered out with Turkey, Turkey maintained control of the action agenda and served as host, but Australia would hold pre-COP in Fiji and take responsibility for running negotiations. It has widely been considered something of a devil’s bargain in that Australia will be blamed for failure and denied glory in success.
Pre-COP may have been a consolation prize, but the Pacific nonetheless embraced the opportunity. It is rare for the machinery of the COP process to head this far south, and civil society from Australia and across the Pacific made a point of showing up. The setting for the meet-up was Denerau Island. In 1988, a Japanese developer began buying up parcels of land before bulldozing 850 acres of mangrove forest to build Denarau with its telling geography: there is one road in, and one road out. On one side of the island lies the Pacific ocean, offering stunning views of the setting sun, on the other a deep canal. It would be too easy to sneer at the obvious symbolism of holding such a meeting on a resort island built atop reclaimed land. But there were more mundane logistical drivers at play too: Since its construction, Denerau has become an engine of the local economy and was best positioned to support a sudden influx of a few thousand curious foreigners, and a gaggle of ministerial delegations.
Zooming out, what the pre-COP meeting in Fiji offered is a reversal of the traditional dynamic that normally underpins the COP process. Rather than the Pacific having to spend a fortune to send a few representatives vast distances to be ignored, the pre-COP offered an opportunity for representatives from developed countries to travel to the Pacific and speak with the people whose homes were at risk of being drowned by the ocean. Moreover, Professor Wesley Morgan from the University of Sydney said the event was important to Australia, which used it to signal to the Pacific that it was capable of championing their concerns about climate change.
“This whole event is as much as anything about Australia’s public diplomacy in the region and less about genuine climate action,” Morgan said. “It’s more about leveraging climate to cement Australia’s place as partner to the Pacific.”
“The thing to understand is that the only time Australia ever meaningfully engages with the Pacific, is when it’s been trying to keep the other buggers out. In the 1890s it was to keep the French and Germans out so they didn’t get a naval presence. In 2022 Solomon Islands signed a bilateral security deal with China and Australia freaked out. They have since signed five bilateral treaties in the region, which is a genuine diplomatic triumph.”
“Australia has slowly realised that to be a partner in this region you have to act on the key security issue which is climate change.”
It was a dimension that speaks to the confluence between geopolitics, national security and climate change at this moment—concerns that have only heightened after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, prompting the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a recognition that two-fifths of global shipping is devoted exclusively to the movement of fossil fuels. These were big conversations with global implications, but it was difficult to get this from the coverage in the Australian media, which with notable exceptions, largely treated the event as a $20m jaunt at public expense. One headline in The Daily Mail accused Australian climate minister and COP Co-Chair for Negotiations Chris Bowen of having fallen asleep during the trip to Tuvalu. The implied accusation was that he was too tired from skiving off work back in Australia as he sunned himself poolside with cocktails. In truth, the plane to Tuvalu left at 4am that morning, and returned at 6pm that night for the final plenary that ran into the evening, after several days of early starts and late nights—an extraordinarily brutal day even for the notoriously driven Bowen. Even state broadcaster The ABC dabbled in rage-bait, with a headline on one analysis asking whether pre-COP was a flop. A pre-COP has about as much capacity to flop as setting up chess pieces does: none. It either happens, or it doesn’t.
It was a missed opportunity given there remains much to be critical of. For a start, Australia’s involvement in the COP process as president of negotiations has allowed the Australian government to export its particular brand of “climate hushing” onto the global stage. Domestically, the centre-left Labor government has long been anxious that too much action on climate change, too quickly will result in a backlash from the Australian public, and even within its own ranks thanks to some unions who draw their membership from the coal and gas industries. The right wing of Australian politics, meanwhile, with its own relationships to oil, gas and coal producers, has no issues talking about climate change directly and have almost uniformly embraced climate denial as party policy partly because any managed phaseout of fossil fuels will inevitably devalue assets concentrated among the wealthiest. In response, the Labor government and the bureaucracy have avoided speaking directly to the Australian public about climate change, its causes or implications, and instead have preferred to discuss the issue through the proxy of electrification. The result has been a silence on any future plans regarding Australia’s fossil fuel production and export industries, and overwhelming focus on the holy trinity of rooftop solar, home batteries and electric vehicles.
The political logic behind this rests on the belief that an increasingly electrified economy will improve lives, crush demand and render fossil fuel infrastructure increasingly irrelevant so that oil, gas and coal is no longer as much of a political force and there emerges a broad coalition in favour of change. What this means in practice, however, is that Australia’s current political leadership has been silent on significant questions at a time when the political right has been all too willing to fill the vacuum. For example, when the International Court of Justice delivered its advisory opinion on the rights of states with respect to climate change (ICJAO), Australia stressed how it had supported the student movement and Pacific governments when they sought to bring the matter to the UN General Assembly, and then on to the highest court in the world. What it never addressed was how Australian lawyers argued against the case made by the Pacific and lost. It has now been a year since the ICJAO decision, and the Australian government has not directly addressed this decision nor the implications of the decision for the country’s growing fossil fuel export sector for a domestic audience. This is despite Australia now serving as COP Co-President for Negotiations.
The extent of this evasiveness is remarkable. Drilled contacted the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) prior to the start of pre-COP in Fiji to ask whether a long-running review of the decision had been completed. DCCEEW responded on the final day of the conference, after the final leaders’ press conference.
“Australia continues to carefully consider the Court’s opinion, alongside the views addressed in our submissions to the Court,” a spokesperson said. “Australia’s explanation of vote delivered in the UN General Assembly clarified that our support for the resolution welcoming the ICJ advisory opinion should not be read as Australia’s agreement with every aspect of the opinion itself.”
Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and one of several Pacifika university students who led the campaign that resulted in the ICJAO, said it was obvious Australia was suffering under the weight of its climate contradictions.
“The law is clear, the science is clear, but when you measure the conduct of certain states like Australia, they don’t hold up to that standard,” Prasad said. “And for Australia to be co-president of negotiations, that means it has to first reconcile that and, I think, tell the world, and tell specifically the Pacific Island countries how it intends to reconcile it, how it tends to push for stronger action that’s grounded in law and science at COP31 as president of negotiations.”
The disconnect between words and actions go to questions about Australian authority, credibility and weight in any upcoming international negotiations on climate change, especially at a time when it continues to approve new oil, gas and coal projects. Sometimes the contrast is jarring. During a recent visit to Palau ahead of pre-COP in Fiji, for instance, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese insisted “Australia is highly regarded when it comes to climate change” and that “the Pacific Leaders have respect for the position that we’ve taken.” On the same day, back home in Australia, Albanese’s industry minister was photographed smiling while turning the valve on a new gas project in the Beetaloo Basin.
In another development during the pre-COP process itself, Australia’s High Court ruled that planning authorities had to consider the Scope 3 emissions that would be generated when deciding whether to approve the new MACH coal mine. It was a ruling whose significance is yet to be determined, but the symbolic result was compelling. Asked whether the government had any comment regarding the decision during the final press conference on the last day, Chris Bowen said only that it was “the law of the land” and that he had no further comment.
Former leader of the Australian Greens and Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Adam Bandt said his organization understood the diplomatic realities of working within a consensus model, but that there is plainly a “disconnect” between the way Australia in particular speaks about climate change when overseas compared to at home.
“You can’t say one thing abroad and do another thing at home,” Bandt said. “Increasingly, we live in a world where people are consuming global media. The ability to go to one country and say one thing, and then come back home and do another is no longer there.
“You can’t keep saying one thing and doing another, and I think increasingly there’s nowhere to hide on exports.”
With the meeting in Antalya less than four weeks away, Australia appears to be taking its communications strategy global by encouraging a focus on electrification during the COP process. It is an interesting political play in a process that remains notoriously deadlocked thanks, in part, to fossil fuel-producing nations in both the developed and developing world that refuse to discuss the practicalities of a managed phaseout of oil, gas and coal. So far both Turkey and Australia have sought to prioritize electrification and green industrialization that, it is hoped, may find some traction out of a sense of pragmatism given the complications created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
It remains to be seen, however, if Australia has enough diplomatic clout to meaningfully grapple with the other major issue that threatens the legitimacy of the COP process: finance. From the very beginning of the UNFCCC and the COP process, it has been an accepted principle that developed nations caused climate change and have enjoyed decades of economic growth made possible by unconstrained emissions. Now that climate harms are beginning to mount, the bill is coming due and these developed countries are obliged under international frameworks to help finance the transition in developing countries. To date, however, these countries have often talked big, but spent little. With nationalist parties at home ready to use any cash transfer for domestic political advantage and other complexities, there has been little willingness to actually stump up the cash.
With the United Nations Environment Program warning that the world has breached the 1.5C threshold, it’s unclear how events will play out in Turkey. What is clear is that the hosts appear to be well aware of the fragility of the moment. During his opening address on Monday night, Australian climate minister Chris Bowen went so far as to take the dangerous step of daring to hope.
“I’m very confident that COP 31 will be remembered as one in which, in a difficult environment, the world took a forward step,” he said. “That, in a difficult environment, the world said multilateralism matters more than ever before. And in a difficult environment, a region which has not had its voices heard like the Pacific, has had its voices heard.”
