The government says its plan to host a climate summit in Fiji will direct global eyes on the Pacific’s fight against rising seas. But will anyone show up?
By Ryan Cropp, Nicola Smith
In 2019, during then-prime minister Scott Morrison’s visit to Tuvalu, a low-lying nation on the front lines of climate change-induced sea level rises, his deputy, Michael McCormack, rather indelicately summed up Australia’s general response to the Pacific Islands’ existential concerns.
“I … get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector,” he said. “They’ll continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit.”
The remarks were of little use to Morrison, who was attempting to placate criticism of Australia’s fossil fuel economy – and hold back the region’s potential drift towards China – with a $500 million(US$354.43 million) grant for adaptation measures. According to Tuvalu’s former prime minister Enele Sopoaga, the message was “take the money … then shut up about climate change”.
Seven years later, those hostilities have been turned down a notch, though the risk of another rupture has not gone away. In October, Australia – one of the world’s top coal and gas producers – will host a climate summit in Fiji and Tuvalu, at a cost to taxpayers of $50 million (US$35.45 million), in what Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says is an effort to bring global attention to the Pacific’s plight.
The summit, which is the centrepiece of a broader $150 million(US$106.32 million) Pacific package, is the result of the Albanese government’s shift in approach to Pacific relations, which is built on a conspicuous public embrace of the region’s climate prodding, and a bet that the green transition can be an economic and diplomatic boon for Australia.
The risk for the government is in the gap between what the Pacific wants and what can reasonably be delivered. Among the region’s key demands, for example, are an end to new fossil fuel expansion and a non-negotiable global commitment to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
The Fiji event will deliver neither. It is effectively a consolation prize – a minor bureaucratic curtain raiser to the United Nations’ huge annual climate jamboree, known as COP, which Australia had hoped to host before its increasingly half-hearted bid was scuppered by an intransigent Turkish counterbid last November.
In exchange for standing down, Australia secured the Pacific pre-summit, and Bowen a top negotiating role. Worryingly for the government, though, it has so far been unable to convince any heads of state from outside the Pacific to commit to attend, despite Bowen’s declared intention to upgrade the pre-COP to a leader-level event.
The difficulties are partly to do with inter-governmental disputes between the climate change and foreign affairs departments, which have dogged the bid since the beginning. Bowen’s department is understandably the most enthusiastic about COP, but it’s DFAT that is responsible for wrangling leaders to the event.
The Turks, too, have proven to be a roadblock after they announced they would host their own leaders event before the full COP summit in Antalya in November. In the midst of a packed conference calendar, the chances of getting key world leaders to show up to two climate events on opposite sides of the globe are not great.
The government hopes some may still show up, but it is unlikely they will be from G7 countries. Either way, it is threatening to be a major diplomatic embarrassment for Australia, whose promises to the Pacific on COP have effectively muffled the region’s criticism of Australia’s fossil fuel expansions in recent years.
A New Zealand foreign affairs department spokeswoman said the government had yet to confirm who it would send. According to diplomatic sources speaking on condition of anonymity, there is a strong chance that even some Pacific leaders will skip the event if no world leaders show up.
Wesley Morgan, a research associate with the Institute for Climate Risk and Response at UNSW, said there had been real disappointment in the Pacific to see the full COP summit conceded to Turkey, but the precursor event would still encourage a “convergence of interest” between Australia and the region.
“It is well short of the sort of global influence that we could have expected if Australia and the Pacific had hosted COP31 in the region. So this is something of a consolation prize in lieu of not hosting the UN climate talks in Australia and the Pacific,” he said.
“[But] this is a crisis that is impacting Australia as much as it is impacting Tuvalu, and so that huge gap between Australia’s interests and the Pacific’s interests really is starting to close.”
The domestic politics are even thornier for Bowen. The country’s conservative political parties have abandoned any interest in climate policy, and since Australia secured the summit, have repeatedly demanded – cynically, if not unfairly – that Bowen explain how Australia’s interests are being served by its $150 million(US$106.32 million) price tag.
His answer, it seems, is that it is basically a more effective version of Morrison’s 2019 bribe. Speaking at the National Press Club last week, Bowen said the Albanese government’s advocacy on climate change had turned around Australia’s relationship with the region, where the impacts of sea level rises were “the number one, two and three issue”.
“They look to Australia for leadership, and under this government, we reciprocate with action,” he said. “I’ve been to several COPs. The issues of the Pacific have not been front and centre. That’s the unvarnished truth. We think at least at this COP they should be and they will be.”
But with very little domestic interest in the plan, a political climate not amenable to an increase in climate policy ambition, and a prospect of Pacific disappointment with the outcome, the real risk is that geopolitically, Australia eventually ends up right back where it started.
In 2022, when Albanese’s Labor opposition announced its intention to bid for the COP31 summit, the politics of climate were markedly different. Joe Biden was in the White House pushing for a global green industrial transformation, and his government was putting the squeeze on allies to increase their ambition on emissions cuts.
In Australia, the Morrison government followed suit, securing an expensive commitment from the conservative wing of the Coalition to back a target of net zero emissions by 2050, which the prime minister then took to the Glasgow COP summit in 2021 – the high-water mark of modern global climate politics.
In the Pacific, meanwhile, China had become more assertive in its diplomatic efforts to curry favour with Australia’s strategic partners, including the Solomon Islands, which signed a security cooperation agreement with China in April 2022.
In that environment, Labor’s case to use COP as a means to push a more assertive posture on climate policy in the region seemed like a no-brainer, both as a geopolitical tool and a wedge against a conservative government that appeared increasingly out of touch with global trends.
In a speech to the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in Fiji just four days after becoming foreign minister, Penny Wong presented the proposal to co-host a future UN Conference of the Parties with Pacific Island countries as an imperative to fighting an “existential threat”.
“I understand that – under past governments – Australia has neglected its responsibility to act on climate change. Ignoring the calls of our Pacific family to act,” she said. “I want to assure you that we have heard you.”
George Carter, the head of the Department of Pacific Affairs at the ANU Pacific Institute and a vocal supporter of the COP bid, said that regardless of the outcome of the bid, the process had improved relations between Australia and the Pacific on climate questions.
“We now have a situation where cabinet ministers from Australia and the Pacific WhatsApp each other. Our officials are connected. We’ve never had this level of communication,” he said. “More importantly, our societies, the community here in Australia and in the Pacific, they’re naturally now talking about and working on climate solutions,” he said.
“If we don’t get the hosting, don’t worry about it. We’ve already attained what we wanted.”
Others are more circumspect. Since the re-election of U.S President Donald Trump in 2024, the direction of travel in global climate politics has become increasingly bifurcated, with the world now effectively split into two clear camps based on their level of enthusiasm towards the green transition. Australia, a fossil fuel economy with a stated goal to decarbonise, seemingly straddles both.
Lachlan Strahan, a former senior diplomat who served as high commissioner to the Solomon Islands from 2020 to 2022, said that while it made sense to send “a signal to the Pacific that we are going to put our shoulder to the wheel”, there were serious questions about the wisdom of the timing of such a major financial and logistical commitment when the US was “disengaged and hostile”.
“Hosting a COP is incredibly expensive, and the organisational financial load is enormous. And so, if you’re going to host a COP, you better be damn sure you really want to do it. Secondly, you’ve got to be sure you’ve actually really got the resources. And then thirdly, you’ve got to think, if we do host, where is it going to land?
“Even if some of the broader settings are difficult on climate change, you can still make some progress on technical issues, but there’s no doubt it’s much harder work if you’ve got a country as important as the United States who … it’s not just that they’ve stepped aside; they’re actually playing a kind of spoiling, destructive role.”
Strahan said it did matter to the Pacific that Australia was pressing ahead with the COP, but it always had an eye on more direct efforts to limit climate change, such as a ban on new coal and gas projects.
“Of course, the Pacific would say [the COP] is only part of the story. Australia, we want to see you taking real action to curb your own emissions,” he said. “There’s no doubt when Australia approves new hydrocarbon projects, especially new coal mines, that is not well received in the Pacific because it looks like we are not taking enough action.
“I think the current government policies, where they are trying to drive change, is appreciated in the Pacific. But there’s no doubt when we do things like approving the extension at the North West Shelf [gas project in the Pilbara], people then kind of arc up.”
And while it is true that Australia is partly leveraging the COP process to lock in its role as the primary economic and security partner to the Pacific, in Strahan’s view, the China dimension was only a “backstory.”
“The frontline story is still driven by climate change,” he said. “One thing that I would always say to people: we shouldn’t see the Pacific as a China story. It’s a Pacific story with a Chinese subplot.”
The uncertain outcomes of the summit have naturally increased scrutiny of its overall cost to Australian taxpayers, particularly from the conservative parties, which have recently committed themselves to dismantling almost all the ad hoc climate policy architecture Australia has put in place since the late Morrison era.
The government has put the overall cost of hosting around 2000 climate bureaucrats in Fiji at $147.8 million(US$104.80 million) (set aside in a budget measure titled “Standing with our partners in the Pacific”), which includes the costs of guest accommodation at Fijian resorts, a smaller but more logistically complex side trip to Tuvalu to see one of the world’s most at-risk countries up close, and 70 full-time equivalent staff (28 of which will work in the newly established “Office of the Presidency”).
The federal government has locked in several island resorts for summit guests.
The $150 million(US$106.32 million) is unlikely to be the limit of Australia’s financial contributions to Pacific climate responses. In January, the government announced it would spend $50 million (US$35.45 million) helping individual nations transition away from fossil fuels. Australia is also likely to contribute to a new global climate adaptation fund for the Pacific, slated to be discussed at the pre-COP itself.
Bowen has defended the cost of the summit and his international travel as head of COP negotiations as a necessary investment in Australia-Pacific relations, one that gives it outsized influence over global climate policy.
To be fair to Bowen, it’s also not the largest sum of taxpayer money that has been thrown at the issue. Morrison took $500 million with him to the Pacific Islands Forum in 2019 as part of what he called the “Pacific step up”, a broad regional finance package to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
At the 2016 PIF, his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull announced a four-year, $300 million (US$212 million) Pacific climate change support package. Two years earlier, even Tony Abbott, a well-established critic of the green revolution, committed $200 million(US$141.76 million) to a global climate fund. That followed a $150 million (US$106.36 million) Pacific climate package announced by Kevin Rudd at the 2009 PIF.
Coalition foreign affairs spokesman Ted O’Brien said that while climate change mattered a lot to the region, Pacific leaders had told him they had more pressing concerns with drug and health issues.
“For governments confronting an emerging HIV crisis, violent crime and gaps in basic services due to an emerging drug problem, I understand why the issue of drugs is of most immediate concern,” he said.
“Climate change was discussed during my visit, raised by me or on occasion by others. No one raised net zero, specifically. While climate change was not the number-one issue raised, it is nevertheless an issue of significant importance to the region.
“I explained the Coalition’s practical approach to reducing emissions, evidenced by our own track record in government. This was well received.”
Strahan said regardless of the outcome, Australia needed to show the Pacific that it had a “strong, coherent climate policy” that would not shift depending on who was in government.
“Australia has been unable to sit on a strong, coherent climate policy, and depending on which side of politics has been in power, will jump back and forth. So, of course, the Pacific have watched that, and that’s been aggravating, demoralising,” he said.
“The Pacific has just been crying out for Australia to do something domestically and to play a leadership role,” he said. “We need to be able to say to the Pacific that we really get it,” he said.
Ryan CroppEnergy and climate reporterRyan Cropp is an energy and climate reporter at The Australian Financial Review based in the Canberra bureau.
Nicola SmithCanberra bureau chiefNicola Smith is The Australian Financial Review’s Canberra bureau chief. She was formerly a foreign correspondent covering Asia and the European Union and joined the Financial Review in 2025. Reach Nicola securely on Signal @niccijsmith.03
