The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, made a whistle-stop visit to Turkey on Friday night in an attempt to reach a deal for Australia to host tens of thousands of people at a major UN climate summit in 2026.
Bowen visited the Turkish capital, Ankara, on the way to the Cop29 climate conference in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku. The two countries are vying to host Cop31, and the Albanese government hopes Turkey will exit the race in time for an announcement before next week.
The last-minute detour, confirmed on Friday by Bowen’s office, came as he prepared to take a central role in the second week in Azerbaijan, having been asked to co-lead negotiations between climate and foreign ministers on the summit’s core issue of climate finance for poor and vulnerable countries.
Unlike Anthony Albanese, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, attended the leaders’ section of Cop29. In his address, he confirmed Turkey’s candidacy to host Cop31 and thanked countries that had supported the bid.
Hoping to host
Bidding to co-host a climate summit with Pacific nations was a Labor pledge before the 2022 federal election. Its diplomatic campaign has won support from several member nations of the Western European and Other States group that determine where the 2026 conference is held, but the final decision is made by consensus.
Some activists have argued Australia’s hosting bid would be a form of greenwashing given the country is one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters. Others have said it would bring a global spotlight to Pacific needs and that global pressure could help accelerate Australia’s move towards exporting renewable energy.
Addressing Cop29 this week, Tonga’s prime minister, Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, backed Australia’s bid, because it would be known as the “Pacific Cop”.
The president of Palau, Surangel Whipps, told the Guardian his country would “never pass up an opportunity to work with Australia on hosting what is the most important international forum for those of us on the frontline”. “The world needs a Pacific Cop with ambition at the very heart of it,” he said.
Observers in Azerbaijan said the bid would address an imbalance: a climate summit has not been held in the southern hemisphere for a decade.
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, the former Peruvian environment minister who hosted Cop20 in 2014 and is now with the WWF, said it made “perfect sense to bring the eyes of the world to a region on the frontline”.
The “awesome power of the Pacific voice” had been demonstrated in the late Marshall Islands minister Tony deBrum’s leadership role, he said, in the “high ambition coalition” of nations that helped secure the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Australian Dean Bialek, a former UN diplomat and Cop veteran, said it was “quite staggering to think we’ve now gone a full decade without a Cop south of the equator”. Thom Woodroofe, a senior international fellow at the Smart Energy Council who recently worked at the Australian embassy in Washington, said hosting would help Australia’s transition to “clean energy export superpower”.
South Australia has made a pitch for the conference if Australia’s bid is successful.
Who pays for climate finance?
A study published this week found developing countries, excluding China, would need US$1.3tn a year by 2035, and recommended that US$1tn a year be paid from 2030. It said that sum should be shared by wealthy countries, the private sector, multilateral development banks and new taxes, including potentially on aviation and shipping. Negotiations on a “new collective quantified goal” on climate finance moved slowly this week – some countries described the wording of a proposed deal released on Thursday as “unworkable”.
Developed countries have argued they met the existing goal of delivering US$100bn of climate finance a year, having reached nearly US$116bn in 2022. But Oxfam has estimated that nearly 70% of this was not funding, but loans that would need to be repaid, often at rates that benefited the rich.
Is Australia doing enough to help?
Josie Lee, from Oxfam Australia, said the Australian government had committed $3bn in climate funding for the five years to 2025, an average of $600m a year. This was far short of the $4bn a year the advocacy organisation calculated as Australia’s fair share, noting the funding had all come from the existing aid budget and rebadged as climate finance. Addressing climate breakdown had thus rarely been the primary funding objective, she said.
Countries at the talks have agreed the new finance deal will need to be much greater. Lee said the quality of the finance – whether it was new funding, accessible to small island states and the least developed countries, and designed to support gender and Indigenous rights – was just as important as the quantity. “They don’t just want [US]$500bn in loans,” Lee said.
She called the Australian government’s announcement this week – that it would support action in the region by guaranteeing up to US$200m for the Asian Development Bank to lend to Pacific and south-east Asian countries – “disappointing”.
“[They] have done little to cause the climate crisis, but are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, such as more severe storms and floods. It’s only fair that wealthy, highly polluting countries provide real support, and not debts they expect to be repaid,” she said.
On Friday, the Australian government committed $125m to improving energy security and power grid transition in the Pacific. Some of the money has been redirected from a Coalition funding commitment for an Indo-Pacific carbon offset scheme. The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said supporting Pacific countries to stop relying on imported fossil fuels would “enhance economic resilience, improve energy security and help them meet their climate goals”.
Bowen announced Australia would also join global declarations to develop hydrogen, and energy storage and grids.
