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Pre-COP ministerial family photo, 8 October 2026 (Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31/Flickr)
Staging Pacific meetings is the easy part – changing fossil-fuel policy at home is what matters to the region.
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Australia is performing climate diplomacy. But where is the leadership?Australia is performing climate diplomacy. But where is the leadership?
Australia’s Pacific Pre-COP (Opens in new window) has been declared an underwhelming start because only two leaders from outside the Pacific (Opens in new window) accepted the invitation to attend. That misses the point entirely. Pre-COPs have never been designed to attract a parade of world leaders. They have traditionally been technical and preparatory meetings: an opportunity to work through negotiating positions, build consensus and advertise the coming COP. They were never intended to rival the main event.
So the question should not be why more leaders did not come to Fiji, but why Australia is struggling to demonstrate climate leadership when it has been given such an extraordinary opportunity to do so. And the answer is uncomfortable: Australia is performing climate diplomacy while simultaneously undermining its credibility as a climate leader. The Pacific knows the difference.
Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Feleti Teo has previously described continued fossil-fuel expansion by countries such as Australia as a “death sentence (Opens in new window)” for his country. Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has called for fossil-fuel exporters to reduce supply (Opens in new window) as the world transitions to clean energy. Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu has likewise urged Australia to stop approving new (Opens in new window) fossil-fuel projects. These are not abstract policy disagreements.
For countries already confronting rising seas, coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion and destructive climate events, Australia’s continued expansion of coal and gas is difficult to reconcile with its claim to be a Pacific climate partner.And that contradiction was sitting in the room at Pre-COP. Australia’s performance of climate leadership is in wanting to be a bridge (Opens in new window) between the Pacific and the developed world, while continuing to expand the very industry that Pacific leaders are telling us threatens their survival.
This is where the fixation on the Pre-COP guest list (Opens in new window) becomes particularly revealing. We have somehow come to measure climate diplomacy by the number of powerful people we can persuade to attend a conference. But perhaps that is because climate diplomacy itself has become performative. COPs are no longer simply places where governments negotiate. They are enormous ecosystems of diplomacy, finance, investment, technology, consulting, lobbying, advocacy and corporate networking.
There is a difference between business being part of climate action and climate action becoming organised around business.
Of course, business has an role to play in the transition. The scale of investment required to decarbonise economies cannot be delivered by governments alone. But there is a difference between business being part of climate action and climate action becoming organised around business. At COP30 in Belém, fossil-fuel lobbyists (Opens in new window) reportedly outnumbered the delegations of almost every country. COPs now routinely attract thousands of corporate representatives, consultants, financiers and industry advocates alongside governments and civil society. Climate change has become big business.
Losing the bid to host COP31 (Opens in new window) was supposed to be a disappointment. Instead, Australia secured something arguably more consequential: the presidency of the COP31 negotiations (Opens in new window), while Türkiye hosts the physical conference in Antalya. The Pacific Pre-COP was part of that arrangement. In other words, Australia has been handed a remarkable diplomatic opportunity. It can use its position to put Pacific priorities at the centre of global climate negotiations: adaptation, accessible climate finance, loss and damage, energy transition, ocean health and the protection of 1.5°C (Opens in new window). But it cannot do that through diplomacy alone.
Tuvalu Prime Minister Feleti Teo alongside Australia's Anthony Albanese at the Pre-COP talks (@AlboMP/X)
Leadership requires alignment between what we say internationally and what we do domestically. The Pacific does not need Australia to attract more leaders to a conference. It needs Australia to use its influence to recognise that climate finance is not charity but responsibility. Australia should drive an agenda to acknowledge that adaptation cannot substitute indefinitely for mitigation and that a clean-energy transition cannot coexist for the long-term with continued fossil-fuel expansion.
Australia must stop confusing being a host with being a leader. The Pre-COP was never supposed to be COP. It was supposed to help prepare for it. Stop judging Australia’s performance by the guest list and start judging it by what happens next, because the real test of Australia’s COP31 moment will not be how many leaders it can get into a room. It will be whether Australia is prepared to lead when leadership requires something more difficult than diplomacy: changing course itself.
About the author
Larelle Bossi
Dr Larelle Bossi is an ocean ethicist working on values-led ocean governance, with a focus on the Pacific and global ocean policy.
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