A day trip to Tuvalu for world leaders, hosted by Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen, is proving less of a drawcard than the pair had hoped.
An RSVP from Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados (population 282,000) brings the list of Pacific climate forum attendees to six, including Antigua-Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Maldives, East Timor and Thailand. The lack of interest is telling. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the great UN experiment in climate diplomacy, is more than 30 years old. Yet global emissions are more than 60 per cent higher, the Paris ambitions are slipping beyond reach and enthusiasm among the nations expected to pay for it all is fading.
Bowen, as president of negotiations, explicitly billed the Pacific prelude to COP31 as a chance for leaders to observe the effects of climate change first-hand. Australian officials have made elaborate arrangements for a fly-in, fly-out visit to Tuvalu from the conference’s base in Fiji. The single runway at Tuvalu’s only airport is unfenced and doubles as a soccer pitch. The decision to confine the visit to a day trip is prudent if TripAdvisor’s accommodation list is anything to go by.
Reviews of one prominent hotel, for example, are not encouraging. “Women should expect misogynous exclamations and insults about your stupidity,” reads one. “We were even yelled at while the owner had a knife in his hands.”
Tuvalu is home to around 11,000 people and occupies a combined land area no greater than the City of Sydney. Most Tuvaluans would rather be elsewhere. Last year, 8700 of them applied for Australian residency. Tuvalu’s entire economy is worth less than $100m a year. Australia’s $46m aid contribution this year is almost half that figure.
Yet Tuvalu has achieved international fame beyond its size and economic significance as the Potemkin Village of climate change, a drowning island “on the extreme frontlines of the global climate emergency”, as UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres described it on social media in 2019.
After several decades of this kind of hyperbole, it comes as little surprise to discover that the rising bathwater theory is strongly contested. For a start, Tuvalu is not a fixed lump of rock waiting passively to be swallowed by a rising ocean. It is an archipelago of nine low-lying coral atolls, dynamic formations built from sediment continually rearranged by waves and currents. A peer-reviewed 2018 paper in Nature Communications found that sea level around Tuvalu had indeed risen by some 15 centimetres between 1971 and 2014. Yet obtusely the country’s total land area increased by 2.9 per cent.
For the benefit of the Climate Change Authority’s misinformation police, this column is not suggesting that climate change is not real or that investors in Tuvaluan real estate should dismiss the risks of coastal flooding on land close to sea level. It is merely explaining why an international leader with an ounce of scepticism travelling to Tuvalu to find irrefutable evidence of a future global catastrophe is likely to return home disappointed.
It is too early to tell whether we have passed the moment of peak climate alarmism, when political certainty begins to retreat, and politicians quietly detach themselves from claims they once treated as beyond dispute.
Yet we have surely reached peak IPCC: the point at which the elaborate apparatus of conferences, targets, models and acronyms ceases to be regarded as a credible solution to climate change.
Many are now questioning the mantra that developing countries like Tuvalu will bear the heaviest costs. The cost paid by developed economies has been substantial. Transferring emissions from Europe to India and China has come at the cost of industrial might. Energy has been made scarce. Electricity systems, except in a handful of countries with abundant stored hydro reserves or nuclear power, have become prohibitively expensive to run.
The height of enthusiasm for a UN-mediated response to climate change was reached 10 years ago with the signing of the Paris Agreement. It was not, as popularly imagined, an agreement to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 but merely to “pursue efforts” to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C.
The subsequent lack of enthusiasm is apparent from the latest National Development Commitments, most of which were lodged more than a year after the February 2025 deadline. Iran is among 50 signatories yet to update its NDC. Yet the Iranian regime may well have done us a service by reminding us we are not yet ready to abandon fossil fuels. Only a handful of NDCs are judged consistent with 1.5C. Whatever their rhetoric, most developed nations have quietly consigned the Paris ambition to the too-hard basket.
Bowen has assumed the presidency of COP31 negotiations just as the rest of the world appears to be losing interest. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Bowen fronts up to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio seeking to tap him for the Trump administration’s contribution.
Meanwhile, the Fiji/Tuvalu gathering has received next to no coverage in the global press. Reuters reported the announcement of the dates and venue, but that is about all.
The PM’s tetchiness last week when questioned about the pre-COP gathering at the Pacific Islands Forum strongly suggests he is aware of the backlash that will follow, not just in Australia but among Pacific leaders, for whom climate finance must look rather like winning the lottery.
By overpromising and underdelivering, the Albanese government risks undoing much of the good work it has done through conventional diplomacy in the Pacific. Belatedly, Australia must separate its climate policy from its strategic objectives in the region. It should reframe the Pacific gathering as what these meetings once were: a gathering of bureaucrats and second-rank ministers, and contrive some vaguely useful purpose for it other than debt collection. It might start by giving it a better name than “pre-COP” – ideally one in English, rather than the bureaucratic tongue peculiar to the UN climate process that Bowen has learned to speak with such fluency.
Climate diplomacy has developed a language increasingly intelligible only to its practitioners. Like Gaelic, it may yet survive, but only among people paid to speak it.
An RSVP from Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados (population 282,000) brings the list of Pacific climate forum attendees to six, including Antigua-Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Maldives, East Timor and Thailand. The lack of interest is telling. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the great UN experiment in climate diplomacy, is more than 30 years old. Yet global emissions are more than 60 per cent higher, the Paris ambitions are slipping beyond reach and enthusiasm among the nations expected to pay for it all is fading.
Bowen, as president of negotiations, explicitly billed the Pacific prelude to COP31 as a chance for leaders to observe the effects of climate change first-hand. Australian officials have made elaborate arrangements for a fly-in, fly-out visit to Tuvalu from the conference’s base in Fiji. The single runway at Tuvalu’s only airport is unfenced and doubles as a soccer pitch. The decision to confine the visit to a day trip is prudent if TripAdvisor’s accommodation list is anything to go by.
Reviews of one prominent hotel, for example, are not encouraging. “Women should expect misogynous exclamations and insults about your stupidity,” reads one. “We were even yelled at while the owner had a knife in his hands.”
Tuvalu is home to around 11,000 people and occupies a combined land area no greater than the City of Sydney. Most Tuvaluans would rather be elsewhere. Last year, 8700 of them applied for Australian residency. Tuvalu’s entire economy is worth less than $100m a year. Australia’s $46m aid contribution this year is almost half that figure.
Yet Tuvalu has achieved international fame beyond its size and economic significance as the Potemkin Village of climate change, a drowning island “on the extreme frontlines of the global climate emergency”, as UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres described it on social media in 2019.
After several decades of this kind of hyperbole, it comes as little surprise to discover that the rising bathwater theory is strongly contested. For a start, Tuvalu is not a fixed lump of rock waiting passively to be swallowed by a rising ocean. It is an archipelago of nine low-lying coral atolls, dynamic formations built from sediment continually rearranged by waves and currents. A peer-reviewed 2018 paper in Nature Communications found that sea level around Tuvalu had indeed risen by some 15 centimetres between 1971 and 2014. Yet obtusely the country’s total land area increased by 2.9 per cent.
For the benefit of the Climate Change Authority’s misinformation police, this column is not suggesting that climate change is not real or that investors in Tuvaluan real estate should dismiss the risks of coastal flooding on land close to sea level. It is merely explaining why an international leader with an ounce of scepticism travelling to Tuvalu to find irrefutable evidence of a future global catastrophe is likely to return home disappointed.
It is too early to tell whether we have passed the moment of peak climate alarmism, when political certainty begins to retreat, and politicians quietly detach themselves from claims they once treated as beyond dispute.
Yet we have surely reached peak IPCC: the point at which the elaborate apparatus of conferences, targets, models and acronyms ceases to be regarded as a credible solution to climate change.
Many are now questioning the mantra that developing countries like Tuvalu will bear the heaviest costs. The cost paid by developed economies has been substantial. Transferring emissions from Europe to India and China has come at the cost of industrial might. Energy has been made scarce. Electricity systems, except in a handful of countries with abundant stored hydro reserves or nuclear power, have become prohibitively expensive to run.
The height of enthusiasm for a UN-mediated response to climate change was reached 10 years ago with the signing of the Paris Agreement. It was not, as popularly imagined, an agreement to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 but merely to “pursue efforts” to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C.
The subsequent lack of enthusiasm is apparent from the latest National Development Commitments, most of which were lodged more than a year after the February 2025 deadline. Iran is among 50 signatories yet to update its NDC. Yet the Iranian regime may well have done us a service by reminding us we are not yet ready to abandon fossil fuels. Only a handful of NDCs are judged consistent with 1.5C. Whatever their rhetoric, most developed nations have quietly consigned the Paris ambition to the too-hard basket.
Bowen has assumed the presidency of COP31 negotiations just as the rest of the world appears to be losing interest. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Bowen fronts up to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio seeking to tap him for the Trump administration’s contribution.
Meanwhile, the Fiji/Tuvalu gathering has received next to no coverage in the global press. Reuters reported the announcement of the dates and venue, but that is about all.
The PM’s tetchiness last week when questioned about the pre-COP gathering at the Pacific Islands Forum strongly suggests he is aware of the backlash that will follow, not just in Australia but among Pacific leaders, for whom climate finance must look rather like winning the lottery.
By overpromising and underdelivering, the Albanese government risks undoing much of the good work it has done through conventional diplomacy in the Pacific. Belatedly, Australia must separate its climate policy from its strategic objectives in the region. It should reframe the Pacific gathering as what these meetings once were: a gathering of bureaucrats and second-rank ministers, and contrive some vaguely useful purpose for it other than debt collection. It might start by giving it a better name than “pre-COP” – ideally one in English, rather than the bureaucratic tongue peculiar to the UN climate process that Bowen has learned to speak with such fluency.
Climate diplomacy has developed a language increasingly intelligible only to its practitioners. Like Gaelic, it may yet survive, but only among people paid to speak it.