Australia has dropped its bid to host the COP31 climate talks. Here’s what happened – and what’s next
- Written by: Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney
At the last possible minute, Australia has backed away from its bid to host the United Nations COP31 climate summit next year in Adelaide alongside Pacific nations.
Under a compromise struck with rival bidder Turkey, the 2026 talks will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya. In return, Australia will shape the agenda and federal Minister for Climate and Energy Chris Bowen will preside over the two weeks of formal negotiations. The Pacific will host a pre-COP event ahead of the summit.
Struck in the final days of the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, the compromise deal comes as a bitter disappointment to many – including me. It follows three years of concerted Australian diplomacy to host the world’s biggest climate talks. The deal does salvage some important wins for Australia and the Pacific.
At a press conference in Brazil, Bowen said: “Obviously, it would be great if Australia could have it all. But we can’t have it all. This process works on consensus.” He described Australia’s role as COP President as a “significant concession” offered by Turkey.
Australia will have a central role to play over the next year in maintaining global momentum in shifting away from fossil fuels and accelerating the renewable rollout even faster. Pacific island countries also have a chance to shape summit outcomes and attract vital investment as they push to reach 100% renewables.
Bowen will be holding the gavel in Anatalya instead of Adelaide, but his workload will begin now. Australia will need to carry forward the agenda set in Brazil, where the COP30 presidency is working toward the first-ever global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
How did this happen?
The Australia-Pacific bid was widely favoured to win. Minister Bowen has effectively been auditioning to head the talks by taking on key roles in recent years.
What happened? Partly United Nations procedure and partly domestic politics.
The annual summit is rotated between five different UN country groupings.
In 2026, Australia’s grouping – “Western Europe and Other” has its turn. By convention, countries choose a host country by consensus. Australia’s bid had overwhelming support within our UN grouping, as 26 of 28 countries in the group backed it publicly.
But Turkey simply refused to give way. This was deeply frustrating for Bowen and Pacific island leaders. Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr called for Turkey to “clear the way” for an Australia-Pacific summit.
After withdrawing an earlier bid in 2020, Turkey’s leaders felt it was their turn. It’s not how the process formally works, but it meant Turkey wouldn’t give up.
For well over a year, Australian and Turkish diplomats engaged in drawn-out negotiations. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year and wrote to him in recent days to ask him to withdraw his bid. Bowen and Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently discussed the issue with their Turkish counterparts.
If neither Turkey or Australia had backed down this week, the talks would have reverted to Bonn, Germany, the home of the UN climate process. As negotiations reached a crunch point at COP30, Australia struck a deal.
The long-runnning saga took a domestic political toll. Internal support within the Labor government had reportedly dropped in recent months.
What does this mean for Australia?
The backdown is a significant economic and diplomatic blow. It’s a major loss for Adelaide especially. The South Australian government had estimated hosting the talks would be a A$500 million boon, from tourism receipts to a chance to attract vital investment for Australia’s ongoing energy transition and for future clean energy industries such as critical minerals and green iron.
UK government analysis of the 2021 Glasgow talks found the net benefit of hosting was double the cost, bringing around A$1 billion in benefits, including trade deals and foreign investment. Australia will miss out on much of this.
Having an Australian president of the COP31 talks is more than a consolation prize. Minister Bowen will hold the pen when the world decides a path forward for climate action next year.
This will be useful in attracting investment. More than 70% of all investment in clean energy in Australia comes from international sources.
It’s unusual for a host country to not preside over the COP talks, but it has been done before.
What does this mean for the Pacific?
For Pacific nations, the news will come as a blow. Pacific nations have been instrumental in pushing the world to go faster on climate. The region is hugely exposed to climate threats, from rising sea levels to intensified natural disasters to coral bleaching to acidifying oceans.
Australia had hoped to host COP31 for strategic reasons as well as economic. Hosting would have shown Canberra’s commitment to address the Pacific’s key security threat at a time of increasing geostrategic rivalry.
As the deal stands, Australia has salvaged a commitment to hold a pre-COP meeting in the Pacific. This will showcase Pacific plans to become the first region powered 100% by renewables. Australia should work with Pacific leaders to ensure this is a serious event shaping expectations for COP31.
It will likely also act as a pledging conference for countries to commit finance to the Pacific Resilience Facility, a Pacific fund to help island nations adapt to changes already arriving.
For Australia, the bid to co-host climate talks with Pacific leaders had strategic purpose as well as economic. Pictured: regional leaders at the 2024 Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga.
Lukas Coch/AAP
What’s next?
As the COP30 talks head toward their conclusion, Brazil is hoping to broker an unexpected breakthrough: a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva surprised observers by calling for this roadmap to be a signature outcome. While countries had already agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at climate talks in 2023, leaders had yet to agree on a plan to actually do this. The roadmap wasn’t expected to be central to this year’s talks, but has increasingly become so.
If President Lula secures a roadmap in Belém, it would likely be developed in greater detail at next year’s talks and beyond as countries hash out measures to phase out fossil fuel production and consumption in the national climate plans required under Paris Agreement obligations.
There’s welcome progress here. Over 80 countries now back the call for a roadmap, including major fossil fuel producers such as Norway. But Australia, the world’s largest exporter of coal and one of the largest of liquefied natural gas, has yet to add its support.
As Bowen and his colleagues reckon with the COP31 compromise deal, they will have to take a position. Will an Australian COP president be able to drive the urgently needed shift away from the fossil fuels which steadily worsen climate change?
If so, it will show Australia is ready to carry the baton from Brazil – and deliver the change its Pacific neighbours and the wider world needs.
Authors: Wesley Morgan, Research Associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney
Daily Bulletin
