The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has declared it is “important that Pacific voices are heard” after landing in Fiji on Monday to attend his first UN climate summit since becoming prime minister more than four years ago.
Albanese joined about 4,000 people in Nadi for a preparatory meeting for the year-ending Cop31 UN climate summit in Turkey while facing criticism from his political opponents at home. Pre-Cop meetings are usually small and bureaucratic affairs, but this meeting has a double purpose: it is being held in the Pacific after Australia and regional leaders argued it would help bring global attention to the plight of countries most at risk from the climate crisis.
In achieving the latter goal, the meeting has been a mixed success. The Australian government invited national leaders to visit the low-lying atoll nation of Tuvalu, but distance, geopolitical ruptures and the expectation that leaders would prioritise a trip to the Turkish Mediterranean resort city of Antalya for more significant climate talks in a matter of weeks made that a difficult sell.
After declining to comment for days, the Australian government acknowledged on Monday that only 14 national leaders would make the trip to Tuvalu on Tuesday, and just two of those – Timor-Leste’s José Ramos-Horta and Mauritius’ Navin Ramgoolam – have travelled from beyond the Pacific.
The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, said they would be joined by EU climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra; the heads of the Asian Development Bank and the Green Climate Fund; UN climate chief, Simon Stiell; the incoming Cop president, Turkey’s Murat Kurum; and international journalists.
Australian opposition energy and emissions reduction spokesperson, Dan Tehan, said the number of leaders attending showed the Fiji conference was a waste of taxpayers’ money, a “farce” and Bowen’s “vanity project”.
Albanese said it would be an important meeting leading up to the Cop31 summit. “It is important that Pacific voices are heard, because the Pacific is the frontline of action on climate change,” he said. “For many of the nations represented by leaders here it is literally a threat to their very existence, which is why the world must act.”
At a welcome event on Monday night, the Fijian prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, said it was important that Pacific stories were told. He said the Pacific Ocean covered about a third of the Earth and “was the engine room of the world’s weather”. When the water was warm and an El Niño was gathering, it could cause “havoc in every country”.
“I’m not asking you to look at the Pacific with your sympathy,” Rabuka said. “I’m asking you to look at us as a bellwether, indicating the scale of the challenges that will come.”
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The Australian government has faced criticism for approving large new coal and gas developments, and calls for it to reject the largest coalmine development in New South Wales history after it received state approval last week.
Bowen told journalists on Monday the path transitioning away from fossil fuels was “to build more renewable energy to replace the need for fossil fuels”, and gave a speech arguing for greater electrification.
Fiji’s environment minister, Lynda Tabuya, said the country’s aim this week and at Cop31 was to keep the goal of limiting global heating 1.5C within reach, unlocking “faster, fairer” access to climate finance for developing countries and making ocean health a focus of climate action.
The UN Environment Programme warned last month the world would overshoot the 1.5C global heating goal included in the Paris agreement, and said every fraction of a degree of temperature rise would intensify destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and coastal submersion.
