Undermined and underdone: How Australia’s climate talks bid failed

On Monday night in Belem, Brazil, the mood among the Australian contingent at the United Nations climate talks was high.

Earlier in the day, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen had appeared at an event, talking up the Australian bid to host next year’s talks, COP31, in Adelaide. Turkey was also fiercely bidding for the rights.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.Credit: Matt Willis

“Let me make it clear – we’re not going anywhere,” Bowen had said. “It’s the fight we’ve got to have because it is very much in Australia’s interests, and I believe in the world’s interest, having Australia as the president of COP31.”

That night, he held drinks for Australian diplomats, civil society and business delegations. Normally, this is done off-site, but options were limited in the Amazonian city, so this year it was held in the Australian pavilion in the UN’s “blue zone”, the heart of the sprawling COP campus.

Catering for the venue had been cancelled by the hosts, so the Australians made do with chips and Brazil nuts and toasted their bid on local wines and beer.

It was clear to all that Turkey had not backed down. But given the overwhelming support Australia had secured within the UN group of nations it shares with Turkey, the support it had from Pacific island states, and the practical work that had already begun, the crowd believed the bid would succeed.

That positive spirit curdled overnight. The Australians in Brazil woke to reports that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had said back home that if Turkey did not fold, Australia would not block it as host.

Many on the ground in Belem were stunned. Under UN rules, if the group of nations whose turn it is to select a host cannot come to a consensus agreement, hosting duties revert to the UN’s climate headquarters in Bonn, Germany.

The Australians, who were not authorised to speak publicly, saw Albanese’s comments as an unnecessary concession to Turkey before the clock had run out – an undermining of the effort at worst, incompetent diplomacy at best.

“The Australians were doing well. They were holding the line. Everyone knows the Turks have a pattern: they fold at the end when they have extracted concessions,” said one veteran of the COP process who was in Belem, but not a direct party to negotiations.

He said that Australian negotiators would have gone into meetings on Tuesday on the back foot. “You can’t negotiate without the support of your capital. It is even worse when your capital is effectively briefing against you.”

It was not until Wednesday in Belem that Bowen made it official, stepping out of ongoing negotiations in the afternoon to explain that Turkey would host, but that he would hold a new position at the Turkish talks as “president of negotiations” with authority to set the agenda, appoint chairs and leads and prepare the draft decision text.

A pre-COP meeting would be held in the Pacific and it would be used to direct finance to the small island nations that were to have co-hosted an Australian event.

It was a lacklustre end for a bid that had started in 2022 with high hopes of bringing the event to Australia to encourage green investment and focus attention on the country’s decarbonisation efforts at a time when the Biden administration was making climate change a global priority.

Its proponents hoped, too, that it would be a boon for Adelaide and that it would offer a boost for Australia’s diplomatic ties to the Pacific states highly exposed to climate change and who are also being courted by China.

Speaking in Perth on the day Bowen conceded Australia would not host COP, Albanese described the deal as an “outstanding” compromise with Turkey that would still assist the Pacific.

“Australia, by having the COP presidency for the negotiations, will be in a very strong position,” he said.

It is not a universally shared view.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said, just hours after Bowen had announced Australia had conceded to Turkey, that he had had “active discussions” with the prime minister and Bowen in the lead-up to Belem, but that he had not found out until the day before the government was preparing to back down.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas and Anthony Albanese spruiked the COP bid during the federal election campaign.Credit: Ben Searcy Photography

“My last conversation with the prime minister was on Tuesday night and I spoke to Minister Bowen yesterday and it was clear that the position of the Commonwealth was changing,” Malinauskas said on Thursday. It was up to his federal Labor counterparts to explain why, he said pointedly.

Some federal Labor MPs are angry, too, that Albanese did not do more to support Bowen and they have questioned his decision not to visit Belem, even if there was little prospect of success. They note it follows other instances where Albanese was unwilling to associate himself with a losing cause after the Voice referendum failure, such as backing down on superannuation changes proposed by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

But other MPs welcomed the outcome. They were wary of the domestic political risks of hosting an expensive international conference, which promotes renewable energy, at a time when many Australians are struggling with the cost of living, fuelled in part by rising energy bills.

According to an estimate reported by the Australian Financial Review, the cost of hosting the event could reach as high as $2 billion, a figure that prompted some observers to raise their eyebrows as the event hosted by Glasgow in 2021 was estimated to have cost $500 million.

And given Turkey’s intransigence, the MPs cannot see what Bowen or Albanese could have done differently, given how bad a climate conference orphaned in a German city that did not want to host could have been.

When Bowen and his team headed to Belem on Saturday, they knew the negotiations would be tough.

The mood in the broader Australian delegation might have been upbeat on Monday, but one senior Australian official said that over the weekend Bowen and his core team had been far more circumspect.

This was not the case early this year, when Australian officials still thought there was time to elegantly see Turkey to the door.

In one notorious example, Turkey had ditched its bid to host COP in 2019 after Britain offered a package of incentives, including advocacy for Turkey to receive climate aid, a promise to host a Turkish investment conference in London and British backing of Turkish candidates for international posts, as Politico reported in May.

So intransigent was Turkey this year that close observers of the process began to speculate about other motivations. Was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan motivated by his wife, known to have environmental concerns? Was Turkey acting as a wrecker of the COP process on behalf of Russia, whose war economy depended on fossil fuel sales the climate talks sought to arrest?

But as months slipped by, Turkey showed no signs of budging, despite interventions from Australian officials, entreaties from Pacific leaders and finally appeals from Albanese himself.

The government came to realise that contingency plans were needed.

In the wash-up of Australia’s concession, Bowen put on a brave face. He emphasised that Australia’s goals of furthering the national and regional interest would still be achieved under this new model.

Perhaps, but no one quite knew what authority a “president of negotiations” would have, given that such a role had never existed before. Indeed, Bowen and the Australian team continued to hammer out the finer points with the Turkish delegation over the following hours. That’s presumably what they were doing on Thursday afternoon when national pavilions caught fire and delegates fled.

“It could have been really terrible,” another of the Australians present said. “It turns out there was no public address system, no fire alarms and no fire wardens.”

The fire was extinguished, but by then Australia’s original bid plan was in ashes. Turkey was seen by many observers as the outright victor.

“Ankara, which has an NDC/climate plan rated as ‘critically insufficient’, will host the summit with the Aussies handed the thankless task of running the negotiations,” reported Climate Diplo Brief substack, relied upon for daily updates by many observers not on site. “They’ve been absolutely mugged. Aus minister Chris Bowen put a brave face on it but Turkey has done em, hook, line and sinker.”

Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean, who attended the talks, disagreed. He said he was disappointed, but he said the role that Bowen had crafted was significant.

“We have the software of the meeting but not the hardware,” he said.

Tennant Reed, who directs the climate change and energy program for the Australian Industry Group, said from Belem that Australia had lost the opportunity to demonstrate to the world its deployment of renewables and to showcase the impacts of climate change on a landscape that is on the frontline.

But he agreed that Bowen’s role at the coming talks could – if managed well – still see Australia help shape the world’s efforts to combat climate change.

And he believes that it was Australia’s respect for the COP process that prompted Albanese and Bowen to blink before Turkey.

Now, he says, the diplomats and officials who lost the race are going to have to work out how to make the process work.

“It is going to take some real diplomacy for Australia and Turkey to build trust now,” Reed said.

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