BREAKINGVIEWS-Battle for COP31 is Australia's to lose

By Antony Currie

MELBOURNE, Oct 28 (Reuters Breakingviews) - It's a wonder any country wants to host the annual United Nations climate summit. This year's Conference of the Parties, or COP, starts next month in Belem, Brazil, and had to contend with everything from a lack of hotel rooms to the return to power of U.S. President and climate change-denier-in-chief Donald Trump. Turkey and Australia, though, are taking the battle to organise COP31 next year down to the wire. It ought to be Canberra's to lose.

Usually, the COP venue is chosen a couple of years in advance by the members of whichever of the five UN regional groupings of countries is in charge of deciding for a particular year. They have to reach a consensus, which means some horse-trading if there's more than one contender – like when the UK and Italy cooperated for COP26, while Turkey dropped out. If neither Ankara nor Canberra concedes by the end of the Belem COP next month, the event defaults to the UN's climate HQ in Bonn, Germany.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's administration made a smart move early on, saying it would co-host with Pacific Island states that are among the most at risk from rising sea levels. Granted, along with Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the previous two events, Australia is effectively a petrostate, with coal and natural gas as two of its top three exports.

But the country can tout its transition progress. It was an early adopter of battery storage, for example, notably helped by Atlassian TEAM.O CEO and local billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes using Twitter in 2017 to persuade Elon Musk to build the then-world's biggest facility in the wake of a major blackout. Australia now has the third-largest utility battery storage globally after China and the United States, per Rystad Energy.

One of Canberra's goals will be to entice more money: around 70% of investment in Australian renewables comes from abroad, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group. Another is to lure startups and other companies working on the energy transition that have been financially hit by the effective repeal of large parts of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.

Showcasing Down Under's potential as a green energy exporter would be a big plus too. That could be through projects like the Cannon-Brookes-backed SunCable, which intends to send electricity from northern Australia to Singapore. Those initiatives, plus expanding extraction of metals key to the energy transition and producing green steel, aluminium and other products could optimistically create some 1.8 million Aussie jobs and more than $200 billion in exports a year, advocacy group Beyond Zero Emissions has calculated. That's a big opportunity to miss out on.

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CONTEXT NEWS

28 governments are set to decide which country will host the 31st Conference of Parties, known as COP31, scheduled for November 2026, by the end of COP30 in Belem, Brazil, that will run from November 10 to November 21 this year.

Australia and Turkey are the two contenders, both members of the 28 countries in the UN Western Europe and Other States regional group from which the venue for next year’s conference is being chosen. The decision is made by consensus, so if neither country concedes, COP31 will by default be held in Bonn, Germany, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is based.