The plane landed in the rain. As the Fiji Airways flight carrying dignitaries sat on the runway in Funafuti, Tuvalu's capital, an official struggled with a broken umbrella, the ABC's Stephen Dziedzic reported, while locals prepared to ferry leaders, ministers, and officials through the downpour to a traditional welcome ceremony. Hundreds of people in traditional dress and floral headdresses were waiting for them. The highest point in Funafuti, according to AFP, is about two meters above sea level.
"The objective of this Tuvalu event is for you, leaders, to experience and feel climate change firsthand, from being in the frontline of the impact of climate change," Prime Minister Feleti Teo told the visitors.
The trouble was the word "leaders."
How Tuvalu Got the Guest List
The meeting was born of a compromise. Last November, at the summit in Belém that this column scored at the time, Australia and Türkiye were deadlocked over who would host this year's conference. Under UN rules the host needs consensus, and without a deal the meeting would have defaulted to Germany. The bargain they struck is unusual: Türkiye hosts COP31 in Antalya, from November 9 to 20, and holds the formal presidency, while Australia's climate minister, Chris Bowen, runs the negotiations. As part of the package, a preparatory "pre-COP" would be held in the Pacific. It ran from October 5 to 8 in Fiji, with a leaders' segment in Tuvalu.
The pitch was simple and, I think, genuinely good. Bring the world's major emitters to the places that will be lost first, and let them stand there. Bowen had insisted that COP could not just be a "jamboree of the willing."
Who Came
In the end, AFP reported, only a handful of leaders made the trip, mostly from the Pacific. Australia's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was among them. According to the ABC, only two leaders from outside the Pacific, those of Mauritius and Timor-Leste, flew to Tuvalu, while ministers from India, the United Arab Emirates, Türkiye, and Nepal attended in their governments' place. That was not the plan. Australian officials, the ABC reported, had spent months telling foreign counterparts that the Tuvalu meeting would be for leaders only, before the inevitable retreat. Denying that the government had ever promised to bring world leaders, Bowen said: "No, I said we wanted to bring the world to Tuvalu."
Those who came saw what they were meant to see: the Funafuti Causeway, one of the narrowest points on the island, and the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, a land reclamation effort meant to hold back the sea. They visited a country of 10,600 people that, according to AFP, is already making plans to relocate its population if the islands are lost, and whose coral, the living structure that built the islands, was estimated to be 99.9 percent wiped out by a marine heatwave in 2024.
The Ledger
The win: the room was real, and some of it paid. Papua New Guinea's prime minister, James Marape, committed around US$5.5 million to Tuvalu over five years for coastal reclamation, saying land reclamation "would buy them two or three more generations of life." Pacific officials told the ABC they were glad to see the region's fight placed, once again, at the center of the negotiations.
The cost: roughly twenty million Australian dollars, by the ABC's estimate, which the same analysis called small next to a national budget, and a round of embarrassing headlines at home. New pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility, a fund meant to give island nations faster access to climate money, were, in the ABC's word, "modest." There was friction on the ground, too. A senior Tuvaluan government adviser, speaking anonymously to AFP, accused Australia of overstepping during the visit: "Just because we signed the treaty doesn't mean they can take over our country and our sovereignty." The treaty is the Falepili Union, signed in 2023, which created a dedicated Australian visa category for Tuvaluans. And Australia arrived having just approved a major coal mine expansion.
The catch: the people who showed up were the people who needed no convincing. The most striking line of the week came from Marape himself, who said he would skip COP31 entirely, calling global climate forums "talk fests" with few serious commitments. Vanuatu's climate minister, Ralph Regenvanu, put the disappointment more gently: "We were hoping for more (leaders)."
Attendance as Data
My beat, as regular readers know, is less which climate fix works than why people show up for one. Last month I wrote about volunteers, and about the research finding that most of them show up exactly once. Diplomacy runs on a version of the same economics. A head of government's time is the scarcest resource a country has, and a trip to one of the most isolated nations on Earth is expensive precisely because it proves attention. That is why the absences read as data. Tuvalu did not ask for a speech. It asked for a few hours.
Teo's request also contains a theory of persuasion: that seeing changes minds. I suspect he is right, and the turnout suggests that the minds most in need of changing were the ones that stayed home. In fairness to the absent, the trip is genuinely punishing, and the leaders' summit in Antalya, scheduled for November 11 and 12, will still give them a stage. But appearing in a convention hall is the cheap signal. Flying to Funafuti was the costly one.
I'll disclose my standing bias: I would rather cover a summit that aimed too high than one that never aimed at all, and the pre-COP aimed. Its real grade arrives in three weeks, when Pacific officials hope to see promises made in Fiji to turn into hard money in Türkiye.
Tuvalu brought the world as far as the runway. The sea, which keeps no guest list, will be there whether anyone else comes or not.
