Chris Bowen wants to use his stint as the world’s chief climate negotiator to lobby Saudi Arabia and others to stop resisting progress at UN summits, heeding calls for a “hard-nosed” approach in dealing with big emitters obstructing the transition.
Appointed “president of negotiations” for Cop31 under the deal that handed Turkey hosting rights for the conference, Australia’s climate change and energy minister has told Guardian Australia a focus ahead of the summit would be talking to countries “with whom we don’t traditionally agree”.
Bowen mentioned Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Gulf state accused of repeatedly obstructing efforts at UN summits to accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels.
“We won’t get anywhere if we just have a jamboree of the willing,” Bowen said.
“We need to have a Cop which really tries to cross some of those bridges that have been very difficult to cross in recent Cops.”
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Asked how that would be achieved, Bowen said: “engagement, engagement, engagement”.
Bowen’s comments follow a direct appeal from the former US secretary of state John Kerry for Australia to actively push the world’s big emitters – including China, Russia, the US and India – to develop a roadmap to end the era of fossil fuels.
The Trump administration this week pulled out of the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis and has effectively abandoned the UN climate arena, meaning Bowen has little capacity to influence the US via the Cop negotiations.
The Labor minister said the fact Australia was itself a major exporter of fossil fuels meant it had “credibility” when it came to lobbying petrostates to do more.
The Cop30 summit in Brazil ended with a deal that omitted direct mention of fossil fuels after opposition from Saudi Arabia and its allies.
However, more than 80 countries – including Australia – signed a separate “Belém declaration” that committed nations to working towards a “just, orderly and equitable” phasing out of fuel fuels.
Bowen wants to achieve a more successful outcome at Cop31, targeting a “meaningful step forward” from the 2023 summit in Dubai, when nations agreed for the first time to start phasing out fossil fuels.
Under the deal Australia agreed with Turkey, a pre-conference event will be hosted in the Pacific with the aim of drawing global attention to small island nations under existential threat from the climate crisis.
Despite the disappointment of missing out on full hosting rights after a years-long bidding process, Bowen said Cop31 was a “remarkable opportunity for Australia”.
Bowen has asked the Pacific Islands Forum to choose a host for the event, which will be used, in part, to encourage countries to contribute to the region’s climate resilience fund.
The Labor frontbencher made the comments in an interview outlining his priorities for 2026, where he will balance his international duties with managing the domestic energy transition.
Bowen described progress in cutting pollution as “good, a lot done, but a lot more to do”, after the government’s latest projections showed it was tracking well to achieve its 2030 target but would need to substantially ramp up policies to meet its new 2035 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 62% to 70% below 2005 levels.
Upcoming reviews of the safeguard mechanism, which is designed to reduce pollution at major industrial facilities, and the national vehicle efficiency standard, introduced to drive uptake of electric cars, present two early opportunities to move faster.
The productivity commission last month recommended expanding the safeguard mechanism to capture more polluters, building on the changes Labor made to the scheme in 2023.
The scheme captures facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of Co2 equivalent each year, which applies to 219 sites.
Bowen would not pre-empt the review – which is a legislated requirement – but cautioned that including more businesses was not necessarily the answer.
“When we’re looking at the threshold, there will be a balancing act. You don’t want to expand it so much that you’re bringing in a whole bunch of new companies without much bang for buck in terms of emissions,” he said.
“It’s not a sort of slam dunk to say, well, obviously, covering a lot more businesses is the obvious thing to do.”
