‘Clandestine and amorphous’: The negotiations to secure COP
Adelaide has to beat out Türkiye to secure major international climate conference COP next year, the Premier said, with a decision to be made in the coming months.
“The truth is, most people haven’t heard of Adelaide,” admitted Premier Peter Malinauskas at the Adelaide Economic Development Agency (AEDA) 2025 Business Summit yesterday.
“But, if things go according to plan, that’ll change next year.”
Adelaide would become a city known worldwide if selected to host the climate change conference COP in 2026, he said.
“The sort of cities that host COP are names like Paris, Copenhagen, Glasgow; people are going to hear about it,” the Premier said.
“And with the nature of climate policy, which is in a state of flux, I think it’ll be a pretty important one.”
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he “can’t think of anywhere better than Adelaide” to host COP in 2026 should Australia’s bid for the event be successful.
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The state government said hosting COP31 could yield an estimated $511.6 million in economic benefits for South Australia.
COP would “eclipse all these other major events” like LIV Golf, Gather Round and The Fringe – cornerstones of the Premier’s events policy.
“When the Federal Government announced they wanted to go for it, I put a little team together immediately to start doing the policy work to see if we could actually host it,” the Premier told attendees at the AEDA Business Summit.
“But then I started doing the political work in Canberra and initially it was sort of scoffed at that we could even do it, and that was particularly true in the Federal bureaucracy because these sorts of conferences, the big global international conferences, if they’re ever in Australia they’re in Sydney, Melbourne.
“But this is up there in terms of size and scale as the Olympics. So they fobbed it off but we persisted.”
He said the Federal government changed its tune at Gather Round 2024.
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“That sounds stupid because what’s footy got to do with COP, not much, except the number of people that came and were able to be accommodated through the massive expansion in the size of the Airbnb and short-term rental market.
“There’ll be some cash to be made next year if we get this – I’ll give you a hot tip.
“But it’s not about filling hotel rooms or bums on seats. This is a major opportunity for South Australia to recast itself, for Adelaide to reposition itself around the attraction of global capital as awareness develops.”
But to secure the event, Adelaide needs to beat out Türkiye, which has also put in a bid for the major conference.
The Premier described efforts to win COP as “clandestine and amorphous”.
“There is a formal way it can happen at the next COP. Frankly, that’s too late,” he said.
“We hope and anticipate that there’ll be some back-channel negotiations. The truth is, Turkey didn’t pull out because of the Federal election. They thought if the Federal Election had gone a different way, then they would just get it, which is quite a rational calculation from their perspective.
“Now that that’s resolved, there are negotiations going on which I won’t go into, but time will tell if they hold fast.”
If Türkiye doesn’t pull out, the decision will go down to a vote: “and that would be precarious” the Premier said.
“Hopefully, we’ll know sometime in the next few months.”
The 2025 UN Climate Change Conference will convene in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil.
