https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/foreign-relations/2026/09/26/tuvalu-criticises-its-good-neighbour
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With just days to go before the climate talks that Australia is co-hosting with Pacific Island nations, only a handful of leaders from outside the region have committed to attend. They are mostly from other small islands highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
Tuvalu’s climate and environment minister, Dr Maina Talia, doesn’t mince words in describing his disappointment. “It’s immoral, I would say, and it’s unacceptable.”
Major greenhouse gas emitting countries have shunned the Pacific events, which were organised as a concession to the region when Australia conceded to Türkiye in its bid to host November’s UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP31.
Fiji is the main venue, and Tuvalu is staging a special leaders’ event that is intended to show how climate change is affecting the nation at ground zero of the climate crisis.
“We asked them to come, to see for themselves because they cannot claim leadership over the climate narrative if they never get to experience what the people are going through,” Talia tells The Saturday Paper.
“They cannot claim to be taking leadership on this if they cannot make an attempt to go to Tuvalu.”
The low-lying nation could be the first country to become uninhabitable because of climate change. While Fiji has mountains and rivers, the minister points out, Tuvalu has no higher ground people can move to as sea levels rise.
This threat is not the only one Tuvalu faces – it also relies on rainfall for fresh water, which makes the island extremely vulnerable to drought as well as cyclones, which, scientists forecast, will become more intense as the planet and the oceans heat.
Already, higher tides are pushing salt water up through the earth and limestone, corrupting traditional crops such as pulaka, or swamp taro, once a staple food. Fish is Tuvalu’s main export and a traditional source of protein but, says Talia, “with the increased heat in the ocean, fish are moving further out and are more difficult to catch”.
Rising rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity have followed a shift from traditional local staples towards imported processed food. Talia says it is also affecting traditional culture and identity.
“Manhood in Tuvalu is determined by how many pulaka do you own and how many pigs do you own, because we plant, we go fishing, we feed our pigs. It’s a difficult time for our farmers. I mean, that whole cultural measurement [is being undermined].”
Talia, who describes himself as “a theologian by profession and a politician by choice”, makes no apology for bringing biblical concepts of ethics and morality to political discussion. “I want to bring that flavour to the climate discourse,” he says. “That’s where moral leadership needs to come from. If a neighbour is in trouble, our responsibility is to help.”
Anthony Albanese seemed to acknowledge this in a speech in New York City this week, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, in which the prime minister said, “There’s no avoiding the scale of our responsibility – or the cost of inaction.”
Albanese spoke of “a promise to our Pacific family that they will not face the climate crisis alone”.
Talia has heard Australian leaders talk about “our Pacific family” many times before. He points to a glaring omission.
“How does Australia, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, rate as a neighbour when you look at it in that context?
“We cannot just put money on the table and then do the opposite,” he says. “We cannot continue to open up coalmines and LNG [liquefied natural gas] plants, which is the root cause of all of this.
“Being a good neighbour is doing what ought to be done, doing the right thing,” he says. “Are they good neighbours to the Pacific or not? That is a question Australia should be pondering.”
The concept of tuākoi is a foundational part of Tuvaluan culture. The word translates into English as “neighbour”, but it encompasses far more. For Tuvaluans, being a tuākoi brings obligations of sharing, reciprocity and caring for others, especially the vulnerable.
Talia’s PhD in theology frames the climate crisis around the concept of tuākoi and the biblical parable of the good Samaritan. He draws on it as a politician to critique the geopolitics of climate change.
“Tuvalu,” he says, “is like the man robbed and left half-dead by the side of the road.”
Nations that expand fossil fuel exports and fail to take the steps needed to save low-lying nations are like the priest and the Levite who see the wounded man but cross to the other side of the road, he says.
At The Australia Institute’s recent Climate Integrity Summit, Talia shifted the analogy.
“Let us look upon the wounded person on the side of the road as Mother Earth and the robbers as capitalist corporations. The banks that continue to issue subsidies and [the companies] that wantonly exploit and bleed nature through extractive activities.”
Aiming for unlimited growth through the exploitation of natural systems is, Talia argues, “absurd and unacceptable”.
“All our economic models up until now have failed us,” he says.
Talia was with Albanese in Palau for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting this month when the UN Environment Programme released a report confirming global temperature rises will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next few years – “pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights”.
Just days earlier, a catastrophic glacier collapse linked to rising temperatures devastated parts of Tibet and Nepal.
Both events left Talia feeling distraught. “I couldn’t sleep at night,” the minister says.
The UN report warns “there are no benign scenarios” with global temperatures rising above 1.5 degrees. The higher and longer the overshoot, the greater the risk of hitting irreversible tipping points such as ice sheet collapse, causing multi-metre rises in sea levels.
“Once large-scale ice loss is set in motion,” the physicist and climate scientist Bill Hare notes, “it plays out over centuries and cannot be undone on any timescale that matters to us or our children.
“Sustained 1.5°C destroys 70 to 90 per cent of the world’s [coral] reefs; 2°C, close to all of them.”
The impact on the world would be devastating – the already grim outlook for Tuvalu and other coral atoll nations would become hopeless.
Yet, led by Trump’s America, the world seems to be doubling down on fossil fuel dependency and Australia on its huge coal and gas exports. According to the Climate Council, Labor has approved 37 new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas developments since taking office in 2022.
While Albanese defended Australia’s climate change record against fierce pushback from regional leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum, back home, his resources minister, Madeleine King, posed for photographs in the Northern Territory celebrating the first flow of gas from fracking in the Beetaloo Basin. Climate Analytics research suggests this project will release the equivalent of almost 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
Australia has made some effort to help Tuvalu adapt to climate change. It’s contributing to the cost of a project known locally as “the reclaim”, which is building up and then sand-bagging land to protect part of Funafuti, the main atoll and capital.
The government is also offering some Tuvaluan citizens an opportunity to migrate to Australia to live, work and study under the Falepili Union treaty. “But that does not save the country,” Tuvalu’s climate change minister says.
Australia claims the program will allow the diaspora to maintain their culture and identity, but this is easier said than done. Tuvaluan people have what Talia calls an “earthed faith”, with profound ties to land.
“It’s about who we are as a people. Our culture indicates that when you give birth, the placenta and your umbilical cord need to be buried in the ground,” he says. Tuvaluans feel an ongoing connection to their ancestors and the land where they are buried.
“We are [not] only talking about those who are living in Tuvalu. We are also talking about people that are resting in the land … Do we just have to neglect them or ignore them and pack up and leave?”
Talia knows the UN annual climate talkfests struggle to deliver what the world needs to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Every final text or final decision from the process requires total consensus, ensuring the lowest common denominator rules.
He’s investing hope in a new international forum focused on ending the unchecked proliferation of oil, coal and gas extraction. Colombia hosted the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this year. Tuvalu will co-host the next TAFF with Ireland in 2027. Talia wants countries to arrive prepared “not simply to restate that the transition is necessary but to demonstrate how to make it happen”.
Talia says he hasn’t had the chance to sit down with Anthony Albanese and speak to him directly, but would like the opportunity.
“I will be frank with the prime minister,” he says. “It is about the survival of my people. We can be very diplomatic and be problematic at the same time.”
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