Russell Buzby

In November 2026, Australia will take the chair at COP31, in what the Lowy Institute has described as the single biggest diplomatic undertaking in the country’s history. Hosting a Conference of the Parties is a larger logistical and political exercise than most Australians appreciate. It involves months of bilateral preparation, a physical footprint of tens of thousands of delegates, and the delicate work of brokering an outcome document between parties whose interests rarely align. A country that chairs a COP is signalling an intention to lead, or at the very least to be seen leading, on the issue at hand.

The same Lowy Poll that framed the scale of that undertaking also reported, in 2025, that Australian public concern about climate change had dropped six percentage points in a single year to 51 per cent (Lowy Institute, 2025). That is a single survey, and it is reasonable to be cautious about reading too much into any one year’s movement. But the drop sits against a backdrop of similar signals from other sources. The Australia Institute’s Climate of the Nation report has tracked a parallel softening of concern over several years. The Climate Action Tracker downgraded Australia’s policy rating in 2025 after the approval of fossil fuel projects with operating horizons running to 2070. The Coalition formally abandoned its commitment to net zero by 2050 over the same period. On every visible indicator, the political energy that once supported Australian climate action has been leaking quietly.

The disconnect between “chairing the COP” and “public concern is drifting” has always been awkward to explain. Until recently the standard interpretation was that Australians were simply reacting to the news cycle, and that concern would rise again with the next bad summer. New research suggests the problem is more structural than that, and that the mechanism linking extreme weather to political demand for action does not work the way most climate communicators have been assuming.

A 68-country study published in Nature Climate Change by Bergquist and colleagues (2025) examined the relationship between extreme weather exposure, subjective attribution and support for climate policy. Their finding has substantial implications for how Australian climate communication is designed. It is not exposure to extreme weather that predicts support for climate policy. It is subjective attribution: the act of personally connecting the extreme weather you have experienced with climate change as its cause. Exposure alone does almost nothing. You can live through a catastrophic fire season, lose property, be evacuated twice, and still not shift your policy preferences, if you do not attribute the event to climate change as its driver. The attribution step is doing the work that the exposure was previously assumed to do.

That finding rearranges the causal model Australian policymakers and advocacy groups have been running on for most of the last decade. The working assumption was that lived experience of disasters would generate public pressure for policy action more or less automatically, and that the job of environmental communication was to translate that pressure into specific legislative demands. The Bergquist paper suggests the chain is broken in the middle. Lived experience generates worry, and worry without subjective linkage to warming does not convert into policy preferences. Australia has had a long run of disaster experience without a corresponding shift in its legislative settings.

The more difficult Australian angle is why the attribution step fails here when it apparently succeeds in other countries. A line of research led by Klas and colleagues (2022) at Deakin University has been pointing at national identity as the mechanism, and a nationally representative Australian study in the March 2026 research digest strengthened that finding substantially. Australians with stronger national identity are less likely to attribute bushfires to climate change, and the reduction in attribution flows directly into reduced support for climate policy. The mechanism appears to run through a conservative political identity that positions climate attribution as culturally foreign, something associated with “the elites” or “the inner city” or whatever the current phrase is in the political discourse. Once attribution becomes an identity marker, it stops being an empirical question and starts being a tribal signal. Presenting more science to someone for whom attribution has become a tribal signal will not change their view; it may entrench it.

This is where the COP31 timing becomes uncomfortable. Australia will be hosting the world while its own domestic mechanism for translating climate impact into climate policy is measurably breaking. That is not the same as saying Australia is unique in struggling with climate politics (several of the other wealthy countries with poor policy scores have similar issues) but it is particularly visible in Australia right now because the gap between the diplomatic posture and the domestic politics is large and widening. Hosting a COP is, at its core, a claim about political credibility. A country signals that it can deliver the domestic policy settings its international position implies. That claim is harder to make when 51 per cent of the electorate is only “very” or “fairly” concerned about climate change, the Coalition has walked away from net zero, and the Climate Action Tracker considers the recent project approvals inconsistent with the country’s stated targets.

The January 2026 Victorian bushfire season sharpened the irony. World Weather Attribution found that climate change had made the driving heatwave around five times more likely than it would have been in a cooler world (World Weather Attribution, 2026). Temperatures reached 48.9 degrees at several stations. More than 400,000 hectares burned. A State of Disaster was declared across 18 LGAs. Polling commissioned by the Australia Institute around the same period found that 82 per cent of Australians worry about bushfires. Eighty-two per cent worry, and a much smaller share attribute, and the distance between those two numbers is the distance between the politics we have and the politics the science implies we should have.

For anyone working in environmental communication, the practical implication of all this is that the frame matters more than the evidence and the messenger matters more than the frame. Audiences who have decided that climate attribution is a marker of a political tribe they are not part of will rarely be persuaded by stronger science. They may be persuaded by trusted local voices, by people inside their existing identity groups who have made the causal connection themselves and can explain why without triggering a tribal rejection response. This is slow, uncomfortable work, and almost entirely unsuited to the press-release-and-campaign cycle that Australian advocacy runs on.

On the policy side, the implication is more awkward. The science is settled, as I argued in a separate article on fire weather attribution and the resourcing question. The treasury case is strong. The policy tools exist. What is missing is the political weight of public attribution, and that missing weight is what would normally power the political system into action. Chairing COP31 without that weight at home is a particular kind of diplomatic exposure. Australia will be asking other countries to do things it cannot reliably ask of its own electorate.

The optimistic reading is that the Bergquist and Klas research at least identifies the leak. You cannot fix a mechanism until you know where it is breaking, and subjective attribution through a nationally-identified political lens is a clearer diagnosis than “the electorate is not concerned enough”. The pessimistic reading is that the repair job is harder than any of the current climate communication budgets assume, because it means building trusted local attribution voices rather than commissioning more infographics from Canberra. Either way, the COP31 chair is arriving at a moment when Australia’s diplomatic posture is running out ahead of its domestic consensus. The conference will happen; the consensus may or may not catch up; the distance between them is what the next couple of years of policy conversation will be about.

References

Australia Institute. (2025). Climate of the nation. The Australia Institute.

Bergquist, M. and colleagues. (2025). Extreme weather event attribution predicts climate policy support across the world. Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02372-4

Climate Action Tracker. (2025). Australia policy rating update. Climate Action Tracker.

Klas, A. and colleagues. (2022). Investigating how economic and national identity loss messages impact climate change policy support. Climatic Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03472-2

Lowy Institute. (2025). Lowy Institute Poll 2025. Lowy Institute for International Policy.

Nationally representative Australian study on national identity and bushfire attribution. (2026, March 20). OpenAlex.

World Weather Attribution. (2026, January 22). Human-induced climate change made the January 2026 Victorian heatwave around five times more likely.