Australia’s COP31 Presidency can turn an ICJ mandate into Pacific partnership

David Zhang | Climate & Environment Fellow

Image sourced from Ernests Vaga via Unsplash 

In 2019, law students at the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu set out to take climate change to the world’s principal court, a campaign the government of Vanuatu adopted and championed. Six years later, their efforts culimated and succeeded. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that states owe binding obligations under international law to protect the environment, framing climate harm as a threat to fundamental human rights, including the right to life and health. In May 2026, an overwhelming majority of United Nations (UN) Member States (141 in favour, 8 against, and 28 abstentions) voted to welcome the ruling. The vote underscored broad multilateral support for the ICJ’s legal interpretation at a time when climate leadership under United States (US) President Donald Trump continued to recede. The upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31), to be held in Antalya, Türkiye, in November 2026, will test whether this growing legal and political consensus translates into meaningful policy action.

The question now is what institutional architecture can deliver that action. Climate change exemplifies a collective-action problem because it affects everyone, and no state can solve it alone. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the UN framework for trading carbon credits between countries, is one of the few instruments designed for that reality. However, it can cut two ways, and the difference will decide whether the ICJ’s mandate is truly met: extraction, in which wealthy emitters pay for cheap abatement abroad while emitting at home; or partnership, in which host nations help build, own, and benefit from the systems that generate climate finance.

A market that can cut both ways

At its best, Article 6 offers something rare in climate policy. Since a tonne of carbon does the same damage wherever it’s emitted, a well-designed system can channel real finance to developing countries already bearing the brunt of a crisis they did least to cause, turning climate action from a cost into an economic opportunity. For wealthier countries, paying poorer ones to abate is not evasion of responsibility but meeting it where abatement is cheapest and each dollar cuts the most emissions.

Australia has attempted this before. The Indo-Pacific Carbon Offsets Scheme (IPCOS), launched at COP26, committed AUD$104 million to help Fiji and Papua New Guinea build the capacity to generate high-integrity credits. In practice, it never settled the demand side as there was no resolved basis for using the credits at home. Without buyers, the supply projects it was meant to seed never got off the ground, and the scheme’s funding was eventually repurposed in 2024. This failure was fixable, but points to a deeper danger, one that exists even once buyers arrive: a carbon market can be technically sound and still be deeply unjust. A market that merely lets wealthy countries buy cheap offsets instead of cutting their own emissions, while the countries supplying them stay poor and powerless, is extraction at its starkest - or what some critics describe as ‘carbon colonialism’. 

Why COP31 is different

So why expect a different result this time? 

First, the foundations IPCOS lacked are taking shape. The demand gap that sank it may finally close, with Australia’s review of its Safeguard Mechanism over 2026-27 an opportunity to connect domestic buyers to these markets. The Article 6 rulebook, finalised at COP29, also provides greater confidence for the supply side by setting clear frameworks for double-counting and cross-border transfers.

Second, the hosting arrangement is unusual. Türkiye holds the formal presidency and the venue, but Australia will preside over the negotiations, with authority to draft texts and issue the cover decision, while Fiji and Tuvalu host the pre-COP. This means the rules can be written with the Pacific not merely represented, but in the room, backed by negotiating power of the region’s largest economy behind them.

Third, and most important, Australia has a domestic model that answers the extraction objection directly. Its savanna fire management method utilises early dry-season ‘cool burning’ practised for tens of thousands of years by First Nations people, with most projects run by Indigenous organisations themselves and generating more than AUD$50 million in revenue a year. It builds wealth for these communities and honours knowledge on Country. The same logic of this Indigenous-led approach could underwrite blue carbon across the Pacific, utilising the mangroves and seagrass that store carbon while shielding eroding coastlines.

Drafting a Pacific partnership

Nearly a decade ago, the Pacific asked the world’s highest court to recognise climate change as a matter of legal obligation, not just an environmental problem. Article 6 won’t discharge that obligation alone, but at Antalya, Australia holds the pen. The test is whether it builds with the Pacific or merely for it: whether Pacific nations own the institutions, the revenue, and the knowledge these markets rest on, or are left to simply supply credits. That is what separates partnership from extraction.

David is a final-year Bachelor of Laws student at the University of Sydney, where he has also completed a Bachelor of Economics. He is interested in how economics, law, and international cooperation can be harnessed to confront climate change and drive the energy transition. This is driven by a conviction that a stable climate is not a policy choice but a precondition for basic human rights, aligning with his broader work on First Nations advocacy, refugee support, and gender equality.

He spent three years as an Associate in Commodities and Environmental Markets at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, helping build carbon markets as a nascent asset class alongside fast-evolving regulation. A semester exchange at the University of Copenhagen studying sustainable development and economic policy offered a working contrast to Australia, showing him an economy centred on environmental sustainability. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were used by this author for grammar checks, but all content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.