From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Perhaps they are worried they won’t go home afterwards?

Labor plans to slash numbers for UN climate summit

Ryan Cropp and Phillip Coorey
Sep 10, 2025 – 5.39pm

The Albanese government will scale down the size of the COP31 climate summit to 30,000 delegates if its bid to host the conference is successful, as Labor readies itself for a last ditch lobbying effort to secure the event at this month’s United Nations meeting in New York.

Documents published late last week put the potential size of a COP summit in Adelaide at more than 52,000 attendees, which would include heads of state, UN officials, media, sponsors, “observers” and their delegations.

However, federal and state government sources speaking on condition of anonymity said Australia’s preferred figure is much lower, at 30,000, and Labor has little appetite to host an event on the scale of recent COP summits in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

The COP28 event in Dubai in 2023 was attended by more than 85,000 people, with just under 100,000 registered – exceeding the record attendance figure set at the previous year’s event in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh.

…Read more: 

https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/labor-plans-to-slash-numbers-for-un-climate-summit-20250910-p5mtxg

We can only speculate why the Aussie government wants to keep the 2026 COP conference small if they win the hosting bid.

Perhaps Australia’s leaders are worried about the cost. Or maybe they actually do fear 10s of thousands of attendees from low-income nations will overstay their visas, creating a long running PR disaster spectacle of rounding up the lost COP31 climate refugees.