How Donald Trump could become an accidental climate saviour

November 10, 2026 — 2:00am

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An Australian contracting firm recently finished building a series of seawalls to protect about four kilometres of the coastline of Tuvalu, a tiny archipelagic nation of 11,000 people that sits an average of just two metres above the waters of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

The seawalls, funded by Australia, New Zealand and the US, are the front line in the effort to hold back the rising tides projected to claim 90 per cent of Tuvalu’s land area at high tide by the end of the century.

Other seawalls are either completed or under way in a bid to protect Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands and Tonga. Storm surges increasingly ruin arable land, salinate scarce fresh water supplies, swamp homes and disturb the dead in flooding graveyards.

The seawalls, desperately welcome in the Pacific island states, offer communities some hope of clinging on to the land of their ancestors. At the same time, they are concrete evidence of humanity’s collective failure to kick one of modern history’s most destructive habits – our addiction to carbon fuels and the profits they generate.

Delegates to the world’s annual climate change negotiations are today assembling in Turkey for a fortnight of meetings – COP 31. They gather every year, and every year, the central solution to the problem seems more elusive.

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The Paris Accord sought to hold the global temperature rise to a maximum 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, as an average measured over 20 years.

“Crossing that Rubicon is inevitable now,” says Jamie Fergusson, climate change director for the........

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