Overseas, Albanese sees ‘the very definition of climate injustice’ – but at home, he still wants coal

There are unlikely to be many bigger moments in Australian action on the climate crisis this year than a judgment by the high court on Wednesday.

In what is likely to prove a historic victory, the court sided with community members in the Hunter Valley to strike down a state regulator’s approval of a massive coalmine expansion that could have kept it operating until 2048.

This doesn’t happen every day and the central implication may yet have ramifications for other fossil fuel expansions.

If comments he made in May are taken at face value, the judgment may not please Anthony Albanese. Speaking on 2HD radio in Newcastle, the prime minister said the renewable transition was needed, but the government supported “existing industries” – that is, coal. He hoped the community group would lose as the Mount Pleasant mine expansion had “been through appropriate approvals”.

Well, not according to the high court.

Critics were quick to note the contrast between Albanese’s language opposing legal action to stop a coalmine and the message he delivered over the past three days at a climate conference in Fiji in preparation for the Cop31 summit in Turkey next month.

With Pacific island counterparts, the prime minister helped lead a delegation of about 50 dignitaries to the atoll and reef island nation of Tuvalu. Remote and tiny doesn’t do Tuvalu justice. It is described as the least visited country on the planet. Its land totals just 26 sq km, mostly narrow strips less than 2 metres above sea level. And the distance between the ocean and where most of its people live is getting smaller.

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The rate of sea level rise around Tuvalu is about twice the global average, according to Nasa researchers. It means the edges of the nation are being eroded. The delegation was given a presentation illustrating the escalating threat of floods and storm surges washing through homes and infrastructure in the years ahead.

They also saw an example of what the country is doing to give itself the best chance to survive, visiting a land reclamation project on the main atoll of Funafuti that is mostly funded by the Australian government. Sand and gravel dredged from the lagoon is being used to create more than 20 hectares of new, higher ground.

It is a project of hope, and a way to buy time. Possibly the most powerful moment on the quick trip came when the delegation was addressed by a 13-year-old, Melelusi Sokotia, who spoke powerfully about how her friends’ aspirations to be “teachers, doctors, builders” was being overridden by the basic question of whether they could “grow safely here in Tuvalu”.

Melelusi made a plea: “Please work together to protect small islands like ours.”

Later, back in Fiji, a leaders’ plenary heard from the Nepali foreign affairs minister, Shisir Khanal, who travelled for the pre-Cop meeting while his country staggers under the fallout from devastating flooding in August.

While the Pacific confronts a crisis of rising tides and more fierce cyclones, Khanal said Nepal was threatened by melting mountain ice bringing havoc from above. He pointed out the two threats were linked. Melting glaciers ultimately add to rising seas.

The minister said Nepal and the Pacific had something else in common. Neither contributes much at all to the global emissions causing these catastrophes. “Yet our people pay with their lives and development gains for a crisis they had no hand in creating,” he said. “This is the very definition of climate injustice.”

Albanese didn’t ignore this. He took Khanal’s message on enough to repeat part of it – that Nepal faced “extraordinarily traumatic” climate events despite running entirely on hydroelectricity – in a speech before flying out on Wednesday.

He described other examples of extreme events becoming less predictable and more intense as “the science told us would occur”. Climate change wasn’t an abstract future challenge, but “a daily reality that communities are dealing with”. “We saw that first-hand yesterday in Tuvalu,” Albanese said.

The point of Albanese’s speech was to argue for more international investment in the Pacific Resilience Facility, a fund designed to help people in the region cope and live that has received A$100m in Australian government support. He didn’t mention coal.

But when held up against his commentary about the high court judgment, it wasn’t hard to see a screaming internal contradiction – a case of a leader sending conflicting messages to different audiences.

Does Albanese disagree with the high court judgment and still support coal expansion, given its contribution to the crisis he has accurately identified? There was no chance to test this on Wednesday. He left pre-Cop without taking questions from journalists.

None of this is to dismiss the work being done in Fiji. Despite the focus in Australia on the number of leaders who flew to Nadi and Funafuti for the meeting, there is little sense on the ground of it being the failure some have described.

Pre-Cop meetings usually barely make a blip on the public radar. They’re not meant to. They’re a chance for diplomats and bureaucrats to gather before the big end-of-year UN climate summit to lay groundwork and hopefully give it some chance of success.

This year is something else entirely. It is being held in the Pacific in an attempt to bring focus to the plight and needs of its peoples. In that, it has had at least some success. Ministers and their representatives from about 50 governments, including India and European nations, attended. So did thousands of diplomats and civil society members. They talked about Pacific needs.

The trip to Tuvalu included only two national leaders from outside the region – but the EU climate commissioner and the heads of the Asian Development Bank, the Green Climate Fund and the UN climate secretariat were on board. They saw and heard things people doing their jobs should see and hear.

Pacific national and community leaders are not uniform in their views, but they have largely applauded the focus and Australia’s support. Some are also critical, and cynical, about what they see as Australia’s hypocrisy on fossil fuels. That issue isn’t going away.

The ultimate test of this week’s success is whether it helps Cop31 pull off a meaningful agreement on issues to limit climate catastrophe and better direct finance to those that need it to survive, including in the Pacific. To describe that as a challenge in the current geopolitical climate is a spectacular understatement.

One upside of this week has been that the two men responsible for trying to pull that off – the president of the formal negotiations, Australia’s Chris Bowen, and the Turkish Cop31 president, Murat Kurum – have had a few days together to build their relationship and consider how they might do that.

And they have had a consistent and forceful reminder from those around them of why it matters.

• Adam Morton is Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor and writes the Clear Air newsletter