Global Citizen NOW: Perth 2026 is a pre-COP31 deal-making venue. It targets 4 million homes and 2.5 GW of new renewable capacity, with commitments announced on stage. If you sell into clean energy or Indo-Pacific trade, your buyers will be in that room. Your job is to be in their inbox before October 2026.
We've written before about the £8B clean energy procurement window that closes in October. This is the same window, different door. Global Citizen NOW is where the targets get named in public. Once they're named, the procurement follows. Once the procurement follows, your window to pitch as a partner rather than a vendor closes.
Why this conference matters more than the average climate summit
Most climate conferences are talking shops. Global Citizen NOW has a track record of extracting specific, measurable commitments from governments and corporates. The Perth 2026 edition is timed deliberately ahead of COP31. That timing matters.
COP31 is the deadline. Perth 2026 is the runway. The 4 million homes and 2.5 GW figures aren't aspirational slogans. They're procurement targets. Someone has to supply the panels, the storage, the grid software, the installation labour, the financing, the monitoring, the reporting. That someone is either you or your competitor.
The Indo-Pacific angle is the second reason. Perth sits in the same time zone as Singapore, Jakarta, and Manila. The trade corridors that matter for clean energy components run through those cities. If your solution touches cross-border logistics, compliance, or financing in that region, this is the room where the partnerships get sketched.
Who actually attends, and who you should be emailing
We pulled the attendee profile from the 2025 edition and the early 2026 registration list. Three buckets matter for outbound.
- Government procurement leads from Australian state energy departments, plus trade delegations from Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. They arrive with mandate letters and budget lines.
- Corporate sustainability and infrastructure VPs from utilities, mining, and logistics firms with net-zero commitments they haven't figured out how to hit. These are the people who sign partnership agreements.
- NGO and multilateral programme directors who control grant funding and co-investment vehicles. Slower sales cycle, but the contracts are larger and the logos open doors.
What you won't find: early-stage founders shopping for their first customer. The room is senior. The conversations are about deployment, not discovery.
The pitch that works for this audience
Generic "we help companies decarbonise" emails get deleted. So do the ones that lead with your funding round or your AI credentials. The buyers in this room have three questions, in this order.
Can you hit a number? Not "reduce emissions" — a specific number against a specific target. If you can help a utility hit 500 MW of new capacity by Q4 2027, say that. If you can help a housing provider retrofit 40,000 homes, say that. The 4 million homes target is the anchor. Position against it.
Can you do it in the Indo-Pacific? Supply chains, regulatory environments, and labour markets differ across the region. If you've shipped in Indonesia or Vietnam, lead with it. If you haven't, say what your plan is. Don't pretend.
Can you start before COP31? The commitments announced at Perth 2026 need to show progress by the time COP31 opens. If your implementation timeline is 18 months, you're already late. If it's 90 days to first deployment, you're interesting.
We've seen this pattern before. At the App Growth Summit in London, the founders who booked meetings were the ones who pitched against the specific agenda items, not the ones who sent the same email to every attendee. Same principle here, higher stakes.
How to build the list before your competitors do
Conference attendee lists leak. Not in a shady way — sponsors get them, speakers get them, and the event app usually exposes a searchable directory. The founders who win are the ones who build the list six months out, not the week before.
Here's the workflow we'd run.
Step one: scrape the speaker and sponsor pages now. The 2026 speaker list will update between now and the event. Set a weekly check. Every new name is a warm-ish lead because you know they're attending and you know their topic.
Step two: enrich with role and mandate. A speaker from a state energy department is a different pitch than a speaker from a mining company. Use the conference agenda to infer what they care about. If someone is speaking on grid storage, don't pitch them solar panels.
Step three: score the inbox before you send. Government email addresses are notoriously bad for deliverability. Corporate addresses are better. NGO addresses vary. We built inbox scoring into MiraReach specifically because sending 200 emails into a spam folder is worse than sending 20 into an inbox. If you're running this manually, at least verify the domain before you hit send.
Step four: write the first line from the agenda, not the template. "Saw you're speaking on Indo-Pacific grid interconnection at Global Citizen NOW" beats "I hope this email finds you well." The first line is the whole email. The rest is logistics.
What doesn't work, and what we'd skip
We tried the "we'll be at the conference, let's grab coffee" email for a similar event last year. Open rate was fine. Reply rate was under 2%. The problem: everyone sends that email. It asks for a meeting without giving a reason.
What worked instead: a one-paragraph email that named a specific target the recipient had spoken about publicly, and a one-line offer to share a deployment plan. No calendar link. No "let me know if you're interested." Just the plan, attached as a PDF, with a question at the end.
Also skip the follow-up sequence that runs for six weeks. If they don't reply to the first email, they're either not interested or not the right person. One follow-up, three days later, then stop. Your deliverability will thank you.
If you want to try this
The Perth 2026 window is open now. The list-building takes a weekend. The outreach takes a week. The meetings happen in October. If you want to see how MiraReach handles the inbox scoring and the first-line personalisation for this kind of list, give MiraReach a try. No auto-send. You press the button.
— Mira