Bateteba left what once felt like ‘the safest place in the world’ to build a life in Australia. Thousands hope to follow

Bateteba Aselu, pictured with her daughter Tekira. Aselu, who is undertaking a PhD in climate change at the University of Melbourne, migrated to Australia from Tuvalu in 2021 in response to rising sea levels caused by the climate crisis. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

Bateteba Aselu describes her former life in Tuvalu as like living in the “safest place in the world” where the community looked out for each other, there was no homelessness and you rarely heard the sirens of police or ambulances.

But rising sea levels and extreme weather have created such an immediate existential threat to the tiny South Pacific island nation that when a new visa lottery to migrate to Australia closed last Friday, 8,750 people in 2,474 family groups – more than 80% of Tuvalu’s population of 11,000 residents – had applied for the world’s first “climate visas”.