For many years, residents of Tuvalu have been aware of a threat hanging over their country: if nothing is done to combat the climate crisis, their islands in the Pacific Ocean could one day be swallowed by the sea.
As the urgency of the climate threat rises, last week Australia offered up to 280 citizens each year from Tuvalu access to live, study and work in the country as part of a sweeping treaty.
But for those living in Tuvalu, including graphic designer and photographer Venu Edwin Pedro, the choice to leave his home is not a simple one.
“For me I have grown up here, I have managed to make a good life here,” the 37-year-old father of seven says. “I have faith that God has prepared a future for us not to lose.”
Pedro says he has already witnessed the impacts of climate change, including the flooding of villages as rising sea levels chew away at Tuvalu’s coasts. The country consists of nine low-lying islands and sits about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Pedro worries for the future of his children and believes they might find better lives abroad.
“I’m not really sure what the future holds for them regarding the impacts of climate change,” he says. “I’m not sure whether [the islands are] going to survive the next 12 years.
“I think it’s better for them to go and look for great opportunities in Australia and build up their own families there.”
‘Historic blessing’ for Tuvalu
The treaty signed between Australia and Tuvalu is expected to give families like Pedro’s a faster route to those opportunities. It outlines a “special human mobility pathway” for citizens of Tuvalu to move to Australia. The deal has been welcomed by community leaders such as Taualo Penivao from the Christian Church of Tuvalu, who says it “exceeded expectations” and was a “historic blessing for Tuvaluans”.
“For the safety of people, it is best to migrate to Australia who has a large space of lands, rather than being affected by the increasing impacts of climate change,” Penivao says.
The pathway is expected to significantly ramp up migration between the two countries – Australia is home to around 250 people born in Tuvalu, with just 30 Tuvaluans migrating to the country in 2021. Once in effect, the new deal could double the number of Tuvaluans in Australia in just a year – while Tuvalu stands to lose more than 2% of its population over the same time period. Some details of the scheme are still being worked out and Tuvalu’s climate change minister, Seve Paeniu, says his government “haven’t finalised” the process to choose who will move to Australia.
Paeniu tells the Guardian the agreement was not an attempt to relocate citizens impacted by climate change, insisting Tuvalu has not “given up the fight” to preserve its land.
“Tuvalu citizens are free to travel to Australia and may choose to return to Tuvalu,” he says, adding the government do not see the deal “as a refugee settlement”.
“What we have agreed with Australia is to limit [the number of migrants] and avoid a situation where we have a whole flurry of people leaving Tuvalu and entering Australia.
“It is a facility that would allow a smooth transition for Tuvalu citizens who, by their own choice, would want to leave Tuvalu and migrate and stay in Australia,” he says.
Most vulnerable ‘left behind’
Still, some residents may want to make the move to Australia but find the option remains out of reach.
At more than A$900 (US$582; £469), flights to Australia are expensive in a country where a 2017 report found more than 25% of the population live below the poverty line. Visa application fees are also expected to be added to the cost, though neither Australia nor Tuvalu have indicated the total cost to migrate.
Talua Nivaga, co-founder of Tuvalu’s youth-led environmental organisation Fuligafou and a project manager for Oxfam, welcomed the easing of migration barriers to Australia. But he says without financial provisions, the scheme would only be accessible to Tuvalu’s wealthiest, and was not a viable solution for those most impacted by climate change.
“The most vulnerable ones who don’t have much money to migrate, they will be left behind,” he says. “Migration is not something that they just can think of, and then they just move away, because it involves a lot of money and preparation.”
Such concerns have led some climate campaigners, including Richard Gokrun from Tuvalu’s Climate Action Network, to push for the treaty to be “reconsidered” by his government.
“We don’t want to be locked up in other people’s countries,” Gokrun says. “Moving away means the dying off of our cultures.”
The treaty is set to go through “domestic processes” in both Australia and Tuvalu before coming into effect, with Australia’s parliament yet to pass the deal. Paeniu says it could take as long as “nine to 12 months” before the treaty is ready for implementation. He says there is a possibility of further changes to the deal depending on the outcome of Tuvalu’s January elections, when a new government would need to “renew” the treaty with Australia.
Pedro, who remains apprehensive about leaving his home country, is nonetheless certain Tuvalu’s culture will flourish even if its citizens migrate abroad.
“The culture is with the people wherever they go,” he says. “[But] a place without people, it’s not a country.”
