Australian deal exposes "global north"’s flawed approach to climate migration

In light of this year's UN climate, hosted in the United Arab Emirates, having wrapped up with a statement causing controversy as it ignored addressing fossil fuels in its first draft, the Foreign Policy journal has shed light on a climate agreement entered between Australia and the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, which in its core reveals the exploitatory approach the so-called "Global North" adopts when dealing with smaller nations to improve their climate score. Caliber.Az reprints this article. 

"Whether out of belief or opportunism, governments and civil society in the global north have embraced an incremental approach to climate action. According to this narrative, individual policies and small-scale cooperation are, together, more than the sum of their parts. Climate action will be achieved through the gradual accumulation of policy upon policy, rather than a silver bullet in the form of a binding global treaty.

The end result is clear: after COP27 [the 2022 UN climate change conference], the final statement included a commitment to bolster 'low-emission and renewable energy,' which includes natural gas; COP28 was mired in discussion of controversial carbon capture strategies; and G-20 countries remain reticent to support climate finance or comprehensive debt relief for countries in the global south.

But the dichotomy between incrementalism and structural reform is false. Some piecemeal policies deliberately obscure fundamental questions of mitigation, reparations, and redistribution. The Falepili Union, an expansive climate deal between Australia and Tuvalu, is one such initiative.

The union, hailed by Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong as a 'giant leap forward' on regional prosperity and security, was announced by Tuvaluan Prime Minister Kausea Natano and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the sidelines of the Pacific Islands Forum in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, in November.

Falepili is a Tuvaluan word meaning care for one’s neighbor. But how neighborly is Australia’s response to the climate crisis? By extracting the symptom of climate displacement from the disease of emissions, the Falepili Union risks serving as a structural barrier—not a stepping-stone—to climate justice.

Tuvalu, which lies about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, faces existential risks due to climate change-induced coastal erosion and sea-level rise. According to NASA predictions, a majority of its land will be below the average high tide by 2050. Tuvalu is one of 18 Pacific Islands Forum members. Most of these will likely experience increasingly severe tropical cyclones, water and food insecurity, loss of marine resources, and damage to coastal infrastructure. But it is the low-lying atoll nations, including Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu, where land could become entirely uninhabitable.

The Falepili Union will see up to 280 Tuvaluans each year offered 'a special mobility pathway' to live, work, and study in Australia, alongside 16.9 million Australian dollars [about $11.3 million in US dollars] for Tuvaluan coastal adaptation. At this rate, Tuvalu’s existing population of 11,200 could be resettled in Australia by 2064. But this comes at a cost: The agreement provides for Australia’s effective veto power over Tuvalu’s defense and security partnerships with other countries.

For the Albanese government, the union is a diplomatic coup. It reflects what Wesley Morgan, a senior researcher at the Climate Council, referred to as Australia’s long-standing 'strategic imperative to maintain political influence' in the region. The agreement also soothes fears of another China-Solomon Islands pact, and paves the way for a Pacific-Australia bid to host the UN climate change conference in 2026. [Discussions of a combined bid have been fraught.] Now, the prospect of Australia’s veto power over Tuvaluan security arrangements has reawakened fears of neocolonialism in the region.

'Australia should allow Tuvalu climate migrants into Australia in good faith,' argued distinguished professor Steven Ratuva, the director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury—and not, he continued, at the cost of 'their sacred sovereignty,' which 'smacks of predatory imperial behaviour' on Australia’s part.

The agreement is framed as a response to the 'driving rationale' of climate change, as the Kaldor Centre’s Scientia professor Jane McAdam has noted. Wong, the Australian foreign minister, described the agreement as a 'signal' of how Australia will approach its 'membership of the Pacific family.' Falepili is, in other words, a possible model for future climate mobility agreements.

The inaction of successive Australian governments on climate change makes a mockery of the values of falepili. The federal government has approved four new coal mines or mine expansions since May 2022 and amended Australia’s sea-dumping laws to allow other countries to export carbon dioxide to Australia for troubled carbon capture projects. According to emissions watchdog Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s long-term emissions reduction plan 'is unclear on how net zero can be achieved' and over-reliant on carbon offsets in lieu of phasing out fossil fuels.

Supporters of the Falepili Union have been quick to argue that it represents an incremental step toward climate justice, free mobility, and regional integration. Mihai Sora, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, characterized it as 'a model for compassionate and strategic partnerships in the face of global threats.'

This assumes that the agreement will increase diplomatic pressure on Australia to embrace its reparative climate obligations. But rather than nudge Australia in the right direction, the Falepili Union risks atrophying ambitions for a binding regional agreement.

For many Tuvaluan advocates, the agreement is designed to mitigate climate displacement without addressing the original sin of fossil fuel emissions. The Tuvalu Climate Action Network has argued that the agreement 'fails to effectively address the root cause of Tuvalu’s existential threat.' Enele Sopoaga, the Tuvaluan opposition leader and former prime minister, has pledged to 'throw away' the agreement if elected in 2024. While the Tuvaluan government formally sought the union, scholars Taukiei Kitara and Carol Farbotko, writing from Vaitupu, one of Tuvalu’s outer atolls, suggested that 'Tuvaluans have not been consulted' and that 'the Falepili Union does not deliver climate justice for Tuvaluan people.'

The issue of displacement is key to the agreement. Jamie Draper, a philosopher at the University of Utrecht and the author of the book Climate Displacement, argues that 'people who live in historically high emitting states have responsibility for climate displacement,' and that this responsibility 'alters the moral landscape regarding our duties to those who are displaced.'

Yet the absence of human rights language in the Falepili Union is stark. While recognizing the 'desire' of Pacific peoples to stay in their ancestral homelands, it makes no mention of a 'right' to do so. And, though the agreement establishes a commitment by Australia and Tuvalu to 'work together' to support Tuvaluans to remain in their lands, it only makes explicit reference to the international promotion of 'Tuvalu’s adaptation interests'—not Australia’s mitigation responsibilities.

For a rights-based model that recognizes this responsibility, we should look to another world first in Rarotonga. The announcement of the Falepili Union overshadowed Pacific leaders’ endorsement of the nonbinding Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility. The agreement aims to guide governments, communities, and development partners toward just solutions to climate displacement.

Among a host of important commitments, the framework recognizes 'the right of Pacific peoples to stay in place.' In practice, this right means that Pacific leaders, including those in Australia and New Zealand, should 'proactively pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius] above pre-industrial levels' so Pacific communities can remain in their ancestral lands until, or unless, migration becomes unavoidable.

Under the framework endorsed by Pacific leaders, planned relocations of communities are a 'last resort.' The priority is to limit global warming, so relocations never become necessary. The framework acknowledges that 'rights-based migration'—supporting people to move how and when they wish to—is crucial.

And it recognizes that 'staying in place' is about more than the loss of territory. For Pacific peoples, ancestral connections to land and sea are closely tied to identity and well-being. This relationship is the foundation of Pacific efforts to secure the preservation of sovereignty in the context of sea-level rise.

While the regional framework is nonbinding, developments such as the right to 'stay in place' will be essential to advocates in their struggle for climate action. But unlike the regional framework, the Falepili Union risks establishing a bilateral model that precludes—rather than enables—possibilities for climate justice.

By divorcing 'displacement' from 'emissions', and 'adaptation' from 'mitigation,' the Falepili Union bilateralizes these issues under terms where Australian interests reign supreme. Questions of economic justice, enhanced adaptation financing, and reparations are quashed.

An alternative approach could involve Australian support for a regional agreement that makes binding the values of the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility, centering the right of Pacific peoples to remain in place. Such an approach could also include Australian leadership on a multilateral debt forgiveness mechanism to support domestic green transitions across the global south; enormous increases to adaptation financing; and, at the very least, a serious commitment by the Albanese government to 'embed equality' in the UN loss and damage Fund, which has to date been severely lacking.

As long as Australia fails to accept historical responsibility for climate harms in the Pacific, with all the reparative obligations that this responsibility entails, the Falepili Union is not a model for global solutions to climate change, but rather a cautionary tale".