The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty was signed on November 9, 2023 and came into force on August 28, 2024; it creates a special pathway for mobility whose implementation provides for up to 280 visa places per year for Tuvalu, including partners and dependent children. The treaty recognizes the continuity of Tuvalu’s State and sovereignty despite rising sea levels, while prioritizing adaptation to enable inhabitants to remain on their territory when possible. The 2024-25 PEV ballot received 926 primary registrations from Tuvalu. IPCC AR6 projects a median global average increase of approximately 0.77 m by 2100 under SSP5-8.5, with a likely range of 0.63 to 1.01 m; local Pacific values vary according to scenario and location.

The Essential Points

  • The Falepili Union is presented as the first legally binding treaty recognizing the continuity of Tuvalu’s State and sovereignty in the face of rising sea levels; it creates a pathway for “human mobility with dignity” without explicitly formulating an opposition between forced exodus and managed migration.
  • Tuvalu has 11,000 inhabitants; the Treaty stream had 2,474 primary registrations as of July 23, 2025, and 280 annual visas to Australia are provided for by the treaty (Government of Tuvalu / Australia Department of Home Affairs, 2024).
  • The treaty articulates the continuity of the State, the maintenance of territorial ties and voluntary mobility; it does not define the diaspora as a legal substitute for territory.
  • International law has never had to address this case: no existing convention defines what becomes of a State’s sovereignty when its population is relocated to another nation-state in an organized manner.
  • If the model holds, it could serve as a reference for the tens of millions of people that climate projections place in vulnerable coastal zones by 2100.

An Archipelago Disappearing Under Water Within a Human Lifetime

Tuvalu consists of nine coral atolls in the central Pacific. Its highest point is approximately 4.6 meters above sea level. According to the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, the global average rise by 2100 varies depending on emissions; under SSP5-8.5, the median is 0.77 m, with a likely range of 0.63 to 1.01 m, compared to 1995-2014. Soil salinization, repeated flooding during high tides and cyclones, and the progressive destruction of freshwater reserves threaten the archipelago before any total submersion. The physical land may remain, but could cease to be habitable before it disappears.

This timeline changes everything. A single generation is enough for the question to cease being theoretical. Tuvalu’s inhabitants already live with regular submersion of their gardens, contamination of their wells, and erosion of their coasts. The Tuvaluan government understood at least a decade ago that multilateral climate negotiations, however important, would not save the archipelago within this timeframe. The Paris Agreement targets a global trajectory; it does not rebuild atolls.

A different response was needed.

Tuvalu’s response is both pragmatic and bold. Tuvalu sought durable arrangements including a mobility pathway to Australia and support for adaptation, in order to protect its population, identity, culture and sovereignty. This is the central political wager of the Falepuli Union treaty.

The Concrete Changes of the Falepuli Union Treaty

The treaty, signed on November 9, 2023 and entered into force on August 28, 2024 after the required exchange of diplomatic notifications, creates a special mobility pathway; its implementation provides for an initial allocation of up to 280 visa places per program year, including partners and dependent children, adjustable by mutual agreement, with access to employment, Australian public services and permanent residence. The treaty gives Australia a central role in security matters: Tuvalu must agree with it on any engagement with third parties in the fields of security and defense. The agreement falls within the context of Pacific security and sovereignty issues and frames certain Tuvalu cooperations with third parties; its official texts do not, however, name China nor an Australian-American competition against it.

But the most innovative clause is elsewhere. The treaty explicitly recognizes the continuity of Tuvalu’s State and sovereignty despite the effects of rising sea levels. Tuvaluans relocated to Australia remain Tuvalu citizens. They maintain ties with the institutions of the Tuvaluan state. The treaty affirms that Tuvalu’s State, sovereignty, rights and obligations will continue despite rising sea levels; the maintenance of Tuvalu’s representation at the UN in the event of territorial disappearance is legally unprecedented and unresolved, while the maintenance of maritime rights in the extreme hypothesis of total submersion remains an evolving legal question; international practice supports the stability of already-established zones.

Tuvalu had an estimated 9,853 inhabitants in the first quarter of 2024; the 2024-25 PEV ballot received 926 primary registrations from Tuvalu. The rate of up to 280 places per year represents approximately 2.8% of the total population. At this rate, and if momentum accelerates as living conditions deteriorate, a significant share of Tuvaluans could live outside the archipelago before the atolls are physically submerged. This timeline poses to legal scholars a new question: the threshold beyond which a State ceases to exist if its population lives elsewhere remains to be defined.

International Law Has No Prepared Answer

The Montevideo Convention of 1933 formulates the classical criteria for statehood often used as a reference, but it is neither a universal instrument nor the sole source of international law on the State. Territory is one of four conditions. The available case law provides no identical precedent for a State that would meet the other three criteria while losing its territory irreversibly and documentedly.

Legal scholars specializing in public international law have been debating possible scenarios for several years. Legal analyses support the view that institutional continuity can contribute to the maintenance of international legal personality, even without physical territory. International recognition would be a crucial political and practical factor for the continuity of a State without habitable territory, but it is not, according to Article 3 of Montevideo, a general constitutive condition of its existence.

Another, more cautious reading notes that international recognition is a political as well as legal fact. If other States cease to recognize Tuvalu as a sovereign interlocutor, if its UN seat is called into question, or if its maritime rights are contested once the territory becomes uninhabitable, no formal rule guarantees continuity. International law is made of precedents and power relations as much as texts.

Tuvalu chose not to wait for the question to be resolved in an emergency. By concluding this bilateral treaty while it fully exercises its functions on its territory, Tuvalu is helping to create an important precedent on State continuity in the face of rising sea levels. This is a form of preventive jurisprudence.

The Cooperation of Small Pacific States

Tuvalu does not act alone. The Marshall Islands have adopted a parallel strategy, maintaining their maritime rights and international seat while negotiating mobility agreements with the United States. Kiribati is holding similar discussions with Australia and New Zealand. The Federated States of Micronesia already have free access to the American labor market via the Compact of Free Association. These cases converge toward the same emerging model: the dissociation between physical territory and State existence.

In July 2025, Pacific island nations adopted five common climate adaptation measures at a regional summit, signaling a willingness to coordinate that goes beyond isolated national responses. France Info Nouvelle-Calédonie documented these commitments, which include mechanisms for regional solidarity and common positions in multilateral climate negotiations. This collective dynamic is important: it indicates that the Tuvaluan model is not an exotic exception, but potentially the first prototype of a set of solutions that several island States could adopt and adapt.

The question of financing remains open. The Falepuli Union treaty relies on Australian political will, itself articulated around specific geopolitical interests. This bilateral model is more solid than dependence on multilateral climate funds whose financing tends to end at the next budget cycle. But it remains dependent on an asymmetrical relationship between a micro-State of 11,000 inhabitants and one of the world’s largest economies.

This Precedent and Its Implications for 2050 and Beyond

The Tuvaluan case is not a geographical curiosity. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt, the Netherlands, Miami: densely populated coastal areas on every continent face risks of flooding or degraded habitability within similar timeframes. IPCC AR6 estimates that 176 to 880 million people could be exposed to the centennial coastal floodplain by 2100 under RCP8.5; this measure does not correspond to exposure defined by exactly one meter of sea level rise.

The difference in scale is radical. Tuvalu can negotiate a bilateral treaty because it is tiny. A Bangladesh or a Vietnam cannot relocate its coasts to another State. The Tuvaluan model nonetheless poses a useful question at that scale: States must build their institutional continuity when a significant part of their population is in forced movement.

Two trajectories are taking shape for the coming decades. In the first, the Tuvaluan precedent convinces the international community to adapt the existing legal framework: a convention on climate transition States could formally recognize the continuity of international legal personality independent of physical territory, create multilateral financing mechanisms for organized relocations, and establish specific rights for populations displaced by climate factors. This would be a mutation of international law comparable, in ambition if not in scale, to the creation of the refugee system after 1945.

In the second trajectory, the Tuvaluan case remains a particular case, treated as a geographical exception with no possibility of generalization. Larger-scale climate relocations occur in disorder, State by State, without common framework, with variable rights depending on negotiable bilateral agreements. The most vulnerable populations, those who do not have behind them a still-operational government to negotiate, find themselves in a legal gray zone between economic migrant and climate refugee, two statuses that correspond to neither their actual situation.

The signals to watch in the coming years are precise. The evolution of Tuvalu’s UN seat will tell whether the international community de facto accepts post-territorial sovereignty. Decisions by the International Court of Justice on the opinions requested by Vanuatu concerning States’ climate obligations could create useful jurisprudence. And the success or failure of maintaining Tuvaluan cultural identity within the Australian diaspora will determine whether the model is socially viable long-term, not just institutionally.

On this point, the experience of large diasporas is instructive. National communities have maintained strong identity for generations without territory, by articulating language, cultural practices, community institutions and transnational family ties. The Tuvaluan diaspora in Australia will benefit from an institutional framework that these historical diasporas did not have: a still-recognized country of origin, maintained civil rights and an explicit cultural policy. This framework constitutes a resource that previous generations of forced migrants did not have.

A Model to Build, Not to Await

The Tuvaluan government, by signing the Falepuli Union treaty, took a lucid political action. By concluding the Falepili Union, Tuvalu has added a bilateral strategy of State continuity, adaptation and mobility to its ongoing multilateral action for climate and the protection of its sovereignty. It is this window of action, to act before the crisis and not after, that other island States are beginning to use.

International law has adapted to the emergence of international organizations, to decolonization and to the creation of maritime law. It can adapt to States whose physical territory disappears as a result of a documented and predictable phenomenon. This adaptation requires actors who set precedents, request legal opinions and bring cases before multilateral institutions.

Tuvalu is implementing this approach right now. For the coming decades, other States facing comparable risks will have to decide whether they engage in similar initiatives while they still have the capacity to do so.

Sources

  1. France Info Nouvelle-Calédonie – Climate change: five measures adopted by the Pacific islands (July 2025)
  2. Government of Tuvalu / Australia Department of Home Affairs – Falepuli Union Treaty (2024) [official document, available via Australian and Tuvaluan government portals]
  3. IPCC – Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), Working Groups I and II: sea level projections in the Pacific (2021-2022)
  4. Commonwealth Secretariat – reports on climate mobility and continuity of island States
  5. Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) – reference text in public international law