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Home News World Australia

Why Climate Visa Lottery Schemes Are Not the Answer

August 22, 2025
in Australia, Environment, News
Why Climate Visa Lottery Schemes Are Not the Answer
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In July 2025, an astonishing 8,750 people of Tuvalu’s approximately 9,470 residents registered for a visa to Australia through the Falepili Mobility Pathway, a “climate visa” born out of the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union. The treaty grants 280 Tuvaluans each year access to Australian residency, education, and health care, in exchange for closer security cooperation, especially an obligation to mutually agree on any partnerships with other states on security, defense and critical infrastructure matters. Marketed as the world’s first climate mobility visa, it comes wrapped in the language of “building climate resilience.”

But behind the climate resilience rhetoric lurks strategic interests. As Clare Francis, a former Australian diplomat, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2023 when the union was announced, the treaty offers Australia geopolitical leverage under the guise of climate justice. More troubling, it represents a broader trend: governing climate migration not as a right, but as a matter of chance.

When around 92 percent of a country’s population signals interest in leaving, the crisis goes beyond rising sea levels. In Tuvalu, as in many climate-threatened nations, migration demand stems from eroding livelihoods, fragile economies, overstretched health care systems, and fears over the future. Even if some registered without intending to move—because it was easy or because everyone was doing it—the overwhelming participation speaks volumes.

The Guardian’s interviews with visa applicants reveal a wide range of views and intentions. Some explained how the trauma of extreme weather combined with education on the consequences of climate change have made it clear that Australia is the future. Others, already in Australia on other temporary visas, note how hard the transition has been and how hard it will be for those who come after.

Tuvalu is not an anomaly. Across the world, as governments confront unmanageable wildfires, deadly floods, and disappearing coastlines, lottery logic is spreading. When political will is insufficient, randomness becomes a default policy tool. And in accepting it, we risk normalizing an unjust system that is only going to get worse.


Lottery-based migration programs are not new, but their use in climate contexts is accelerating.

New Zealand’s Pacific Access Category (PAC) and Samoan Quota schemes, in place for decades, randomly allocate visas to citizens of Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Samoa. Officially labor migration programs, they function in practice as limited escape routes from climate-vulnerable nations.

Australia’s newest migration program also uses a ballot system. The Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV), within which the Falepili Mobility Pathway is a distinct treaty-stream subcategory, is a regional lottery offering 3,000 places annually to citizens of the Pacific and East Timor. A 2022 policy brief from the International Organization for Migration highlighted that these labor mobility schemes lower population pressures, generate remittances, and diversify livelihoods as islands are negatively impacted by climate change.

Despite those benefits, these schemes have structural barriers: capped numbers, short application windows, and a nonrefundable registration fee. In 2019, Fiji’s PAC quota had 75 applicants per slot; Kiribati’s had 58. That year, roughly 13,500 people registered for 650 slots, 20 times oversubscribed, generating more than 1 million New Zealand dollars (about $582,000) in fees for Wellington. The Falepili ballot cost 25 Australian dollars ($16) to register this year, and with almost the whole nation likely to register each year, there will be a steady supply of registration fees for the years to come.

These limitations demonstrate that visa lotteries are not always truly random. Geographic and economic filters as well as the short application window determine who makes it to the draw. The result is a selective lottery that is only dressed up as egalitarian.

Lottery logic also appears within the context of post-disaster resettlement, which is often a form of internal displacement and not the same as cross-border relocation due to climate change. After the United States’ Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the surrounding area 20 years ago this August, some displaced families were assigned temporary housing in other parts of the United States through rapid, seemingly arbitrary systems. Similar patterns emerged after Nepal’s 2015 earthquake and the enormous 2010 floods in Pakistan.

These improvised mechanisms reflect the same uncomfortable truth as formal visa lotteries: When governments are unprepared to mitigate and adapt to climate change, randomness fills the void of policy. Turning such chaotic emergency stopgaps into planned governance models, such as climate migration, risks normalizing an approach born of poor governance, not justice.

Post-disaster lotteries can also damage social resilience. In post-Fukushima Japan, evacuees from the nuclear disaster were officially allocated housing from their contaminated zones through a randomized system. Researchers used the random distribution of evacuees across housing clusters to study peer effects on employment outcomes. They found that proximity to employed neighbors improved reintegration, underscoring the significance of social capital in recovery. But random allocation often breaks apart existing networks, eroding that same capital that’s supposed to make you resilient.

I saw this firsthand in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Tens of thousands were forcibly relocated inland to undeveloped land. The government, along with some nongovernmental organizations and corporate donors, argued that a housing lottery was the fairest way to distribute units, contrasting with the traditional practice of relocating neighbors together. On paper, it sounded equitable. In reality, survivors were doubly displaced: first from their coastal homes, then from their communities.

The impact on trust was stark. I found in my research that in resettlement coastal villages prior to resettlement, 20 percent of surveyed residents said they trusted their neighbors; in the lottery-based resettlement sites, that figure fell to just 5 percent. This means that trust in housing lottery resettlement sites was virtually nonexistent. The sense of isolation was profound, undermining recovery.

This example demonstrates the deep psychological costs of lottery systems to managing displacement and humanitarian aid distribution. When people are forced to pin their future on a randomized outcome, they experience prolonged anxiety, loss of agency, loss of social trust, and emotional distress.


For many Tuvaluans, registering for the visa lottery was more than a bureaucratic act—it was seizing a thin lifeline in the face of an uncertain future. Of the 8,750 who applied, 8,470 were rejected. The Australian High Commission Tuvalu tried to soften the blow, writing on Facebook: “Don’t worry, the ballot will be back again next year, and for many years to come.”

This framing—that lotteries are equal opportunity and that everyone gets a chance—has a paternalistic feel to it because it reminds us of what children are taught at school: “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” But this narrative conceals the brutality of the process. Rights are not prizes. The losers are not merely unlucky. They are left to face the same climate risks that drove them to apply in the first place and that Australia committed to building resilience against through the treaty.

More importantly, the larger politics stay below the surface. Nowhere in the Falepili agreement is Australia obliged to reduce its own carbon emissions, which directly threaten Tuvalu. The lottery format sidesteps these uncomfortable realities. Climate risk is not random; it maps closely onto histories of colonialism, racist exclusion, and economic precarity. Lotteries pretend otherwise, imposing an illusion of neutrality on deep injustices.

The Falepili visa lottery may preserve dignity and freedom of movement for the few hundred who secure it, but it leaves the majority with nothing. This tension will only grow as climate impacts intensify. Using lotteries as a catch-all solution to climate displacement allows governments to project action without investing in systems that deliver rights and protection at scale.

There is a world where we govern climate mobility differently. In other places, I have argued for the necessity of a global framework for climate relocation. But for climate mobility in general, better models exist. A new global coalition lead by the Human Rights Watch is advocating for rights-based climate relocation policies that would ensure that communities forced to plan climate-induced relocations can do so on their own terms and with dignity.

There are also proactive and vulnerability-based relocation schemes that prioritize those most at risk and are grounded in transparent criteria. Regional frameworks, similar to the PEV but with a climate focus, could coordinate movement and adaptation among neighboring states. Lastly, community-led relocation approaches have proven to be quite successful. Imagining different possibilities is important because more than 400 climate- and weather-related community relocations have already taken place globally since 1970, and more will happen in the future.

The world’s first climate visa lottery came from Tuvalu, but it won’t be the last. The model is politically convenient: low cost, low commitment, and high PR value. But governing human mobility through chance is a dangerous precedent.

As climate impacts deepen, demand for protection will grow. We must resist the allure of lotteries because they allow governments to gesture at action without building infrastructure for equity or responsibility. We need to co-design rights-based pathways with climate-threatened communities, invest in adaptation to reduce forced migration, and address the structural inequalities that underpin the climate crisis.

The future of human mobility will be shaped not by who wins the next draw, but by whether we choose to replace chance with justice.

The post Why Climate Visa Lottery Schemes Are Not the Answer appeared first on Foreign Policy.

Tags: AustraliaClimate ChangeEnvironmentMigration and Immigrationpacific ocean
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