Climatic Deterritorialization as an Accelerator to Statelessness

Climate change leads to many direct and indirect consequences throughout the world. A major ancillary to global warming is raising sea levels resulting in territorial dissipation of island states. This areal degradation has resulted in environment determined displacement directing massive migratory trends which eventually intensify statelessness. As the statistics and severity of storms and floods like cyclones, hurricanes, tornados and tsunamis and other cataclysms have been on a rise, sinking of island states is unavoidable. Once the islands and other coastal settlements are inundated causing deterritorialization, the prospects of the remaining population getting adapted to the reversed conditions get restricted. It permits migration as the only alternative. This external displacement is permanent in nature and the migratory inhabitant lives get dependent on the legal status provided by the host country. Correspondingly, if the sovereignty of the island state is endangered and the populace is not granted citizenship status by any other state, they per se becomes de jure stateless. Through this article, an effort is contrived to understand in detail the extensive impact of environmental degradation on the increasing stateless population globally. This paper also offers an overview of the interconnectedness between the climatic and social, political or economic factors leading to statelessness, parallelly working on understanding the probable provisions to be implemented to aid such people. Furthermore, an endeavour to understand different solutions for preventing statelessness in the context of low-lying island States has been made.