Rising Tides, Stateless Lives: Towards a Normative Framework for Climate-Induced Statelessness of Climate Refugees in International Law

Abstract

The rising impacts of weather change, especially the rise of sea-levels and submersion of coasts are generating novel displacement patterns that the international law is poorly adapted to handle. One of the most pressing yet the least developed issues is the threat of statelessness as a result of temperature change, people and communities can lose not only their homestead but also their nationality, legal identity, and access to state protection. This study questions normatively and doctrinally the lack of the norm in current international law that regulates climate displaced individuals, particularly in the situation of disappearance of the territory. Leaving behind scholarship that isolates the problems of refugee’s law, statelessness, and environmental loss, this paper suggests an unified legal strategy based on climate justice, theory of human rights, and changing sovereignty principles. It talks about the flaws in the 1951 Refugee Agreement and the 1954 and 1961 Stateless People Conventions, and soft law tools like the Loss and Damage Fund and the Nansel Initiative that were created at COP28. The implications of the 2024 ICJ Recommendation Comment on climate obligation are further discussed in light of its interpretive implication that states bear the burden of protecting the impacted populations. The study is methodologically based on a doctrinal and comparative legal approach by studying international treaties and jurisprudence and domestic constitutional law. The study combines global legal analysis with a located case study of displaced communities in coastal Mumbai due to climate changes where the question of property loss, loss of civic identity and constitutional rights as per Article 21 are examined through the lens of climate justice. Lastly, a normative legal structure for identifying and safeguarding stateless individuals displaced by global warming will also be provided by the study. The synthesis of lawful principles across domains and jurisdictions makes the study relevant to the transformation of global law to address the new challenges of the Anthropocene the remaking of legal identity, sovereignty, and belonging in a warming world.