The Impact of Climate Change on Statelessness in the Southern African Region such as flooding, where documentation may be swept away in flood waters. Affected persons may then be unable to be re-issued with documentation due to limited or no public services in the affected areas.75 It is also possible that displaced persons were never in possession of identity or registration of birth documents and were therefore always at risk of being undocumented and potentially stateless, which risk is then exacerbated by the displacement, as they may be unable to return to their country of origin as they are unable to prove their nationality. The lack of documentation in itself, does not cause statelessness, as nationality can be proven in other ways. But the absence of documentation can make this process more difficult and for that reason can heighten the risk of a person being unable to prove their nationality and therefore becoming stateless. Statelessness is also a possibility where single mothers, displaced across borders as a result of the impacts of climate change, give birth while displaced. Should the mother in question originate from a country that follows only the jus soli principle of nationality determination at birth, the child will not have the same nationality as its mother, because it was not born in the mother’s state of origin. The state in which the mother gives birth may have laws that address this issue, but these laws do not always provide effective protection.76 For example, in South Africa, section 2 of the South African Citizenship Act 88 of 1995 states that citizenship by birth may be acquired by children born in South Africa who would otherwise be stateless. However, in practice, this law is rarely applied properly. Often officials assume the child acquired its mother’s nationality at birth. Often births to foreign nationals are not adequately registered or recorded in South Africa, making it difficult to prove that the birth did, in fact, occur in South Africa and that section 2 applies.77 The protection of these laws is therefore limited and statelessness in childhood can result. Irrespective of how persons came to be stateless, should their stateless status not be resolved, another risk is that of generational statelessness. For persons displaced permanently across borders due to the impacts of climate change, they will pass on their stateless status to their children, who will in turn pass it on to their children, unless the laws of Southern African nations develop to address this issue. (b) Determination of statelessness status Another important consideration in assessing the rights and status of stateless persons displaced by the impacts of climate change is how their status as a stateless person is determined, if at all. The majority of states in the Southern African region have not ratified either the 1954 or 1961 Statelessness Conventions. In Mozambique, where both have been ratified, a person may be considered de jure stateless if they meet the definition of a stateless person in Article 1 of the 1954 Convention. They would then be entitled to the protections offered by the 1954 Convention. However, 75 76 77 Ibid. Ibid. Fatima Khan op cit note 3 at 17. 107