The climate crisis in India no longer announces itself as isolated events; it arrives in waves that collide, compound, and overwhelm. Floods rip through mountain valleys even as recurrent heatwaves choke the plains. Cyclones intensify overnight, striking with a force that cripples cities and severs supply chains. Recently in Uttarkashi, rivers turned to torrents in a matter of hours, sweeping away homes, public infrastructure and livelihoods.
Across the northern plains, searing heat kept children out of classrooms and patients crowding into overstretched hospitals. Along the coasts, storms brought not just winds but surges and rains that drowned entire neighbourhoods. These are not disconnected tragedies, but they are symptoms of a new climate reality in which risks converge, amplify, and cascade through India’s most fragile systems.
This convergence of hazards is precisely what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now warns us about. Therefore, climate risk in 2025 is less about single massive events and more about sequences of moderate events that cascade through weak systems. Take, for instance, a cloudburst in a fragile terrain triggering a landslide that cuts off power to a city reliant on uninterrupted electricity to manage its swollen rivers.
Or consider how a heatwave can weaken workers, slow down voluntary migration, and then leave them stranded during the next flood. India’s long-term climate burden encapsulates precisely this shift. According to the latest Climate Risk Index by Germanwatch, India ranks sixth among the most severely affected countries from 1993 to 2022, based on the economic toll and loss of life from extreme weather events. Over that 30-year span, India endured more than 400 extreme weather events, resulting in approximately 80,000 fatalities and around $180 billion in damages.
This underscores a crucial truth: India is not just vulnerable to standout catastrophes, but it is chronically exposed to a chain of hazards. That historical exposure forms the fertile ground for risk cascades. When statistics show repeated floods, heatwaves, cyclones, and droughts making simultaneous landfall in different states, it’s no longer adequate to plan for one hazard at a time. We need a lens that sees how these events link across space, time, and social systems.
India’s geography magnifies this diversity of risk, Himalayan landslides, coastal surges, plain floods, dryland heat, and urban inundation, each demand different responses. The crucial point is also that risk is not evenly distributed. Averages disguise the intensity of local vulnerability. The same rainfall footprint can produce vastly different outcomes depending on whether homes are brick or mud-walled, whether drains function or clog, whether clinics have power backup or not.
In other words, climate risk in India is mediated by exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity which are the three interacting dimensions that the IPCC and contemporary climate assessments emphasise. In the near term, outcomes depend more on these social and institutional factors than on differences in hazard projections. This is the heart of the challenge. Without reliable, granular data, governance is forced to react to crises rather than anticipate them. Relief spending follows disaster, but resilience investment often lags behind. Yet finance commissions, line departments, and local governments cannot prioritise adaptation without a clear map of where people and assets are exposed, how sensitive they are, and what institutional capacities exist to protect them.
India cannot rely on generic national assessments alone anymore given its ambitions for a green development. The country’s vast diversity demands state-level Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment. The Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment 2025 done by the Institute for Competitiveness underscores the uneven nature of climate risks in India. Scores across states range from 55.27 to 22.46, with a national average of 39.76.
About 13 states sit above that average meaning nearly half the country faces above-average vulnerability. Bihar emerges as the most vulnerable as per the assessment. What stands out is the tight clustering in the high-vulnerability band: Andhra Pradesh, ranked second, is within just four points of Tripura, ranked tenth. This suggests that a large group of states share similar risk profiles, exposed not only to hazards but to systemic weaknesses in adaptive capacity. The analysis groups states into four quartiles: those in the fourth deemed very high risk, the third as high risk, the second as medium risk, and the first as low risk. The stark spread confirms that climate risk in India is not a distant projection but a measurable, uneven burden already shaping state-level resilience and development trajectories.
Such robust data collection is essential if India is to confront climate risk as an immediate concern rather than a distant possibility. A state-level assessment must function as a living tool to be updated regularly, disaggregated down to districts and sectors, and embedded within fiscal and planning systems. This is critical not only to capture shifting hazards and vulnerabilities but also to trace their impact on productivity and growth. Heatwaves cut labour capacity, floods disrupt supply chains, and droughts sap agricultural output; each of these risks directly undermines India’s economic ambitions.
Without evidence, we cannot anticipate where productivity shocks will hit hardest or how to design safety nets to protect livelihoods. Such evidence is also integral for fiscal planning and devolution, ensuring that resources flow where risks are greatest and resilience investments are rewarded. As we are at the cusp of the next Finance Commission, integrating climate risk and vulnerability into formulas for transfers and incentives will be pivotal. Climate risk, then, is not a peripheral environmental issue but a structural challenge for development. For a country with India’s scale and aspirations, mainstreaming climate risk and vulnerability assessment into governance is no longer optional; it is the foundation for resilient, inclusive, and sustained growth.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. |
