In recent years, we have witnessed Delhi sizzling in over 50 degrees celsius extreme heat, devastating flooding in Punjab & Assam, and widespread crop failure in Maharashtra. These patterns will repeat, with more intensity and frequency.
And it’s not just central government officials who should be preparing for these, but also those in local municipal corporations and councils. These local bodies should be the frontline of India’s climate defence. But right now, our first responders are underpowered, underfunded, and dangerously unprepared. Unless we strengthen them, India’s path to climate resilience will falter.
Climate adaptation is about survival. It builds society’s resilience by enhancing its capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate impacts. It includes both localised proactive measures, such as developing drought-resistant crops or building coastal defenses, and reactive responses to climate disasters.
At its core, adaptation is inherently localised. In the Sundarbans, where rising seas and cyclones swallow farmland, adaptation means floating gardens built on bamboo rafts to grow food even when the land disappears. In Ahmedabad, where heatwaves have turned deadly, it means stationing medics in slum clusters, issuing early warnings, and painting roofs white to cool homes. In Bundelkhand’s drought-scorched terrain, it means building check dams and reviving centuries-old rain tanks. And in Odisha’s cyclone corridor, it means raised evacuation roads, storm shelters, and salt-tolerant rice varieties. Each solution is rooted in local risk. One national template isn’t enough; it should be complemented with thousands of local blueprints.
Unlike carbon emission mitigation, which can be standardised nationally, adaptation’s context-specific nature means it requires a bottom-up approach. It demands community involvement in assessing climate vulnerabilities and adaptation needs. Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) are the ideal institutional bodies for this work, as their existing mandates already overlap with climate sensitive sectors like water, housing, waste, and public health.
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Fiscal and administrative autonomy
ULBs today are not equipped for the climate frontlines. The Reserve Bank of India’s 2024 Report on Municipal Finances highlights the precarious position of ULBs. They are chronically underfunded with minimal self-generated revenue and heavily dependent on state and central transfers. This fiscal weakness reflects a deeper governance imbalance. While countries like China and the US allocate over 60 per cent of public employees to local governments, India flips the model with only 15 per cent of public servants working at the local level. Effective climate adaptation cannot emerge from this extreme centralisation; it requires a fundamental rebalancing of India’s governance structures toward local empowerment.
ULBs need to be empowered with real fiscal and administrative autonomy, and space for community participation. Urban governance fails when citizens do not have empowered councillors, which discourages constant communication and a self-correcting feedback loop between citizens and local politicians. Additionally, ULBs must become hubs for regional climate data; no one can adapt to risks they don’t understand.
Right now, we have a policy window to get this design right. The National Adaptation Plan (NAP), due for submission to the UNFCCC before COP30 in November, gives us a chance to embed decentralised governance into the country’s core climate strategy. NAPs typically outline what risks we identify & prioritise, how adaptation is funded, who implements it and how progress is measured. India’s approach to these elements must be fundamentally imagined through a decentralised governance lens.
Integrating local leadership into India’s NAP from the outset will streamline achievement of its broader objectives, beyond effective identification of risks. Particularly, when it comes to financing. Currently, adaptation funding remains predominantly public. The private sector stays out because projects lack revenue models, bankability, and local data to understand their climate exposure. But empowered ULBs can unlock that. By generating granular, location-specific climate risk data, they give businesses the tools to assess exposure, and the confidence to invest in their own resilience.
This need will only grow due to SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) disclosures and RBI’s upcoming disclosure framework for climate-related financial risks. By positioning ULBs as repositories of localised climate risk information, India can help both large corporations comply with these regulations and enable SMEs to understand and adapt to their specific vulnerabilities.
Currently, multilateral data dashboards provide data on flooding, heat maps and land protection, for cities such as Chennai, Surat and Pune. While these initiatives could be useful for policymakers and urban planners, corporations need more granular and country-wide data for climate stress testing their operations. Hence, a distributed approach to climate intelligence would strengthen economic resilience against climate shocks that, according to the RBI, could put 4.5 percent of India’s GDP at risk by 2030.
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Beyond climate resilience
Finally, adaptation must evolve with reality. Adaptation strategies need rapid, local feedback loops; what worked, what failed, what must change. Only decentralised governance, with decision-makers embedded in the community, can deliver that kind of agility. A central dashboard in Delhi can’t replace what a councillor learns from walking their ward.
More than just climate resilience, this approach to adaptation has the potential to upend or speed up India’s entire development trajectory. Adaptation increasingly intertwines with broader development goals. Painting a school roof white to cut indoor temperatures by five degrees isn’t just adaptation; it improves learning outcomes. Reviving tanks to store rainwater doesn’t just build resilience; it feeds farms, boosts incomes, and keeps children in school. Local climate action often delivers outsized social and economic returns.
This convergence between adaptation and development will accelerate as funding institutions increasingly prioritise climate-resilient projects. Already, housing developments vulnerable to flooding, heat stress, or other climate risks struggle to secure financing from development institutions.
Certainly, decentralisation can be a double-edged sword. There are valid concerns of quality assurance, capacity and local structures of power with vested interest in the existing setup. The central government has the crucial role in this design to be an enabler, providing technical assistance, assimilating existing stakeholders in the new design and ensuring that ULBs learn from each other.
Climate adaptation planning is not a mere cosmetic exercise, it represents a critical opportunity to reimagine governance for resilience. Strengthening, rather than bypassing, these existing governance structures offers the most efficient path to climate resilience. Embedding decentralised governance at the heart of India’s NAP is not just a good idea, it’s the only credible path to climate safety, economic stability, and inclusive development in a warming world.
Saiyed Kamil is an SDG & Climate Finance Policies Specialist at the UNDP. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)