The government of India in the Economic Survey 2024-25 had highlighted the significance of adaptation to the adverse impacts of global warming and consequent climate change and lamented the lack of international climate finance for the same but has not adequately supported adaptation action with finance in its Budget 2025-26.
In fact, the word ‘climate’ was mentioned only thrice in the finance minister’s budget speech and the word ‘adaptation’ was not mentioned even once. The word ‘resilience’ was mentioned a couple of times and only once in the ‘climate’ context.
The phrases ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ were not mentioned even once in the speech despite India being the seventh most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change in the world, according to the Economic Survey 2024-25.
Adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change is a wide subject with diverse aspects trickling down to almost all sectors of the economy and is often conflated with general development. According to some, one can think of adaptation as development activities that keep in mind that global warming and consequent climate change are ongoing, urgent and impacting the present and will not just impact the future.
Even then, some dedicated focus is required on adaptation schemes, perhaps just to understand how the impacts of climate change on various sectors of the economy and communities are intensifying and what needs to be done to adapt to them.
Under the budget estimates for the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), the National Adaptation Fund (NAF), Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) and the National Mission on Himalayan Studies (NMHS) were shifted from schemes to non-schemes and moved to the secretariat budget head of the ministry without a clear budget outlay.
All these three budget heads haven’t received any budget allocation since 2022-23. The actual spending under these budget heads which happened last in 2022-23 were Rs 21.95 crore for NAF, Rs 26.60 crore for NMHS and Rs 31.98 crore for CCAP.
While the NAF or the NAF for Climate Change (NAFCC) is crucial for executing projects on different aspects of adaptation across the country, mainly related to agriculture and animal husbandry, the NMHS is crucial to understand adaptation and ecological security in the fragile region of the Himalayas spread across 13 states and UTs of the country.
The CCAP or the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), on the other hand, defines eight missions related to climate change and was formulated in 2008. The NAPCC has not been revised since then, despite the rapid changes in India’s climate in the last decade-and-a-half and their intensifying impacts on the lives and livelihoods of people.
The NAFCC administered and implemented by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) was established in 2015 “to meet the cost of adaptation to climate change for the states and union territories of India that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.”
An update from the MoEFCC published by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) on August 5, 2024, stated that 30 projects have been sanctioned under the NAFCC across 27 states and UTs with a total project cost of Rs 847.48 crore.
A NAFCC project titled Climate Resilient Interventions in Dairy Sector in Coastal and Arid Areas in Andhra Pradesh was sanctioned on August 16, 2016, with a total budget of Rs 12,71,36,316 for three districts of Andhra Pradesh — Anantapuramu (Anathapur), Sri Potti Sriramulu Nellore (Nellore) and Vijayanagaram (Vizianagaram).
One of the components of the project was to establish community-based best practices for managing heat stress and impacts of cyclones on dairy animals.
Of the total sanctioned budget, an amount of Rs 6,35,68,108 was released to NABARD on October 26, 2016, and Rs 5,12,78,000 was released by NABARD to the executing entity on August 11, 2017, which is not named. The executing entity was able to utilise only Rs 2,28,49,000 of this amount.
“The challenges encountered in implementation of the project include delays in land identification & alienation, identification of civil engineering executive agency & technical resource agency, finalization of climate resilient animal hostel design,” said the PIB update, based on a response by Kirti Vardhan Singh, minister of state of MoEFCC, in the Lok Sabha on August 5, 2024.
The PIB update also informs that the NAFCC was made a non-scheme in November 2022 without citing any reasons for doing so or stating if the objectives of the fund had been fulfilled.
The National Coastal Mission scheme which is related to the sustainable management of India’s coastline and has some component of climate change adaptation to it has had its budget outlay reduced from Rs 8 crore to Rs 2 crore.
A central scheme under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) — Ocean services, Modelling, Application, Resources and Technology (O-SMART) which is crucial for building better models for understanding the changes occurring in the Indian Ocean region — has not been allotted any budget in 2025-26. It was not allotted any money in 2024-25 as well.
The research activities carried out under the O-SMART scheme could also be important for understanding the changing character of tropical cyclones and the south west monsoon, which then becomes crucial for understanding their impacts on lives and livelihoods and adaptation to the same.
But all is not gloom and doom in the Budget 2025-26 in terms of adaptation to climate change.
One of the climate change-related programmes under the NAPCC and MoEFCC which has received an increased budget allocation in Budget 2025-26 is the National Mission for a Green India (NMGI) with Rs 220 crore, up from Rs 160 crore in 2024-25. The NMGI implements projects on afforestation and fire prevention and management across the country.
Another important aspect of adaptation is observing how changes are occurring to weather patterns over India and how they can be understood in the context of global warming and consequent climate change.
To this end, the Government of India introduced ‘Mission Mausam’ on September 13 2024, with a budget outlay of Rs 2,000 crore over 2024-26.
“Mission Mausam has the goal of making Bharat a ‘Weather-ready and Climate-smart’ nation, so as to mitigate the impact of climate change and extreme weather events and strengthen the resilience of the communities,” said the PIB in a press release.
“The mission aims to establish 50 Doppler Weather Radars (DWR), 60 Radio Sonde/Radio Wind (RS/RW) stations, 100 disdrometers, 10 Wind Profilers, 25 radiometers, 1 Urban testbed, 1 Process testbed, 1 Ocean Research station and 10 Marine Automatic Weather Stations with upper air observation,” the press release added.
Even with these steps much more was required in terms of new schemes and budget allocation to old schemes in Budget 2025-26 for an enhanced understanding of adaptation to global warming and consequent climate change in India.