In India’s climate-vulnerable regions, community-led approaches are proving vital to resilience.
By listening to lived experiences, integrating local knowledge and co-creating solutions, initiatives address heat stress, flooding, safety concerns.
Such participatory models bridge technical planning with cultural realities, ensuring climate action is inclusive, accessible, grounded in the needs of those most affected.
During a community visit to informal settlements in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur a few months ago, a woman pointed out that “it gets as hot as 120 degrees”, when describing the heat stress she experiences in her tin-roof house. At first, we tried to rationalise her comment before realising she was describing the severity of her daily reality.
For years, development conversations have emphasised working with communities. Yet, when it comes to climate change, are we truly listening to them?
India faces the highest population exposure to extreme heat globally. The importance of community engagement is now widely recognised, but it is time to rethink how we engage with them — as partners shaping resilient futures.
The world today faces what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) calls a Triple Planetary Crisis — climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. These challenges manifest differently for India's diverse landscapes, lifestyles and economies.
Over 70 per cent of India’s districts are climate vulnerable, according to reports from Council on Energy, Environment and Water. However, the varied community experience remains underrepresented in the climate debates.
In climate education, communications tend to be technocratic and top-down. Discussions are mainly focused on emissions, mitigation and policy frameworks. While these themes are crucial, they often lack nuanced perspectives on community vulnerabilities and gendered impacts, and local knowledge such as heat hotspots, daily flood routes, seasonal water patterns. As a result, the language of climate action can feel inaccessible to the people most affected by it, providing a significant obstacle in making climate a people’s issue.
The question arises: How do we embed community participation in climate action so that it does not exclude the very people it affects the most, and make the conversation more accessible?
What does meaningful participation look like when projects are technical or complex?
According to the Mira Bhayandar Climate Plan, 40.5 per cent of city emissions come from the residential sector. Addressing this emission segment means working with residents at housing and society levels, despite the challenges of residents’ participation in complex infrastructure development initiatives.
The understanding of “home” as a deeply personal and emotional space shapes every step of the process. Keeping this emotional dimension at the heart of awareness and capacity building programmes has been found to empower residents to build trust and ownership in the project.
Seen through the lens of lived experiences, interactions with residents highlighted that while most people agree on the macro-level project idea, their interpretations of how it should be implemented at the micro-level can vary widely. To make urban initiatives more responsive, we can further enquire into different dimensions of lived experiences: Climatic (indoor heat, flood frequency, seasonal water scarcity), social (women’s safety, elderly vulnerability), economic (wage loss during heatwaves, repair costs after monsoons) and spatial (hyperlocal data about lanes, chokepoints, unsafe zones).
This serves as a robust model that equips communities with an understanding of the climate crisis and emissions (knowledge), encourages them to reflect on their local context (values), ask questions and ultimately empower them to engage with the relevant groups to take collective actions (skills).
Community-led engagement models can be adapted to diverse contexts. Listening workshops and community mapping exercises with residents, ASHA workers and other community-based organisations, for instance, allow for deep participatory insights. These exercises emphasise ‘Observation’ — where the community identifies daily climate stresses — and ‘Interpret’ — why these patterns occur.
These learnings can help support ‘Validation’ of community concerns through technical assessment and data, followed by ‘Co-creation’ and designing solutions with the community. Such locally anchored systems serve as knowledge platforms for city authorities, enabling planning to be grounded in lived realities.
Local communities are too often seen only as victims of the climate crisis. Yet every day, they adapt, innovate and drive local solutions as they confront its impact. Through this quiet leadership, they strengthen community resilience. Recognising these underlying forces is essential for shaping inclusive, responsive and accessible climate policies at every level.
A recent community-led heat resilience initiative in India's informal settlements was featured among the world’s leading climate adaptation practices at the UNFCCC Climate Week Implementation Forum 2025 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was guided by four key principles: Institutional collaboration, women’s leadership, climate resilience and inclusive planning.
Community-led approaches have demonstrated measurable impact in multiple contexts. In Hyderabad, the Cool Roof Policy lowered indoor temperatures by 2–5 degrees through community application drives. In Ahmedabad, the Heat Action Plan reduced heat-related deaths by up to 30 per cent by expanding ward-level heat volunteer networks and establishing community cool spaces.
Similarly, in housing and settlement upgrading, community-led flood mapping in Mumbai identified 40 per cent new hotspots using participatory geographic information system to inform municipal planning. These initiatives ensure that interventions are not top-down but reflect people’s aspirations for safety, comfort and dignity.
When it comes to climate action, our language often influences the way we participate and work collaboratively. Unfortunately, the scope of climate communications has been confined to its dissemination function. This framing presents challenges and opportunities equally, to consolidate knowledge on climate science, strengthen ethical communication, and community understanding.
Climate change is a complex and interconnected challenge that requires a systems approach to communication. Its impacts cut across environmental, biological, behavioral, social, economic dimensions, each influencing the other directly or indirectly.
Subsequently, every stage of participation must prioritise inclusion. Meetings with women, elderly, youth, informal workers must be accessible in their timing, language and location.
The future of climate action will depend not just on innovation in technology or policy, but on how we connect people to purpose, science to society and data to empathy. When we listen as much as we inform, communication becomes a living process and ensures solutions are realistic and culturally acceptable.
Prerana Langa is the chief executive at Aga Khan Agency for Habitat India and Nayani Khurana is the manager, communications and knowledge management at the same organisation.
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.