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India witnessed a 48 per cent rise in deaths due to extreme weather events in 2025, with 4,064 fatalities reported.
Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest death toll, while Maharashtra suffered the most crop damage.
The monsoon season was particularly devastating, accounting for 3,007 deaths.
As many as 4,064 deaths in India were associated with extreme weather events in india in the first nine months of 2025, according to a joint report by Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and Down To Earth (DTE). This was a 48 per cent increase in the last four years, the analysis showed.
The most number of people died in Madhya Pradesh. In terms of cropped area affected, Maharashtra was the worst hit, with an area of 8.4 million hectares.
Crop loss due to these events — heat and cold waves, lightning and storms, heavy rain, floods and landslides — was a staggering 9.47 million hectares — a 400 per cent rise in four years.
In 2024, there were 3,238 deaths and 3.2 million ha crop loss due to extreme weather events.
The country recorded these losses during a period when there was one or the other extreme weather event on 99 per cent of the days.
During this time, at least 18 states / Union territories recorded their highest number of extreme weather days since 2022, the report showed.
At least 30 states / UTs experienced extreme weather events for eight consecutive months from February to September in 2025. The most number of events occured in Himachal Pradesh.
The monsoon remains India’s most devastating season, with the highest number of extreme weather days recorded every year since 2022. Of the 4,064 deaths documented in 2025, 3,007 occurred during the monsoon months alone.
Published annually, the Climate India 2025 report is based on nearly 1,500 days of daily monitoring and tracks seasonal trends in extreme weather since 2022. The report was released November 19, 2025 in an online webinar by Sunita Narain, director general of CSE and editor of DTE.
“Given the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, the country no longer needs to count just the disasters. What we need to understand is the scale — the scale of mitigation that Belém is talking about, the scale on which the whole world has to come together. But it is also about what we need to do, keeping in mind that there will be more and more such disasters,” she said, adding:
Given this scale, we really must get the world to understand the urgency of mitigation. We have to reduce the amount of CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere, because no amount of adaptation is going to be possible with the scale of disasters we are now witnessing.
The year 2025 has already broken several climate records. January was the fifth driest month in India since 1901, and February marked the warmest in 124 years.
September brought the seventh-highest mean temperature for that month, with minimum temperatures ranking fifth highest on record.
Agriculture has faced the brunt, with extreme weather affecting at least 9.47 million hectares of cropped land — a four-fold rise from 2022. Data gaps, particularly from large agricultural states such as West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, suggest the real extent of damage may be far higher, according to DTE data analysts.
Heavy rain, floods and landslides remained the deadliest types of extreme weather, accounting for 2,440 deaths. These were followed by lightning and storms (1,456 deaths), cloudbursts (135), heatwaves (21) and snowfall (12).
Download the report for a more in-depth analysis.