In India, climate change is not a distant threat, it’s a harsh reality already uprooting millions from their homes. Between 2015 and 2024, 32.32 million people were internally displaced due to natural disasters, mostly floods and storms, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). In 2024 alone, the figure was 5.4 million, the highest annual displacement in over a decade.
These numbers are not abstract. They represent families whose homes were torn apart by cyclones in Odisha, farmers in the Sundarbans who abandoned their fields to saltwater intrusion, and labourers in Marathwada and Bundelkhand forced to migrate after repeated droughts destroyed crops. Many of these people do not move just once, repeated events create cycles of migration, loss, and vulnerability (IDMC, 2025).
Migration is not just about losing a home; it unravels social networks, disrupts community traditions, and strips away cultural belonging. Leaving behind land, livelihoods, and traditions has profound psychological consequences, amplifying the degree of vulnerability. Recognizing this, the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM), established under the UNFCCC in 2013 (UNFCCC Decision 2/CP.19, 2013), made human mobility, including displacement, migration, and planned relocation, a central pillar of the Loss and Damage agenda. It reframed migration not merely as a humanitarian concern but as an adaptation necessity and a justice issue.
Displacement marks just the start of the crisis. In South Asia, beyond sudden disasters, slow-onset climate stresses, sea-level rise, declining crop yields, water scarcity, and ecosystem degradation are set to uproot millions more. A 2020 report by ActionAid-Climate Action Network South Asia report, estimated that, under business-as-usual scenarios, 45.5 million people in India could be forced to migrate internally by 2050. With robust global mitigation and effective adaptation, this number could fall to 34 million. These slow-onset impacts can be overcome by technological interventions that could build resilience in sectors such as agriculture, health, poverty etc. On the other hand, sudden disasters, cannot be perfectly controlled and may lead to migration due to loss of all movable/immovable assets due to floods, cyclone, etc., but the impact can be reduced by technological enhancements in early detection of these disasters and structural interventions.
Where do these people go? Increasingly, India’s urban centers. Cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata are absorbing migrants driven not just by the pursuit of opportunities, but by the pressures of climate-driven distress and survival. These “climate migrants” often end up in informal settlements, exposed to heatwaves, poor sanitation, and health risks. For millions of distressed labourers, the push factors include collapsing agriculture, rising temperatures, and water scarcity, which are overwhelmed by the fragile pull factors of precarious jobs in construction, services, and the gig economy (Rasul & Sharma, 2016).
Policy has not kept pace with this reality. India’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and most State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCCs) make only passing reference to migration. Coastal and island regions are beginning to factor in displacement, but there is still no comprehensive national strategy to project migration flows, allocate resources, or integrate migrants into housing, health, and labour systems. Migration remains treated as incidental when it should be central to adaptation and climate resilience planning.
This gap exposes India to a broader struggle unfolding on the global stage, on how to finance and support Loss and Damage (L&D). Current climate finance flows remain overwhelmingly skewed toward mitigation. Adaptation is chronically underfunded. Loss and Damage, the recognition that some impacts cannot be avoided or adapted to, remains the least resourced of all. The Loss and Damage Fund, operationalized at COP28 in Dubai (UNFCCC, 2023), is a step forward, but pledges so far are a fraction of what vulnerable countries need. Developing countries may require over $580 billion annually by 2030 for adaptation and L&D combined (UNEP Adaptation Gap Report, 2023), yet actual flows are a small fraction of this.
For India, this financing gap translates into real socio-economic costs, inadequate social protection for displaced labour, limited urban planning to accommodate migrants, and an inability to invest in resilient infrastructure. At the same time, technical assistance is equally critical. The Santiago Network for Averting, Minimizing, and Addressing Loss and Damage (SNAB) was established under the WIM in 2019 (UNFCCC Decision 2/CMA.2, 2019) to provide technical support, from climate risk modeling and migration data systems to resettlement planning and resilient infrastructure design. India should actively utilize such mechanisms to prepare for the challenges of large-scale human mobility.
The struggle over Loss and Damage is not only about justice, it’s also about recognizing migrants and the finance needed for them. Communities that have contributed least to the climate crisis are losing the most, their homes, livelihoods, and cultures. In India, the distressed farmer who migrates after a failed monsoon or the fisherman who abandons his village to rising seas is not just adapting, he is absorbing an unjust loss. Unless migration is recognized as a core Loss and Damage issue, India and its neighbours will face escalating humanitarian and economic crises without the global solidarity they urgently require.
The solution lies in a threefold action plan. First, migration must be embedded at the heart of India’s adaptation and climate action strategies, supported by robust data, projections and policy support. Second, domestic and international funding sources addressing loss and damage from climate disasters should allocate resources not just for post-disaster rebuilding, but also for planned relocations, social protection, and the integration of climate migrants. Third, India should leverage international technical networks, such as SNAB, to strengthen capacity in climate risk modeling, early warning systems, and resilient infrastructure planning to minimise potential impacts.
Climate migration is already reshaping lives across India. How we respond will define not just policy, but the very measure of our humanity. The coming decades will test India’s resilience. Climate migration is already a reality in India, and how we respond will define our commitment to resilience, and the future of millions.
Our cities, policies, and institutions must rise to the task, for the migrants and for our collective future, delay is no longer an option.
The views expressed are the author’s own.
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