The journey towards recognising and addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable countries has been long and fraught with resistance. In 1991, Vanuatu, representing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), first proposed the creation of an international climate fund to support nations most threatened by rising sea levels. However, entrenched opposition from economically developed countries reluctant to assume financial responsibility for historical emissions has delayed meaningful progress for decades.

Likewise, while the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 laid the groundwork for international cooperation, it was not until 2007 that the concept of “loss and damage” formally entered the global climate discourse. Subsequent milestones — including the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2013 and the Paris Agreement in 2015 — advanced the conversation but fell short on finance.

Only in 2022 was the first ‘Loss and Damage’ fund finally established at the COP27 climate talks, a breakthrough spurred by climate disasters including catastrophic floods in Pakistan that claimed thousands of lives and left the country’s economy in tatters.

India’s role in this long-winded and still-evolving narrative is particularly complex given its dual identity as a climate-vulnerable nation and an emerging economic power. This chapter explores the historical development of the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund, India’s stance, and the wider political arena in which climate finance is taking shape today.

The genesis of the fund

On June 4, 1991, Vanuatu, a small island country in Oceania, submitted a proposal on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) outlining the elements of a ‘Framework Convention on Climate Change’. This was one of the world’s first proposals to set up an international climate fund to assist vulnerable countries against the effects of climate change, especially since AOSIS realised the need to safeguard their land against the threat of rising seas.

But economically developed countries did not accept the proposal and progress on the matter remained slow on the back of their reluctance to bear financial responsibility for historical emissions.

However, the UNFCCC was established in 1992 to foster international cooperation in addressing and ameliorating the consequences of climate change. The conversation around a fund to help economically developing countries take on the disproportionate effects of climate change they were incurring gained momentum in the early 2000s, even if it was not until 2007 for “Loss and Damage” to formally appear in an international climate plan.

In that year, at the 13th session of the Conference of Parties (COP13) of the UNFCCC in Bali, Indonesia, member states agreed to consider loss and damage in developing countries that were “particularly vulnerable” to climate change effects. In 2010, a work programme on loss and damage was established at the COP16 talks held at Cancun, Mexico.

The real milestone, however, came in 2013: when at the COP19 talks in Warsaw, Poland, member states established the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts (shortened as WIM) to address the devastating effects of climate change, including extreme events and slow-onset events, in developing countries. The next landmark on this journey was the Paris Agreement in 2015, albeit a negative landmark. Even though the Agreement recognised addressing loss and damage caused due to the climate crisis, finance was still not a part of the outcome.

The world took an actual step towards financially compensating particularly vulnerable countries in 2022 at the COP27 talks held at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The first-ever ‘Loss and Damage’ fund was established here, with money from the funds vouchsafed for compensating vulnerable countries against disasters instigated or exacerbated by climate change. Countries here also decided that a transitional committee would recommend the management, contributions to, and other details of the fund.

Once this committee had met five times, it decided that the World Bank would host the fund for four years and that it would be overseen by an independent secretariat. The member states of the UNFCCC agreed to operationalise the fund at the COP28 talks held in the United Arab Emirates in 2023, and pledged $800 million to its corpus.

The significance of COP27 was also that it occurred shortly after widespread floods in Pakistan, causing damage to the tune of billions of dollars. Attribution research quickly revealed that the floods had been made so deadly by climate change and that Pakistan had borne the brunt of carbon emissions that economically developed countries had released as they first industrialised. In the run-up to COP27, the devastation reminded many countries that climate change is a transboundary problem and spurred them to engage more closely with the issue of loss and damage.

At the last UNFCCC conference, the COP29 held in Baku in Azerbaijan in 2024, the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund was at long last operationalised.

India’s position

India’s climate action commitments at multilateral fora have typically been a tightrope walk as its representatives try to pull off wearing two identities at once: a country disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change and a country ranking among the world’s top economic powers. (According to the Global Climate Risk Index released by Germanwatch in 2025, India ranked sixth in countries most affected by climate change between 1993 and 2022. Various studies have recognised that extreme weather events like floods, heat waves, cyclones, and droughts are becoming more common.)

To this end, at the COP26 talks held in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021, India focused on the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) — one of the foundational principles of the UNFCCC — with the idea that climate funding should enhance developing countries’ capacity to cope with the natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. India also contended that its historical cumulative emissions and per capita emissions were “very low” despite being home to more than 17% of the world’s population.

(Indeed, the country is currently the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, but its per capita emissions are 1.776 tCO2/capita (2022) — much lower than the global average, which was 4.3 tCO2/capita in 2022.)

India engaged actively with the demand for a ‘Loss and Damage’ fund at the COP27 talks held in Egypt in 2022, where it also raked up CBDR-RC once again. “You are presiding over a historic COP where agreement has been secured for loss and damage funding arrangements including setting up a loss and damage fund,” Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said at the climate conference while addressing the Egyptian presidency. “The world has waited far too long for this. We congratulate you on your untiring efforts to evolve consensus.”

The Indian government has also maintained that the most copious emitters of greenhouse gases through human history should also take the lead in shoring up the financial assistance available to more vulnerable countries.

India is part of the G77 bloc of developing countries, and also at COP27, the G77 plus China group called for new funding arrangements to support developing countries. And at the ministerial meeting of G77 plus China held in New York in September 2024, the members asked for the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund to be the “centrepiece of the new loss and damage funding arrangements”.

Importantly, India has been at the forefront of demands that the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund should be above and beyond other climate finance commitments. An example of the latter is the New Collective Quantified Goal, which is the money that developed countries are to give developing countries to help them meet their goals to transition away from the continued use of fossil fuels and curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

The larger political picture

India is part of multiple blocs and its perspectives on loss and damage are influenced by its relative standing in them. Perhaps the bloc that most closely mirrors its stand is the BRICS, which has otherwise also positioned itself as a champion of emerging economies worldwide and has expressed support for the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund. A joint statement issued by BRICS countries’ foreign ministers on June 10, 2024, said: “The Ministers welcomed the creation of the loss and damage fund under the UNFCCC in COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh and its operationalisation in the UAE at COP28 and confirmed its important role in supporting all developing countries in responding to the losses and damages of climate impacts.” 

At the third Voice of Global South Summit hosted by India in August 2024, it highlighted economically developing countries’ demand for more and better climate finance and the importance of urgently improving the resilience of these countries — but especially Small Island Developing States — against the effects of climate change

Finally, India is currently also an alternate board member of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage for those “developing countries not included in the regional groups and constituencies” segment.

All this said, many experts have expressed belief that India’s engagement with loss and damage has fallen short of expectations. India is a growing economy, a member of the G20 bloc, and has been hoping to secure a spot in the UN Security Council. These are some geopolitical aspirations that have led to the country’s low engagement with the demands for loss and damage, despite being highly vulnerable to climate change. 

Future of the fund

In April 2025, the Board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage launched the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM), a global work plan to provide financial assistance to countries especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The meeting was held in Bridgetown, Barbados, from April 8 to 10. Barbados itself is a small island developing state (SIDS).

This is the start-up phase of the mechanism: under BIM, vulnerable countries are set to receive $250 million until the end of 2026 entirely in the form of grants. Meanwhile, the fund will also explore how it can engage the private sector. Each intervention under BIM will amount to between $5 million and $20 million. A 50% minimum allocation floor under BIM will be reserved for SIDS and the least developed countries (LDCs).

However, a status of resources report published by the UNFCCC on April 7 — right before the meeting in Barbados — revealed that even though the world’s countries had pledged $768 million to the ‘Loss and Damage’ fund, only $319 million had been made available thus far and that funds to the tune of $388 million are expected to arrive by December 31, 2025.

The problem is that this is nowhere close to the amount vulnerable countries have estimated they need. According to a study conducted by the Loss and Damage Collaboration and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Washington, D.C., and published in 2023, loss and damage finance should have $400 billion a year to work with at a minimum. The gap is an entire order of magnitude.

Ahead of the COP29 talks in Baku in November 2024, representatives of the LDCs adopted the 2024 Lilongwe Declaration on Climate Change in Malawi. Under this declaration, they demanded that loss and damage and mitigation efforts be addressed through new and additional climate finance. The declaration estimated the financial needs of economically developing countries to be around $5.8-5.9 trillion by 2030 and that LDCs will need around $1 trillion to implement their current NDCs.

Priyali Prakash is principal staff writer, The Hindu.

India’s geographical diversity and growing climate vulnerabilities place it squarely in the path of a wide array of natural hazards — most of them weather-related. From cyclones and floods to thunderstorms, lightning, and heat waves, the country faces year-round meteorological challenges that differ by region and season. In recent years, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and allied agencies have made major strides in improving early warning systems, especially for cyclones and heavy rainfall, often saving lives through timely forecasts.

Yet progress has been uneven. Systems for thunderstorm and lightning nowcasting, for example, are still developing, and the coverage of early warning systems for flash floods and heat waves lags behind. Experts warn that climate change is both intensifying and reshaping the nature of these hazards — expanding their geographic reach, increasing their frequency, and introducing unpredictable, compound effects that undermine traditional risk assessments. Despite the launch of Mission Mausam and the adoption of new technologies like artificial intelligence, India’s disaster warning system still struggles with gaps in data, last-mile communication, and institutional coordination.

Addressing these challenges will require not only technical upgrades and decentralised planning but also user-focused design, better risk modeling, and more transparent evaluation to ensure warnings are both received and acted upon — especially by the most vulnerable.

India and its natural hazards

Natural hazards are not new to India. The country experiences different types, although 80% of them are related to weather in the form of cyclones, heavy rains, floods, heat and cold waves, thunderstorms, and gusty or squally winds, Mrityunjay Mohapatra, director-general of the IMD, said. Their formation, seasonality, and locations vary. While heavy rainfall can and often do cause floods in most parts of the country during the monsoon season, thunderstorms can also result in heavy rains and floods in the pre-monsoon season over the northeastern States. Meanwhile, the southeast peninsula — especially Tamil Nadu and Puducherry — experiences floods due to heavy rain in the retreating northeast monsoon season after the rest of the country has been done with its share of the showers.

The hazards affect different regions differently. Thunderstorms are more hazardous over east and northeast India, followed by the south peninsular and northwest India, while heat and cold waves are more prevalent over the plains of northwest, eastern, and central India and the adjoining peninsular region. India’s east coast is more prone to cyclones than those on the west coast.

India’s early warning systems

India has made notable progress in developing disaster early-warning systems (EWS), particularly for cyclones, heat and cold waves, and heavy rainfall, Mohapatra said. IMD’s cyclone forecasting recently resulted in zero human casualties, he pointed out. The accuracy of heavy rainfall warnings has also improved: States such as Maharashtra have adopted regional flash flood forecasting systems, exemplified by Mumbai’s iFLOWS, an integrated flood-warning system for the city.

Additionally, new forecasting tools have been deployed to support State-level heat action plans through impact-based early warnings for heat and cold waves. High-resolution mesoscale numerical models are also being used to predict thunderstorms, lightning, and related hazardous weather events.

The country’s ₹2,000-crore ‘Mission Mausam’ aims to strengthen its weather observation network, forecasting accuracy, and last-mile communication by expanding rainfall monitoring via 50 Doppler weather radars (DWRs), establishing 60 radiosonde stations, augmenting wind profilers, and improving weather prediction models with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

According to Mohapatra, while there has been about a 40-50% improvement in the forecasting accuracy of various severe weather events during the past decade compared to the one before, Mission Mausam aims to further improve forecast accuracy by 15% in the next five years.

EWS for cyclones “are the most mature”, originating as the first weather service in the1860s, even before the IMD was formed, Biswanath Dash, associate professor at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Hyderabad, who specialises in climate adaptation studies and disaster studies, said. EWS for floods is still evolving: he cited the example of India’s Central Water Commission long-standing flood forecasts service and added that the thunderstorm service is currently in a nowcasting framework.

There has also been better progress in warning services for heat waves, including in the form of a colour code for risk levels. Among the non-hydro-meteorological hazards, India has also developed a warning system for tsunamis, “although its problem is that it remains largely untested in the absence of a real tsunami occurrence,” Dash said.

All this said, India is yet to effectively evaluate the quality of its EWS services in the absence of a specific method to measure them. “A general approach is to link efficiency and quality with the number of human casualties,” according to Dash. For example, if fewer deaths occur in a cyclone, one draws the inference that the locals were better warned.

“In my view, like any other service, the quality of EWS services should be evaluated by the users, including the general people. It has not been given much attention.”

Gaps and challenges

Mohapatra also said “significant challenges persist in forecasting thunderstorms, lightning, and extreme rainfall events, which continue to cause substantial loss of life and property.”

The challenges include technical ones related to data gaps in remote locations, such as the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, and scientific limitations with respect to forecast lead-times for certain high-impact weather events such as lightning and localised heavy rainfall. Other hurdles include limitations with respect to models’ precision at local levels for hazards, last-mile connectivity of forecast information, and, sometimes, the perception of low-risk related to slow-onset disasters like heat waves, which, Mohapatra said, can reduce the effectiveness of EWS.

The coverage of the EWS network is also uneven: while the coastal States benefit from robust cyclone warning infrastructure, flash floods, urban flooding, and lightning still lack timely, localised alerts, says Vishwas Chitale, senior programme lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), New Delhi. For example, one CEEW analysis showed that approximately 66% of Indians are exposed to extreme flood events but only 33% of the exposed individuals are covered by a flood EWS.

To address these issues, the IMD has introduced a unified forecasting system to support anticipatory and early response actions by various stakeholders. The integrated system begins with a seasonal forecast at the start of the season, followed by a monthly outlook issued at the beginning of each month. This is further supplemented by an extended-range forecast updated every Thursday for the following four weeks, along with daily short- to medium-range forecasts covering the next seven days. The idea is that the daily dissemination of impact-based, colour-coded warnings will have the relevant authorities mount a timely response.

“Despite the technological advances, challenges such as data gaps and low public awareness continue to limit the overall effectiveness of EWS,” Mohapatra said.

“Even though we are transitioning towards impact-based forecasts and warnings, there is a long distance to go,” Dash said.

Indeed, in a research paper on the potential of impact-based forecast and warning services for hydro-meteorological hazards in India, published in the journal Natural Hazards in March 2024, Dash had called for changes including stronger risk-assessment modelling, clarity in institutional mandates, and the adoption of flexible governance frameworks.

For example, he argued that India needs a mechanism that allows warning agencies to come together in real-time with other stakeholders, including local authorities. Dash has also articulated a need to build trust through transparency in communication, conducting objective performance evaluations, and developing a scientific model “from the user requirement perspective, rather than top down”.

Compounding natural disasters

Climate change is reshaping the way natural disasters unfold in India, making them more intense, frequent, and unpredictable, posing serious challenges to the country’s EWS, Mohapatra said.

“The changing climate is expanding the geographic reach of disaster risk zones and making hazard prediction and preparedness more complex.” He continued: “the Arabian Sea, once less prone to cyclonic storms, [has been] witnessing a noticeable uptick in extremely severe cyclone activity in recent decades, since the 1990s.”

Rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically as well. Erratic and intense downpours are increasingly triggering flash floods across the country. Heat waves are lasting longer and reaching higher temperatures. It is not unheard of for several cities in northern and central India to have endured daytime readings above 45° C for consecutive days.

Meanwhile, “the warming atmosphere is holding more moisture, leading to stronger thunderstorms and a surge in lightning strikes, which arrive as a rare adverse impact during heat waves,” Mohapatra added. The States of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha in particular have reported sharp rises in lightning-related incidents.

Climate change is compounding the challenge by increasing the frequency and unpredictability of extreme weather events, “especially in non-traditional geographies,” Chitale said. A 2021 CEEW study found that 27 of 35 India’s States and Union Territories are currently vulnerable to extreme hydro-meteorological disasters and their compounding consequences. Notably, about 80% of India’s population resides in these vulnerable regions.

The report also discussed how more than 40% of districts in India are witnessing a “swapping trend”: i.e. flood-prone districts are facing droughts and traditionally drought-prone areas are facing more frequent floods.

“This highlights the dynamic nature of climate risks and the need for flexible, region-specific adaptation strategies,” Chitale said, alluding to the west coast’s need to be prepared for cyclones as much as the east coast needs to brace for heat waves.

“A different kind of challenge from climate change is on account of how we conduct hazard risk assessment,” Dash pointed out. Risk assessment is generally based on historical datasets, which form the basis of systematic formal hazard assessment and coverage under specific types of EWS.

“This approach is in question now when you factor in climate-change-induced weather phenomena,” Dash said. This is because, while historical data remains useful, it may not be a good indicator of how things will be under climate change: that is, climate change disconnects the future from the past. Dash used the example of the largely arid State of Rajasthan and its government having to contend with increasingly frequent floods of late.

A particularly important challenge on this front is in the integration of climate risk data across scales, according to Chitale. Local governments often lack access to granular climate and hazard data. The interoperability of forecasting systems across different sectors such as health, agriculture and transport, is also limited. “Outdated forecasting models, poor data accessibility, and lack of coordination across various government agencies hinder effective disaster response and resilience building,” he said.

“The capacity constraints in sub-national institutions and weak last-mile connectivity mean that even where warnings are issued, they may not reach the most vulnerable in time or in actionable formats,” Chitale added.

Resource gaps in EWS

Improving India’s disaster EWS requires a substantial commitment of financial, technical, and human resources, according to Mohapatra.

Despite the country’s significant investments in improving EWS as well as its strong technical foundation, India still needs the necessary technical infrastructure, including weather stations, real-time data access, and/or AI-driven forecasting systems to achieve location-specific EWS, Mohapatra added. There is also a need for better interoperability between systems to ensure a cohesive response to multiple hazards occurring at once.

Equally, while India has a strong core of trained meteorologists, hydrologists, and disaster management experts, and while community-based initiatives have made significant strides in engaging vulnerable populations, “such initiatives are not yet widespread and universally accessible.”

For Dash, an important underlying issue is that EWS is still conceptualised as a “single hazard leading to (at best) a few risks”. For example, heavy rainfall is understood as a single hazard that leads to flooding, a single risk, and that “a cyclone leads to trees being uprooted and low-lying areas being flooded”.

However, he continued, “as several recent disasters have shown, hazards themselves could be interacting, leading to multiple risks in more of a nonlinear relationship. We are yet to mount a mission [that helps us understand] multiple-hazards leading to multiple risks”.

While India has world-class meteorological capabilities, it should focus more on uniform capacity and scaling up at the State and district levels, in Chitale’s telling. The government should invest in real-time monitoring tools such as microsensors, and adopt emerging technologies such as Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to enhance the accuracy and speed of early warnings.

India possesses the building blocks but must invest in scaling and decentralising systems, especially for climate-sensitive sectors like health, transport, and water. Stronger public-private partnerships and international collaboration can also help bridge these gaps, he added.

T.V. Padma is a science journalist in New Delhi.