Deadly heat to vanishing glaciers: India faces climate whiplash on all fronts

Five climate realities India is grappling with right now, and what nature, if we choose to protect it, can actually do about each of them.

Every year, World Environment Day (WED) arrives with a theme, a host city, and a hashtag. This year, the UN Environment Programme has chosen Baku, Azerbaijan, as the global host, and the theme, "Inspired by nature. For climate. For our future," carries a particular weight for a country like India. Because India is not watching climate change from a distance. It is living inside it.

From the Himalayan glaciers retreating faster than glaciologists predicted, to coastal fishing villages in Tamil Nadu that are literally shrinking into the sea, the climate emergency in India is not a future warning. It is a present-tense emergency. The theme of WED 2026, with its focus on nature-based solutions and the hashtag #NowForClimate, could not be more fitting, or more urgent, for the subcontinent.

Here are five climate realities India is grappling with right now, and what nature, if we choose to protect it, can actually do about each of them.

The Heat That Kills
In May 2026, parts of Rajasthan recorded temperatures close to 50°C. Delhi crossed 46°C. The India Meteorological Department confirmed that 2026 was on the lines of becoming one of India's hottest years on record since data collection began in 1901.

Heat-related deaths are notoriously under-reported in India, but the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change (2023 report) estimated that India lost approximately 167 billion potential labour hours to heat exposure in 2021 alone, a figure that has only worsened since.

Extreme urban heat is, in large part, a story of what we destroyed. City planners ripped out tree cover to build flyovers. In Bengaluru, we paved over the lakes; in Delhi, we dried up the floodplains of the Yamuna; in Kashmir, we destroyed the forests.

As the theme for WED 2026 suggests, the time has come to say no to this logic. Urban forests, green corridors, and pockets of green are not just aesthetic adornments. They are a cooling infrastructure.

Research from the World Resources Institute has shown that roads lined with trees remain 4 to 8°C cooler than concrete streets. The urban heat island effect that Indian cities are facing is a consequence of the way we have been losing biodiversity and misusing land. The cure begins with planting trees where they are needed, and perhaps more importantly, where they are not needed.

The Water Crisis Nobody Talks About
According to the Ministry of Jal Shakti, India has 18 per cent of the world's population but only about 4% of global freshwater resources. And the groundwater picture is grimmer: in its report of 2022, a national authority, the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), says more than 1,000 assessment units of the country are "over-exploited", where groundwater extraction exceeds annual recharge.

But this is what goes little explained: India's water crisis is linked to the destruction of its ecosystems. Wetlands are natural sponges, they recharge aquifers, filter water, and moderate floods.

Between 1970 and 2014, India lost an estimated 30% of its wetland area, according to the Living Planet Index report of 2024 by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan, once fed by seasonal floods, nearly died when upstream diversions cut off its water supply.

Nature-based water solutions like restoring wetlands, reviving traditional stepwells and johads, and rehabilitating river floodplains are not nostalgic ideas. They are demonstrably effective. The Arvari River in Rajasthan was, famously, brought back from being a seasonal trickle to a year-round river by communities under the guidance of Rajendra Singh, through the restoration of johads. The science and the stories both point in the same direction.

Glacial Retreat and the Himalayan Reckoning
The Hindu Kush Himalaya region contains the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar ice caps, over 54,000 glaciers feeding rivers that sustain roughly 240 million people in South Asia.

A 2021 study in the journal Nature found that Himalayan glaciers are melting 65% faster in the 2010s compared to the preceding decade.

An image of the Himalayas in the distance. (Photo: Unsplash)

For India, this translates into two contradictory threats that are both happening simultaneously: too much water in the short term (glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs), and too little water in the long term as glaciers diminish.

Uttarakhand's 2021 disaster, where a glacial outburst devastated the Rishiganga valley, killing over 200 people, was a preview of what climate science had been predicting.

The Himalayan ecosystem is not just ice and rock. It is dense alpine forests, high-altitude wetlands, and meadows that together regulate water flow, prevent erosion, and sustain biodiversity. Deforestation in the lower Himalayan belt accelerates erosion and destabilises slopes.

The WED theme's call to protect healthy ecosystems as a tool against climate disruption is, in the Himalayan context, a matter of downstream survival, literally.

The Coast Is Not Holding
India has a 7,500-kilometre coastline, home to approximately 250 million people. Roughly 40% of this coastline is classified as erosion-prone, according to the National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR).

Rising sea levels, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report projects a rise of 0.28 to 0.55 metres under intermediate scenarios by 2100, combined with the destruction of natural coastal buffers, are accelerating this erosion dramatically.

The story of India's mangroves is the story of what we got right, and what we keep squandering. The Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove delta, protected vast stretches of coastline during Cyclone Amphan in 2020.

Research published in PNAS has shown that mangrove belts reduced wave height by up to 50% and greatly reduced storm surge damage. But, outside of the Sundarbans, large tracts of mangroves in India were lost to make way for shrimp farms, port infrastructure, and tourism infrastructure.

The question framed by WED 2026 about the role of oceans, forests, and wetlands as buffers of climate change is not something abstract for us. In the state of Odisha, communities have joined with the government to actively plant mangroves along the coast of Bhitarkanika. In the state of Tamil Nadu, following the tsunami of 2004, the need for coastal afforestation has been understood.

These are not trials, they are proofs. What is lacking is the political will to upscale them.

Agriculture Under Siege
India ranks as the second largest producer of rice and wheat, employing more than 40% of the labour force in agriculture. It is also the most climate-sensitive sector.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that a temperature rise coupled with erratic monsoons could reduce rice yields by 6-10% and wheat yields by 6-23% by the end of the century, in the absence of any adaptation.

Even the monsoon is undergoing a transformation. Rain is getting heavier but of shorter duration, resulting in greater flooding during downpours and longer dry spells in between.

2024 witnessed extreme rainfall in Himachal Pradesh and deficient rainfall in Jharkhand and Odisha at the same time. This is climate whiplash.

Again, these nature-based solutions are by no means wishful. Trees and crops together (agroforestry) moderate temperature, maintain soil moisture, and provide alternative streams of income to farmers. Ancient local varieties of seeds, bred for generations to battle droughts and floods, are giving way to chemical-drenched monocultures.

Forests surrounding farm fields act as shields against dry winds and maintain local humidity. The wisdom of tribal and farming communities in India, in their shifting cultivation methods involving fallow agriculture or irrigation through tanks, was intrinsically adapted to the climate; rather than being thrown away, they are valuable, and the theme of WED 2026 calls us to honour this.

Looking Forward Without Looking Away
In all five of these crises, the common thread is that India's ecological destruction has increased its climate vulnerability, and that ecological restoration can, in significant ways, reduce this.

This is not naive optimism. This is what the science indicates. This is what the theme of WED 2026 indicates. This is what the communities who are already engaged in this work, mangrove planters of Odisha, revivalists of johad in Rajasthan, seed savers of Vidarbha, show each day.

#NowForClimate is not a slogan for Baku. It is a mandate for Bastar, for the Brahmaputra floodplains, for the bleaching reefs of Lakshadweep, for every city in India where trees were felled to build yet another parking lot.

Nature has the answers. The real question is whether we are prepared to listen to it.

Author: Prof. Anjal Prakash, Faculty of Public Policy, FLAME University.