India’s climate reality: Unequal heat exposes deep social divide

From Kyiv to Kolkata, climate hazards reveal a stark injustice: those who suffer the most often have the least power. In Ukraine today, the war’s ruins continue to pollute land and water with toxic remnants, undermining ecosystems and public health. In the Middle East, ongoing conflict has devastated civilian infrastructure, collapsing water and sanitation systems, spreading hazardous debris across densely populated areas, and accelerating environmental degradation in a region already under severe climate stress.

Armed conflict leaves lasting environmental fallout, but it is residents, not the decision-makers waging war, who endure long-term consequences, often with little voice in cleanup or recovery.

Globally, climate experts emphasise that policies must be rooted in fairness: activities that “prioritise equity, climate justice, [and] social justice” yield more sustainable outcomes. One lead author of the latest IPCC report puts it plainly: “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.” In short, the wealthy, powerful, or violators often evade costs, while vulnerable communities bear the brunt.

A skewed moral geometry

This moral geometry is not abstract; it plays out repeatedly in India’s climate crises. After a heavy monsoon downpour in Bengaluru, two neighbours experienced vastly different realities. In a well-built apartment complex, rain pooling was minor, whereas just a kilometre away in a riverside slum, families waded through waist-high water as homes were swept away. As disaster expert Madhukar Upadhya observes, “When floods enter the floodplains, it is the poor that suffer the most damage.” Many low-income residents have no insurance, few savings, and no safe evacuation plan; even after the waters recede, they face months of rebuilding. Meanwhile, wealthier city-dwellers call workers for repairs and move on. This is climate injustice in miniature: the hazard was the same, but recovery was not.

One way to frame this inequality is to ask: who caused the harm, who is exposed, and who has the resources to adapt? Under this view, equality is not about treating everyone the same; it is about protecting based on need. The Bengaluru example shows how social factors like income, class, occupation, gender, and geography determine climate risk.

Manufactured risk

Climate hazards themselves do not check income or class before striking, but societies do. In India, extreme heat is rising every year. In 2024, the country recorded its longest heatwave on record: over 80% of Indians faced severe heat stress daily for weeks, resulting in tens of thousands of heat-related illnesses and deaths. Yet the impact is far from uniform. The country’s overwhelmingly informal workforce (about 90% of workers) endured this deadly heat with little protection. Experts estimate that by 2030, India could lose the equivalent of 6% of its annual working hours (roughly 34 million jobs) to rising temperatures, disproportionately affecting outdoor labourers and informal-sector workers. In other words, heat does not discriminate, but our economy does.

Gender compounds the divide. Deep-rooted inequalities mean that climate disasters have “the greatest impact on women and girls, particularly those in vulnerable or marginalised situations.” Women often have less access to capital, land, or information, and after a flood or drought, they are more likely to lose education or employment. Families may pull girls out of school after a crop failure or health crisis, increasing long-term poverty. Women also shoulder more unpaid care work. A severe heatwave or cold snap forces many women to leave jobs to tend to children or sick relatives, with no safety net. Women’s unpaid responsibilities and limited rights translate climate shocks into widened inequity.

Rajendra Joshi of Saath, which works towards creating inclusive societies, says: “The implications of climate change on the informal workforce are both direct and indirect —spanning financial losses, health impacts, disrupted livelihoods, depleted savings, and reduced access to education.” Ahmedabad-based Saath, which works with informal workers across many states in India, has researched how climate change increases the burden on women. Joshi adds, “When climate disruption affects work, that burden does not disappear — it falls on the household, and women absorb it, compounding an already heavier care burden.”

Urban design is yet another layer of manufactured risk. Affluent areas tend to have more parks, trees, and storm drainage, while poorer neighbourhoods are built on the cheapest land, often in heat sinks or flood zones. In Bengaluru today, fewer than 3% of city areas are vegetated (down from 68% in 1970). With most green cover gone, runoff from development quickly fills drains.

As one expert observed, decades of unplanned construction have “exacerbated India’s Silicon Valley’s vulnerability to floods.” Informal settlements are pushed into harm’s way: the urban poor are “generally pushed to floodplains where roads, drainages and other infrastructure are poorly maintained,” so that in a downpour, “the poor suffer the most damage.” Once flooded, these families have few resources to recover; many have no title to land, no home insurance, and little political clout. These examples show that vulnerability is not simply an act of God, but a product of decisions and neglect by society. Wealth, caste, gender, and address combine to determine who bears the worst impacts of climate change. Policies that ignore these differences can even worsen outcomes: climate adaptation plans that do not account for social inequities risk reinforcing them. In other words, treating everyone “equally” in a crisis might actually be unfair, because equal treatment in an unequal society leaves the vulnerable behind.

Cascading inequality

Climate disasters rarely strike in isolation. Often, one shock triggers another, and each one lands hardest on the marginalised. A flood may displace a slum community downstream, but that is not the end of their struggles. Displaced families may end up in another high-risk area or a crowded camp, still without clean water, while political attention shifts elsewhere. Similarly, a region hit by drought may then face wildfire or a food-price crisis, compounding deprivation. The IPCC warns that with higher warming, even “limits to adaptation will be reached” and losses will be “strongly concentrated among the poorest and most vulnerable.”

For example, coastal erosion is a slow-moving disaster: governments may relocate a beachfront village, only to rebuild highways that push the next village closer to the sea. In all cases, the same people keep losing ground. Conversely, middle-income groups often have savings or insurance to buffer multiple shocks. The result is cascading inequality: each disaster deepens existing divides. In summary, climate change does not just cause damage incrementally; it multiplies hardship for those already exposed.

The limits of policy

Some of the legal and policy frameworks for climate justice are already in place, but implementation lags. Remarkably, India’s Constitution directs both the state and citizens to protect the environment (Art. 48A), and the Supreme Court has long interpreted the right to life (Art. 21) as including a “clean and healthy environment.”

In August 2024, the Court took a landmark step: in Ranjitsinh vs Union of India (2024), it explicitly recognised the “freedom from the adverse effects of climate change” as a fundamental right. In other words, one can now argue in court that unmitigated climate harm violates basic rights. However, the law alone has limits. Many government schemes lack teeth or funding. India’s National Disaster Management Authority issued heatwave guidelines years ago, and most major cities have Heat Action Plans. Yet a 2024 analysis found these plans often lack scientific detail or adequate funding, and they frequently omit rural and informal communities. The result is patchy protection: millions of farm workers and slum-dwellers remain uncounted in city heat policies.

Raghunandan, an environmental lawyer from Chennai, says: “The interests of the marginalised ought to be central to environmental decision-making. Policies that seemingly protect the environment, while disempowering forest-dwelling tribes, traditional fishers, or the urban working class, are neither just nor sustainable.”

Globally, the picture is similarly mixed. The Paris Agreement and UN conventions recognise equity, but funding is scarce. A UNEP report estimates that developing countries will need US$310–365 billion per year by 2035 just for adaptation, yet only about US$26 billion was provided in 2023. At current trajectories, even pledges to double adaptation funding by 2025 will fall far short. In practice, this means vital projects — like raising homes on stilts or maintaining irrigation wells — often go unfunded. International bodies (Loss & Damage funds, Green Climate Fund, etc.) exist, but move slowly, and the largest polluters have made few binding commitments to pay for the harm.

In short, the tools for climate justice are slowly taking shape but the implementation muscle remains weak. Without dedicated funding and accountability, the right to relief or adaptation remains theoretical for most vulnerable people.

What does real climate justice look like?

Climate justice is not an empty slogan; it is a fundamentally different approach to solving climate problems. It means giving equal weight to the needs and voices of the worst-off. Practically, that involves shifting decision-making power: affected communities, local governments, and even informal workers should help set adaptation priorities, rather than being passive recipients of aid. The IPCC and experts emphasise this: activities that “prioritise equity, climate justice and inclusion” lead to more sustainable outcomes.

One can imagine a few elements of such justice in action. For example, requiring that new development projects include risk compensation for nearby poor communities, or mandating that disaster relief funds allocate additional resources to women-led households. In cities, planners could use heat maps and flood-risk maps to “cool the hottest wards first,” planting trees and building drainage in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. In law, embedding climate rights into enforceable policy — as India’s Supreme Court has begun to do — would mean people can seek legal recourse if a floodplain is filled without safeguards.

Wars make climate injustice starkly visible, but the same issues persist in peacetime: in every heatwave and every storm, the fundamental question remains who bears the cost and who makes decisions. Real justice would invert the current logic: those who have been left to “stand in the heat” would be the first whose interests are protected.

Climate change is not a great equaliser. Both in war-torn regions and in thriving cities, evidence shows that the poor, marginalised, and powerless usually pay the heaviest price. Moving forward, policymakers must remember that those most exposed to rising temperatures and floods were often not the ones creating greenhouse gases. Only by centring equity — focusing relief and resilience on those with the greatest need — can we build a fairer response. As one activist put it, when it comes to climate and conflict alike, the burning question remains: who gets to decide, and who is left standing in the heat?

Venkatesh Raghavendra is a global social entrepreneur and philanthropy advisor. Arushi Malik is a climate and energy policy researcher with a background in law. Sruthakeerthy Sriram is a lawyer and public policy professional.