Climate risks grow, hope for action fades

The needs are clear: Keep the Paris Agreement goals alive even as LMICs double down on funding for mitigation and adaptation from high-income countries.

Between 1993 and 2022, India was the sixth worst-affected country in terms of fatalities and damage (80,000 deaths and losses amounting to $180 billion) sustained from extreme weather events (EWEs) wrought by the climate crisis, according to the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index, 2025. Seven of the 10 worst affected countries (including India), ranked on the basis of EWE data from an international database and socioeconomic data from the IMF, are low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This reinforces the developing world’s contention that it has had to bear a disproportionate burden of climate afflictions despite having contributed little to the crisis. High-income nations, whose economies are founded on industrial-era use of fossil fuels, meanwhile, insist that growing economies, especially India and China, shoulder greater responsibility.

TOPSHOT - -- AFP PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2024 -- A woman wades through flood waters at an inundated residential area in Garissa, on May 9, 2024.. (Photo by LUIS TATO / AFP) / AFP PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2024 (AFP)

Where do we go from here? Planetary warming is a shared fate, though the degrees of vulnerability may vary for geographies. After warming breached the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold for a full year for the first time in 2024, the UN earlier this month warned that most countries are set to miss the deadline on submitting updated emission reduction plans that will be key to stalling the worst climate crisis effects. At present, countries are working on blueprints that will lead to a 2.6-2.8 degree Celsius warming future, while 2 degree Celsius warming above pre-industrial level is held as the threshold beyond which cataclysmic effects will play out. Many scientists believe that a breach is inevitable.

The needs are clear: Keep the Paris Agreement goals alive even as LMICs double down on funding for mitigation and adaptation from high-income countries. The $300-billion annual funding promised to the developing world barely scratches the surface and the target must be revised at the earliest. The Loss and Damage Fund must also be urgently operationalised. The climate talks in Brazil later this year would have been the appropriate forum to take up these challenges, but with Donald Trump having walked the US out of the Paris Agreement, the future looks bleak.