The diaspora is crucial to India’s climate story

This article is authored by Deepali Khanna, senior vice president, The Rockefeller Foundation and Neera Nundy, partner and co-founder, Dasra.

“Unprecedented” has perhaps become the defining word of our times, and nowhere does it feel more literal than in India’s climate reality. The numbers are sobering: In the first nine months of this year alone, almost every single day brought a new climate crisis somewhere in the country, with over 4,000 lives lost, 9.47 million hectares of crops impacted, and nearly 100,000 homes destroyed. In 2024, the country experienced extreme weather events — floods, heatwaves, landslides, and droughts — on 322 of the 366 days.

Climate crisis (Shutterstock)

These climate shocks are becoming an inevitable, almost seasonal way of life for millions. As we look toward the long-term vision of a developed India, the question that requires urgent reckoning has become: How ready are we to live and build with such volatility?

Across the world, the climate action conversation so far has largely revolved around mitigation. While it’s certainly critical work, what is also increasingly apparent is that it’s insufficient. The climate crisis in regions like the Global South is not an abstract challenge; it dictates lived realities, especially for those already on the margins. Saltpan workers in Gujarat, paddy farmers in Jharkhand, and contracted laborers in Delhi are experiencing these conditions as unrelenting daily threats, affecting everything from food and water security to health systems and the ability to earn an income.

Resilience, then, must become central to the country’s development aspirations for one crucial reason: The climate crisis is intensifying faster than India’s systems can respond. In this decisive moment, India needs partnerships that are creative, collaborative, and deeply rooted in community leadership. This is where diaspora philanthropy — global in its approach yet anchored in Indian realities — can play a fundamental role. Indians across borders have a powerful opportunity to engage not just as donors, but as strategic partners in building the climate resilience infrastructure that the country urgently needs.

There is a growing consensus among organisations working in the climate action landscape — including actors with long-standing experience in supporting vulnerable communities in India such as The Rockefeller Foundation, and systems orchestrators like Dasra — that resilience is as much a systems challenge as it is a technical one, and that there is no time like the present for the diaspora to help address it. These organisations have seen firsthand that India’s ability to withstand climate shocks depends on strengthening the connective tissue between health, food, energy, and local governance systems.

For decades, diaspora giving has bolstered India’s education, health care, and social innovation ecosystems. Today, as climate impacts intensify, diaspora philanthropy is uniquely positioned — with its networks, comfort with innovation, and maturing philanthropic ethos — to help accelerate India’s shift from primarily mitigation-focused work to one that embeds adaptation and resilience into development planning. From their vantage point across borders, diaspora leaders can apply global lessons to local realities, channel catalytic capital into high-impact models, and back solutions that combine data, community insight, and policy alignment.

Beyond capital, diaspora leaders can offer other equally critical assets: Knowledge, networks, and lived experience across policy, innovation, and climate technologies. Their perspective uniquely positions them to support India’s climate response through mentorship, strategic advocacy, and convening power. They can champion evidence-led approaches, help climate entrepreneurs scale, and ensure community organisations gain international visibility.

This opportunity is reinforced by the changing profile and growing influence of the Indian diaspora itself. According to the India Philanthropy Report 2025, the diaspora has grown from 18 million in 2019 to 35 million in 2024 — a demographic shift accompanied by increasing wealth, global standing, and philanthropic ambition. Families such as Bhagwan Thacker of the Empowerment Foundation (USA) and Maya Patel of the Tarsadia Foundation (USA) are already providing flexible, long-term capital to grassroots organisations led by individuals from marginalised communities — a clear indicator of the diaspora’s appetite for patient, collaborative giving.

At the ecosystem level, philanthropy-support organisations in India are building conditions for this momentum to scale further. By equipping funders with evidence and practical tools, connecting donors to causes, and facilitating exposure to community experiences on the ground, they are enabling diaspora givers to get more involved in addressing India’s most pressing challenges. For instance, last March, the India Philanthropy Alliance’s “India Giving Day” raised $9 million from diaspora donors to support 36 non-profits across sectors. Taken together, the rising diaspora capital, Indian institutional readiness, and climate urgency have created a window where philanthropy can shift outcomes at scale.

With India at this inflection point, the scale of the crisis alone demands collaboration—between funders, non-profits, and governments, certainly, but also across knowledge systems to link scientific evidence with lived experience. For philanthropy to meaningfully support the vision for a thriving, developed India by 2047, it must become more trust-based, more community-led, and more willing to take risks that other actors cannot. It must prioritise long-term capacity building over short-term project cycles. And it must recognise that adaptation is context-specific to ground its solutions in reality.

The diaspora is particularly well-suited to this role. With the right frameworks, data, and partnerships, they can help drive the kind of systemic shifts climate resilience requires —from early warning systems to climate-smart agriculture, decentralised renewable energy, and heat-resilient urban design.

Resilience, after all, is about people—about whether families can plan their futures, whether communities can withstand shocks, and whether we can help prevent the worst of these shocks from hurting those at the margins. This is also where the diaspora’s role becomes deeply personal. Their giving can be something much more than just capital flowing home. It’s an opportunity to steer the future course of the country that shaped them.

The most meaningful contribution the diaspora can make is a steady commitment to the ideas and institutions that will help India remain resilient, and, above all, hopeful.

This article is authored by Deepali Khanna, senior vice president, The Rockefeller Foundation and Neera Nundy, partner and co-founder, Dasra.