E-Paper
The missing link in India’s climate response
This article is authored by Vikrom Mathur, founding director and Evita Rodrigues, urban governance associate, Transitions Research.
Over the past two decades, India has rolled out a growing number of plans and policies to tackle the climate crisis, from national missions to state action plans and in more recent years, district and city level strategies. While these efforts mark critical progress in setting targets for low-carbon transitions and climate resilience, their success ultimately depends on execution by public officials at the frontlines. The reality on ground, however, is that the people responsible for delivering India’s climate goals are operating in a rapidly shifting landscape, where the demands on their skills and capacities often outpace the support available to them.
Despite India’s strong political commitment to addressing the climate crisis, there is a significant skills and capacity gap, particularly within the public sector holding back effective implementation. Numerous studies, including those from the OECD and the World Economic Forum and reviews of State Action Plans by NITI Aayog, have underscored this systemic skills deficit. Our work through the People’s Urban Living Lab, which partners with local governments to advance inclusive, low carbon and climate resilient urbanisation in India’s mid-sized cities, has made this gap acutely visible. We see it in cities where climate action plans remain shelved due to lack of technical know-how or where data goes unused because staff lack the tools to interpret it. The consequences of this capacity gap are all around us. Heat action plans exist, but most often lacking vulnerability assessments. Flood mitigation projects are funded, yet maintenance is irregular and siloed. Climate-smart agriculture schemes falter because local officers haven’t been trained on changing risk patterns. Despite the best of intentions, and sometimes even adequate budgets, climate plans stall or fail at the last mile.
India’s public workforce already participates in a range of capacity-building programmes delivered through government training institutes and academic institutions. However, these were largely designed for conventional administrative and sectoral roles. Climate exigencies create a different kind of demand—one that cuts across domains, evolves rapidly, and requires skills that many existing formats were never intended to provide. Local officials are now being asked to interpret climate data, oversee renewable energy rollouts, redesign transport systems, integrate resilience into planning, and respond in real time to intensifying shocks. This evolving context exposes the limits of traditional training and highlights the need for targeted, climate-specific skill sets.
Over the past year, our team at Transitions Research has been working in close partnership with the Maharashtra State Climate Action Cell to develop a comprehensive 10-week fellowship programme for officials in the newly-formed City Climate Action Cells in 44 AMRUT cities across the state. Rather than relying on static, textbook-style modules, we focused on making learning actionable, anchored in the day-to-day roles, constraints, and incentives of public officials. This meant designing learning journeys that speaks to real challenges they face, contextualising it to ongoing programs and local priorities. We brought in elements like gamification and scenario-based learning to enhance engagement, while embedding a robust Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) framework to track outcomes, gather feedback, and continuously improve. A core insight from this experience is that effective capacity-building must begin by meeting learners where they are—in terms of time, institutional context, and practical constraints. It must be iterative, responsive, and able to evolve with systems. Early signs have been extremely promising, signalling both the need and potential of learning systems that can match both the complexity and urgency of the challenge at hand.
While a few Indian states have begun including ‘capacity building’ in their climate budget statements, these references are often broad, fragmented across departments, and lack dedicated allocations. There is a need for government budgets to lay out a coherent plan for large-scale climate-specific skill development, especially for the public workforce expected to implement these transitions. This means going beyond one-off trainings to build sustained, institutional support for skilling at the last mile. Governments must invest in comprehensive programmes that not only build general climate literacy but also equip officials with sector-specific skills in core areas like energy, waste management, urban planning, and disaster risk reduction.
India’s climate ambitions rest not just on policies and plans, but on the people tasked with delivering them. Local capacity must be seen as the connective tissue that translates high-level climate policy into results on the ground. Without it, adaptation and mitigation efforts risk remaining fragmented, short-lived, or overly dependent on external consultants and donors. Capacity building can no longer be seen as a checkbox exercise or discretionary expense. It is an investment that pays for itself by preventing failed projects, reducing disaster losses, and protecting communities from the mounting costs of the climate crisis.
This article is authored by Vikrom Mathur, founding director and Evita Rodrigues, urban governance associate, Transitions Research.
