World Environment Day 2025: Why climate resilience needs development management leaders?
On World Environment Day, as the world debates net-zero targets, electric vehicles, and renewable energy milestones, it's vital to remember that climate change is not only about carbon emissions. It is, at its core, a human crisis. In India, vulnerability to climate extremes is no longer hypothetical. An assessment by the Department of Science and Technology found that over 80% of Indian districts face high flood or drought risk, with the impacts disproportionately affecting rural and marginalised communities.
As climate-related disasters become more frequent, they compound pre-existing inequities in health, livelihoods, and gender, demanding a more people-centred approach to resilience. To mitigate these issues, there is a need to build a cadre of development management professionals supporting an ecosystem of fellowships, leadership programmes, and institutions that strengthen development management capacities within the social sector.
The human blind spot in climate action
Despite the gravity of this crisis, much of our climate discourse remains dominated by top-down narratives driven by policy, technology, and capital. These are all crucial elements, but they are not sufficient. The lived realities of climate change, migration, loss of livelihoods, and collapsing ecosystems require solutions that are relational, adaptive, and deeply rooted in the social fabric of our communities. The missing link in our response is leadership from India's vast, diverse, and indispensable social sector.
Climate resilience is not built through technology or investment alone. It is built through trust, collective participation, and a deep understanding of how communities function and survive under pressure. The social sector, encompassing NGOs, self-help groups, community-based organisations, and grassroots movements, has long worked within these realities. It is this sector that steps in when families are displaced by floods, when heatwaves trigger public health emergencies, and when farming communities face successive crop failures due to erratic rainfall.
Lessons from the ground
Across India, community-led efforts have long demonstrated the power of local knowledge in building climate resilience, from reviving traditional water structures to adopting adaptive agricultural practices. When supported and scaled, these approaches play a vital role in addressing local vulnerabilities. The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) continues to support women farmers in adopting climate-resilient livelihoods
Programmes like MISHTI, which restore mangrove ecosystems, and MGNREGS, which enable water conservation and drought-proofing in rural areas, demonstrate the potential of people-first climate action. Yet, despite this record, the social sector remains systematically under-recognised and underfunded in India's climate action plans.
The majority of green finance continues to flow towards large-scale mitigation projects. Adaptation, which directly impacts vulnerable communities, receives a much smaller share. While new policy frameworks like India's Climate Finance Taxonomy are promising, implementation has been slow and fragmented.
Bridging the investment gap
Some argue that the social sector lacks the scale or sophistication to lead India's climate response. But this critique overlooks what truly drives resilience. Social purpose organisations possess deep-rooted credibility, contextual knowledge, and the trust of communities. They act as connectors, translating government policy, technological innovation, and philanthropic investment into solutions that work on the ground.
What is missing is not intent, but investment in leadership. According to the India Philanthropy Report 2025 by Bain & Company and Dasra, the social sector has grown at a compound annual rate of approximately 13% over the past five years, reaching ₹25 lakh crore (approximately USD 300 billion, or 8.3% of GDP) in FY 2024. These organisations indirectly enable an additional ₹25 to ₹30 lakh crore in public spending on development.
Yet the people leading them often lack access to the kind of management training, strategic support, and institutional strengthening available to their counterparts in the corporate or government sectors. If we are to scale community-rooted climate action, we must invest in the people who make that action possible.
Catalysing future leadership
This means building a cadre of development management professionals supporting an ecosystem of fellowships, leadership programmes, and institutions that strengthen development management capacities within the sector. It also means reimagining CSR and philanthropic capital to fund not just projects, but long-term institutional resilience.
According to an analysis by Sattva Consulting, only 19 Indian non-profits reported incomes exceeding ₹100 crore in FY 2021-22. This starkly contrasts with the scale of CSR allocations by many large companies, whose individual budgets often exceed this threshold.
The disparity reveals a persistent challenge, even as philanthropic and CSR capital grows, the organisations working most closely with vulnerable communities continue to face institutional and financial limitations. Dedicated pipelines that strengthen the strategic capabilities of grassroots organisations are urgently needed.
India has made ambitious commitments on climate action. But these goals will remain out of reach unless we address the leadership vacuum at the heart of our adaptation response. Social sector leaders are not just service providers. They are catalysts for systemic change. And if we are serious about climate justice, we must centre their voices, build their capacity, and trust their vision.
In a country as complex and diverse as India, climate action must begin and end with people. And the social sector is where that work already quietly, urgently, and persistently continues every day.
(Ravi Sreedharan is the President and Co-founder of Indian School of Development Management)
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