Climate Migration: India’s Unseen Loss and Damage Crisis

In India, climate change is not a distant threat, it’s a harsh reality already uprooting millions from their homes. Between 2015 and 2024, 32.32 million people were internally displaced due to natural disasters, mostly floods and storms, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). In 2024 alone, the figure was 5.4 million, the highest annual displacement in over a decade.

These numbers are not abstract. They represent families whose homes were torn apart by cyclones in Odisha, farmers in the Sundarbans who abandoned their fields to saltwater intrusion, and labourers in Marathwada and Bundelkhand forced to migrate after repeated droughts destroyed crops. Many of these people do not move just once, repeated events create cycles of migration, loss, and vulnerability (IDMC, 2025). [Read more…]