Tipping point: Climate disasters have cost India over $120 bn since 2000

Climate disasters have affected over a billion Indians and cost the country over $120 billion this century. Natural disasters in India, including floods, landslides and the glacial lake outburst in Sikkim, affected over 15 million people and caused over 2,000 deaths in 2023, according to climate disaster database EM-DAT.

In 2000, over 100 million Indians were affected by climate disasters. In 2015, 347 million were hit – the highest this century, when 10 instances of flooding were reported across India. That year, more than 3,000 people lost their lives to these disasters (chart 1).

Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows a rising trend in the number of deaths due to “forces of nature” such as heat stroke, exposure to cold, floods, landslides, torrential rain, lightning and so on. About 2 per cent of the total deaths in 2022 were due to forces of nature, NCRB data shows. Over 8,000 people lost their lives due to such events that year compared to 6,800 in 2018. Nine per cent of these deaths were due to heat stroke and 7 per cent due to floods.

In the last two decades, climate-related disasters have cost India $122.2 billion, or an average of $5 billion each year (chart 2).



This is a conservative figure. The economic losses could be higher considering that the EM-DAT database does not necessarily log the financial cost of climate disasters in every instance. In its recent update on the state of climate in Asia, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said that the continent was the “most affected region” by climate change and weather-related disasters. It further added that though floods and storms are the main causes of human and economic losses in the region, the fallout of heat waves are getting more severe.

The report additionally stated that Asia is warming “faster than the global average”, and that heat waves in India between April and June last year caused over 100 deaths. These are just the reported figures. The population in India was exposed to about 82 days of extreme heat on an average in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency’s climate hazard tracker. The tracker defines a hot day as one when the maximum temperature exceeds 35 degree Celsius.

The only country with a higher heat exposure in the neighbourhood was Pakistan with over 120 days of heat exposure (chart 3).

The WMO report also pointed out that a majority of water-related disasters in the region, which directly affected 9 million people and killed 2,000, were storms and floods. India’s population was exposed to more than 15 days of heavy precipitation on average in 2022. The exposure however, was higher for Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal (chart 4).