Risk – VII: Climate Change and India’s National Security Emergency

NB: I don’t know anything about national security. I’m a climate person now exploring risk and this seems… obvious. This is the toughest thing I’ve ever written.

Siachen is the world’s highest active battlefield, at approximately 6,300 metres above sea level in the eastern Karakoram range.¹ During a complete ceasefire between 2013 and March 2016, 41 soldiers still died there. This is what the glacier costs India in peacetime.²

Now the glacier is melting.

what is climate change
Over time, the atmosphere of our planet has been composed of different material. How much heat is retained by the planet is determined in part by this. If the atmosphere has more greenhouse gases, it will lead to a hotter planet, which leads to cascading effects.

Example: As temperatures rise, glaciers and polar ice sheets melt causing sea levels to rise and threatening to inundate coastal cities, erode coastlines, and displace millions of people. Concurrently, this warming disturbs weather patterns, resulting in more intense heatwaves, devastating droughts, and stronger, more destructive storms and floods. These physical disruptions destroy ecosystems and agricultural productivity, creating severe food and water shortages, while simultaneously expanding the range of pests and diseases that endanger human health. Ultimately, these interconnected hazards damage critical infrastructure, destabilise economies, and heighten the risk of mass migration, poverty, and conflict over declining natural resources.

What are India’s prevalent national security issues
From what I understand, our main national security issues are external aggression, terrorism, and militancy.

Threat multiplier³ ⁴
Climate change doesn’t create new conflicts. It takes every single problem in the list above, such as water, food, borders, internal stability, regional rivalry, and makes it harder to manage, more frequent, and more explosive through resource stress. For example, it tightens the supply of water and food, which increases competition for both, which drives displacement, which destabilises borders and communities, which creates the conditions in which existing conflicts (ethnic, political, territorial) escalate. A drought isn’t just an agricultural event. It is, potentially, a political one, which can always make it a military one too.

Let’s explore how:

I. Internal Security

1. Water
India is the 13th most water-stressed country in the world⁵, and climate-change-driven precipitation changes are projected to worsen this dramatically, with more rain falls in violent bursts, and the moderate, sustained rainfall that actually recharges groundwater becoming rarer⁶. A 2024 peer-reviewed study in AGU Geophysical Research Letters found that monsoon drying combined with winter warming has already caused massive groundwater loss between 2002 and 2021- and that this trend will worsen as irrigation demand rises and recharge declines.⁷ A 2018 Niti Aayog report found that states performing poorly on the water index are home to about 40% of India’s population and account for 40% of its agricultural output, creating a cascading risk for food and economic security.⁸ By 2050, the water crisis is projected to cost India nearly 6% of its GDP.⁹

Similarly, communal tensions in water-stressed regions are increasingly animated by resource competition.¹⁰ As river flows decline and groundwater depletes, communities that share or contest watersheds become sites of conflict.¹¹ The state-level Cauvery riots are a visible example; but beneath the surface, a growing number of smaller, less-reported water conflicts are simmering across India, and their frequency is directly tied to climate variability.

The Cauvery water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka is a preview of what’s coming. The 2016 riots¹², triggered in large part by what was the worst drought Tamil Nadu had experienced in 140 years¹³, left people dead, millions of rupees in damages, and required significant law enforcement mobilisation. While water disputes between Indian states date back to the colonial era, climate change is ratcheting up the intensity by making droughts more frequent and more severe. he Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership’s conflict early-warning tool, which uses machine learning across 15–20 indicators and claims 86% accuracy, has consistently flagged large parts of India and Pakistan as high-risk zones for water-driven conflict.¹⁴

2. Heat
Famously, at the moment the world’s 95 hottest cities are in India¹⁵, rompting Redditors to calculate that you’d need 4.3 million ten-metre tunnels — stacked eighteen rows high across the entire mountain range, ideally with RGB lighting — to reduce India’s temperature by 5°C ^{(Favourite comment: “Would it not be easier to just raise India? Put it on some tire jacks or something? Pixar’s Up but with India maybe?”}¹⁶⁾.¹⁷ ¹⁸

This has an internal security dimension that rarely gets discussed: heat is an economic catastrophe. India’s agricultural workforce, which still constitutes roughly 46%¹⁹ of total employment, is almost entirely outdoor and informal. When a heat event destroys a harvest, it doesn’t just create hunger. It destroys livelihoods, triggers distress migration into already-strained cities, and adds pressure to communities where other tensions already exist.²⁰

3. Food Security
India feeds 1.4 billion people largely through rain-fed agriculture- and rain-fed agriculture accounts for 60%²¹ ²² of all cultivated land in India. This is the singular vulnerability that makes climate change so existential: a disruption of the monsoon is a disruption of the nation’s food supply. And that disruption is already underway.

Erratic rainfall, increased droughts, and more intense floods are reducing crop yields, pushing up food prices, and deepening malnutrition, particularly among the most marginalised communities. Staple crops are losing nutrients as rising CO₂ speeds up photosynthesis while reducing protein and mineral content.²³ Lower yields lead to food scarcity, which leads to price spikes, which lead to social unrest, which is a feedback loop that historically has destabilised governments and ignited conflicts. The most recent example is the Syrian civil war, which multiple studies have linked to a catastrophic 2007-2010 drought that drove 1.5 million Syrian farmers into cities.²⁴

4. Disease
Climate change expands both the geographic range and the seasonal window of vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and others, by making previously inhospitable environments hospitable to the mosquitoes that carry them.²⁵ As temperatures rise, these mosquitoes move to higher altitudes and higher latitudes: places that were, until recently, simply too cold for them to survive and reproduce year-round.²⁶

This matters for India’s security because the Indian Army already manages significant morbidity from malaria in its northeastern and jungle deployments.²⁷ ²⁸ The Northeast is already one of the most malaria-endemic regions in the country, and it is also one of the most militarily active, with ongoing counterinsurgency operations across Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh (during World War II in Manipur and Nagaland, malaria casualties far exceeded those from Japanese aggression)²⁹. Climate change will extend both the altitude and the season of that disease burden, moving it upward into Himalayan deployment zones that were previously disease-free, and lengthening the transmission window in zones that already carry it.³⁰

5. Migration
Between 2015 and 2024, 32.32 million people were internally displaced in India due to natural disasters (mostly floods and storms).³¹ In 2024 alone, the figure was 5.4 million: the highest single-year displacement in over a decade.³² Nearly half of those 5.4 million were in Assam, which experienced its most intense floods in more than a decade.³³ Cyclone Dana, which tore through Odisha and West Bengal in October 2024, added another million on top of that.³⁴ The World Bank projects that South Asia could see up to 40 million internal climate migrants by 2050 in a worst-case scenario.³⁵

So where are our people moving? Cities, it seems. This means that people are fleeing climate-stressed rural areas and moving into climate-stressed cities.³⁶ The downstream effects are predictable: “expanding informal settlements, rising unemployment, worsening public health, increased competition for water and space, and communities under pressure in the exact ways that historically precede unrest.”³⁷ Research on climate-induced displacement in India found that discrimination, violence, and the lack of basic amenities in urban areas meant that migrants who arrived seeking economic survival found themselves in conditions of compounded vulnerability.³⁸

Distress migration does not produce stable, integrated urban populations. It produces large numbers of people with very little to lose.

And the thing to note here is that security issues like insurgency and climate change share a common engine: desperation- witnessed as the regions most vulnerable to rainfall variability often overlapping with areas prone to Left-Wing Extremism (LWE).³⁹ ⁴⁰ As climate change degrades agricultural livelihoods and forces displacement, it provides fertile recruiting ground for insurgent movements that thrive on grievance.⁴¹ The relief web analysis on India and climate security explicitly highlights how climate change’s adverse interaction with insurgencies could “create or exacerbate national security threats” across multiple domains.⁴²

II. External Security

1. Water
China is building what will be the largest hydroelectric dams in human history on the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) river in Tibet, near Arunachal Pradesh.⁴³ This dam, alongside several others upstream, would give China enormous water storage capacity and the ability to control the flow of the Brahmaputra into India’s northeast.⁴⁴ During the 2017 Doklam standoff, China demonstrated its willingness to use water coercively by stopping the sharing of hydrological data with India, impeding India’s ability to predict and manage downstream floods.⁴⁵ In fact, no such data has been shared since 2022.⁴⁶

India itself responded to the Pahalgam attacks by weaponising water. On 23 April 2025, forty-eight hours after the Pahalgam attack killed 26 civilians in Baisaran valley, India formally notified Pakistan that the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 was being “held in abeyance with immediate effect”, until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ends cross-border terrorism.⁴⁷ In early May 2025, India physically cut off water flow through the Baglihar Dam on the Chenab River and announced it was planning identical measures at the Kishanganga Dam on the Jhelum- both rivers that under the IWT belonged to Pakistan’s allocation.⁴⁸ Pakistan’s foreign minister called any withholding of water “an act of war.”⁴⁹

What happens when a desperate, water-starved, nuclear-armed Pakistan faces internal collapse that starts affecting its ruling classes? Does it start bombing us? Because Climate change isn’t just about “resource competition”- it’s about state failure, and Pakistan’s per capita water availability has fallen by 83% since 1951.⁵⁰

Water is already a coercive instrument in our region.

2. Heat
We have a coastline of 11,098.81 kilometers⁵¹, with several economically important and culturally vibrant city-civilisations on them. Rising sea levels and intensifying cyclones are putting all of this at risk.

The surface temperature of the tropical Indian Ocean has already increased by 1°C between 1951 and 2015, higher than the global average sea surface temperature rise.⁵² Higher ocean temperature contributes directly to cyclones.⁵³ During Cyclone Hudhud in 2014, the Indian Navy suffered infrastructure damage worth ₹2,000 crore at Visakhapatnam.⁵⁴ Rising seas threaten dry docks, repair infrastructure, and coastal logistics networks. The frequency of very intense cyclones in the post-monsoon period has increased significantly during 2000–2018.⁵⁵ Each such event doesn’t just damage physical infrastructure — it pulls naval and military assets away from their primary strategic responsibilities and into disaster relief, degrading operational readiness.

Meanwhile, sea level rise in the North Indian Ocean accelerated from 1.06–1.75mm per year during 1874–2004 to 3.3mm per year during 1993–2017.⁵⁶ A 2025 study published in Nature Scientific Reports confirmed that Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai face “intensified risks across all emission projections” due to their low elevation and high population concentration.⁵⁷ Mumbai has already witnessed the maximum rise in sea levels of any Indian city (4.44 cm between 1987 and 2021), and that figure is projected to increase sharply by 2100.⁵⁸

3. Migration
India shares a 4,000+ kilometre border with Bangladesh.⁵⁹ That’s a long border. Bangladesh is also the world’s seventh most climate-vulnerable country⁶⁰, and climate change is projected to submerge approximately 17% of its landmass, displacing roughly 13 percent of its population by 2050⁶¹.

When Bangladesh floods, its people move north and west- into India. India has already spent billions⁶² constructing border fencing, but field reports from the West Bengal border describe fencing on the Bangladesh side with crossing as compromised⁶³, and crossings are facilitated by narrow canals that cannot be fully monitored.⁶⁴ Migration pressure is unlikely to be evenly distributed- it concentrates in Bengal and the Northeast, regions already marked by ethnic tension⁶⁵, political volatility, and a complex history with Bangladeshi migration dating back to 1971⁶⁶.⁶⁷

What transforms this from a humanitarian issue into a security one is the documented presence of banned militant organisations like Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh near the border⁶⁸– groups that can exploit mass migration events for infiltration.

Climate Trigger	The “Climate” Impact	The “Security” Result	Why it matters for National Security
Glacial Melt	Retreating snouts; unstable moraine; GLOFs (floods).	Tactical Instability	Traditional borders (like the AGPL in Siachen) physically shift; supply routes disappear.
Monsoon Shift	Extreme rainfall or prolonged drought.	Economic Despair	44% of the workforce loses income; rural “desperation” becomes a recruitment tool for insurgents.
Extreme Heat	45°C+ days in the plains and high-altitude zones.	Operational Decay	Soldiers face physiological limits; equipment (engines/ammo) fails; training routines are halted.
Sea Level Rise	Coastal inundation and salt-water intrusion.	Base Degradation	Strategic naval assets (like Visakhapatnam) face infrastructure damage; dry docks become unusable.
Water Stress	Depleting groundwater and drying river basins.	Inter-state Riots	Water becomes a “zero-sum” game; leads to internal unrest (Cauvery) or external “Water Wars.”
Crop Failure	Reduced yields and nutrient loss in staples.	Food Riots	High food prices historically lead to urban instability and the potential collapse of state legitimacy.
Migration	Millions displaced by floods (Assam) or cyclones.	Border Pressure	“Distress migration” creates dense, vulnerable urban slums and pushes people across sensitive borders.
Vector Shift	Mosquitoes moving to higher altitudes.	Morbidity Burden	High malaria/dengue rates in active zones (Northeast/Himalayas) reduce troop readiness.

Cheat Sheet

Military Readiness
The April 2026 Planetary Security Initiative report produced by the Clingendael Institute in collaboration with India’s Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies offers this analysis of how climate change degrades military readiness across four core pillars: personnel, infrastructure, platforms, and equipment.⁶⁹

Personnel: Extreme heat is degrading recruitment pools and training routines. India is already experiencing record-breaking heat events across the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and soldiers training in 45°C heat in Rajasthan or operating in flooded terrain in Assam face physiological limits that reduce performance and increase casualties.
Infrastructure: Naval bases, Himalayan forward posts, and logistical nodes are threatened by sea-level rise, cyclones, and flash floods. The 2014 Kashmir floods, which damaged over 40 km of three-tier border fencing and flood-lighting LoC fencing⁷⁰, are a preview of a recurring problem.
Platforms: Extreme temperature fluctuations and humidity degrade armour, engines, and vehicles. The US military has already begun designing vehicles for higher heat and cold tolerance- India must follow suit.⁷¹
Equipment: Ordnance and ammunition have defined storage and operational temperature ranges. A changing climate expands the operational environments beyond these ranges.

Climate change is also squeezing the defence budget from two directions. India already spends about 5.6% of its GDP managing climate change impacts- a share expected to grow.⁷² A Stanford University study found that climate change had a negative 31% impact on India’s GDP per capita from 1961 to 2010.⁷³ Defence spending as a share of GDP has declined steadily, falling below 2 percent in 2024–25 for the first time in over a decade.⁷⁴ As climate disasters redirect more public spending toward relief and rehabilitation, the defence budget will face even greater compression, precisely at a time when India faces two active, nuclear-armed rivals on its borders.

Despite all this evidence, India’s strategic doctrine has been slow to formally integrate climate change into its national security framework. The 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC)⁷⁵ and the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change were early institutional steps, but as a 2024 Tandfonline study noted, India has “remained opposed to discussing security implications of climate change in the UNSC.”.⁷⁶ The Indian strategic discourse, as the Planetary Security Initiative’s 2026 report notes, “remains primarily focused on civilian-centric impacts” rather than hard military readiness⁶⁹, and as recently as March 2026, the Ministry of Defence released its ‘Defence Forces Vision 2047’ — a comprehensive modernisation blueprint that makes no explicit mention of climate change as a security variable⁷⁷.

When the UNSC debate “Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Climate and Security” was convened, India’s permanent representative, TS Tirumurti, voted against a draft resolution in December 2021 on the grounds that it “attempted to securitise climate action and undermine the hard-won consensual agreements” reached at Glasgow COP26.⁷⁸ India’s position, restated across multiple UNSC sessions over 15 years, is philosophically coherent: securitising climate change risks bringing militarised solutions to problems that are inherently non-military in nature;⁷⁹ the UNSC, with its five veto-wielding permanent members who are historically the world’s largest emitters, is not a legitimate forum to decide climate governance;⁸⁰ and the right place for climate action is the UNFCCC, the UNGA, and ECOSOC, which are more representative and participatory⁷⁸.

This is not entirely wrong. The securitisation of climate change at the UN level has real risks- it can be used to justify military interventions dressed up as climate responses, and it gives P5 countries disproportionate control over a global problem they caused.⁸¹ ⁸² India’s resistance carries the moral weight of the Global South.

But there is a distinction that India has repeatedly failed to make cleanly. There is a difference between opposing the international securitisation of climate change (arguing that the UNSC shouldn’t police it) and failing to integrate climate risks into your own domestic security planning (refusing to acknowledge it as a threat to your own military).

India’s 2017 Joint Doctrine of the Armed Forces labels climate change a “non-traditional security issue”⁷⁶, a categorisation that is both technically accurate and practically meaningless, since it places glacier melt in the same administrative drawer as piracy and pandemics⁸³. That framing, non-traditional, therefore not urgent, is the problem.

This is a critical gap. Peer militaries, particularly in the US and within NATO, have been conducting disaster war games, climate risk audits of military installations, and equipment redesign programmes for years.⁸⁴ ⁸⁵ India’s CLAWS has called for the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) to become the nodal body for climate security planning⁸⁶, and for a “risk-risk” orientation in policy one that weighs the cost of climate inaction against the cost of adaptation (A “risk-risk”⁶⁹ a decision-making approach used to analyze the trade-offs between different risks, specifically comparing the risk reduced by a particular action (e.g., regulation, mitigation) against new risks created by that same action).

So what about Siachen?
ISRO and the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology have documented a recession of approximately 800 metres from the Siachen Glacier’s snout over the last 20 years.⁸⁷ As glaciers retreat, the terrain they leave behind is not clean, empty ground. It is unstable moraine^{(Moraine is the debris (rock, sediment, dirt) that a glacier picks up and deposits as it retreats. It is loose, unconsolidated, and structurally unreliable. It also tends to form dams across glacial meltwater, creating glacial lakes that can burst suddenly and catastrophically, these are called glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs})⁸⁸ prone to collapse, to sudden flooding, to avalanche patterns that have no historical precedent because the ice that shaped them is no longer there. Old military positions may find themselves sitting on terrain that is physically changing beneath them.⁸⁹ Routes that were stable for decades become lethal. Strategic high points, held at enormous human cost, may shift in their tactical value as the topography itself rearranges.

Can troops continue to serve there? Technically, they currently do despite conditions that would be described, in any other context, as incompatible with human habitation. But the question climate change forces is not just whether they can- it’s whether the positions they hold will still make military sense as the glacier retreats and new terrain emerges. The Army will have to continuously reassess which positions are defensible, which supply routes remain viable and, what seems more frightening to me, which points are downstream of newly forming glacial lakes that could burst without warning.

All over our country, the ground is changing, shifting, melting under our feet. To ignore the security dimension of climate change is to believe that a nation can be “secure” even if its cities are underwater and its breadbasket is a dust bowl, and its soldiers don’t know where to stand. True autonomy in the coming century won’t just be measured by the size of our arsenal, but by the resilience of our resources. If national security is preparing for the worst case scenarios, it is time to acknowledge that climate change is also our war theatre.

Sources

Author: Finrod Bites Wolves

A blogger. View all posts by Finrod Bites Wolves

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