national-security – Chasing Tales

Risk – VIII: A Hidden Vulnerability- Civilian Infrastructure in War

In October 2023, Sikkim suffered a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF)¹, which means that the Teesta River surged after the South Lhonak glacial lake burst, destroying the Chungthang dam, sweeping away 11 bridges, damaging NH-10² ³, and disrupting mobile coverage across northern Sikkim.⁴ Rescue operations were immediately hampered because road access, communications, and power failed at the same time. The government’s own situation reports noted that teams from multiple ministries had to be deployed simultaneously because all three systems had gone down together.⁵ Twenty-three Army personnel were among the missing.⁶ ⁷

In my previous post, I explored how climate change was affecting India’s national security with a broad brush, but while doing this I realised that civilian infrastructure is also, often, military infrastructure. And as everyone knows, India’s well known for the upkeep of her civilian infrastructure, and mild climate, so this post was born.

Systemic failure cascading through civil infrastructure is a danger to Indians and to India’s national security.

What Is Happening
Climate can damage infrastructure in two ways:

Disaster events, which are sudden unforeseen shocks, or the more mundane,
Daily stress due to newer ambient conditions, that among other impacts also compresses the window between maintenance cycles.

The former is usually visible, localised, and patched up through specially sanctioned money.

The Science

Chemistry
Most infrastructure is built from steel and concrete. Climate change affects both through several chemical processes.

Corrosion is the oxidation of steel, which is the process that produces rust. It is driven by a reaction that speeds up as temperature and humidity increase.⁸ Higher ambient temperatures and higher humidity therefore accelerate the corrosion of exposed steel and of steel reinforcement bars inside concrete.⁹ Studies have found that this reduces structural resistance and threatens the safety of buildings and infrastructure.¹⁰ ¹¹
For India’s coastal infrastructure, corrosion is intensified by chlorides from seawater and sea spray. Chloride ions penetrate concrete and break down the protective chemical layer on the steel reinforcement inside it.¹² Once that protective layer is lost, corrosion accelerates. As sea levels rise and storm surges push saltwater further inland, more structures are exposed to chloride-rich conditions than they were originally designed for.¹³ ¹⁴
Carbonation is another process affecting concrete.¹⁵ Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reacts with calcium hydroxide in concrete, gradually lowering the concrete’s alkalinity. Concrete normally protects embedded steel because its high alkalinity creates a passive film on the rebar. When carbonation reduces that alkalinity, the steel loses that protection and becomes vulnerable to corrosion. Research suggests that under climate change, carbonation can advance much further than expected over a structure’s lifetime, potentially causing corrosion-related failure 15 to 20 years earlier than expected.

Physics
Climate change also affects infrastructure through physical processes.

Materials such as steel, concrete, and asphalt expand when heated and contract when cooled through a process called thermal expansion. Roads, bridges, and railway lines are designed with this in mind, using expansion joints and stress tolerances based on the historical temperature range of the area.¹⁶ When temperatures exceed those historical ranges more often, the materials expand more than expected. This can cause bridge cracking, road deformation, and rail distortion. India’s National Disaster Management Authority identifies all of these as current extreme heat risks.¹⁷
Thermal cycling fatigue is when repeated expansion and contraction over months and years creates cumulative mechanical stress.¹⁸ Tiny cracks form, widen, and eventually reduce the strength of the structure.¹⁹ This is especially important in regions with large temperature swings, including mountain areas where freeze-thaw and heat-cold cycles can be intense.²⁰
Freeze-thaw damage is a physical mechanism relevant to Himalayan infrastructure. Water enters small cracks in concrete or rock-supported structures.²¹ When it freezes, it expands and exerts pressure on the surrounding material.²² Repeated freeze-thaw cycles gradually widen cracks and weaken the structure. Roads, retaining walls, bridges, and tunnels in mountain zones are especially vulnerable to this.²³
Electrical infrastructure is also affected by basic physics. Transmission lines sag more in high heat because the metal expands.²⁴ ²⁵ Transformers and cables become less efficient as ambient temperature rises and can operate closer to their thermal limits for longer periods.²⁶ This reduces efficiency and can shorten equipment lifespan for equipment rated for a maximum ambient of 40°C, a threshold India’s plains now routinely exceed.²⁷
The troposphere, which is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, is getting wetter and more turbulent as climate change increases evaporation and convective activity.²⁸ ²⁹ Water vapour absorbs and scatters microwave signals. This creates what’s called tropospheric delay so that signals from GPS and navigation satellites arrive slightly later than they should because they’re passing through a more moisture-loaded atmosphere.³⁰ For civilian navigation this is a minor annoyance. For precision-guided systems, artillery corrections, or drone navigation that depend on GPS accuracy, accumulated error matters.³¹
Heavier rainfall also causes direct signal attenuation for satellites operating in the Ku and Ka frequency bands³², which are commonly used for broadband and military communications satellites³³. During intense monsoon rain events, which are becoming more intense, the signal can degrade significantly.³⁴ This is called rain fade.³⁵ Climate change is making extreme rainfall events more frequent, which means rain fade events are also more frequent.³⁶

Biology
Climate change changes biological conditions in ways that matter for infrastructure.

Mold and fungal growth increase when warm temperatures combine with moisture and poor ventilation. More humid conditions, heavier rainfall, and more water intrusion into buildings create better conditions for mold on and inside building materials. Mold does not usually collapse a bridge, but it does damage internal building materials, coatings, insulation, sealants, and indoor air quality, and it increases maintenance burdens in buildings.³⁷ The US Army Corps of Engineers identifies hot, humid conditions and climate-linked flooding as important drivers of mold risk in buildings.³⁸ ³⁹
Termites are another biological stressor. Research has found that termite decomposition activity increases sharply with temperature, with one study reporting an almost sevenfold increase for every 10°C increase in temperature.⁴⁰ Warmer conditions can lengthen termite active seasons and expand their range.⁴¹ In India, where termites are already a major issue in many regions, this can increase damage to wooden structures, fittings, and stored materials.⁴²
However, the most important biological effect may be on people, specifically the people who inspect, repair, and maintain infrastructure. Outdoor workers face direct heat stress. Studies from India show that high heat impairs hydration, reaction time, and cognitive performance, and reduces labour productivity.⁴³ One study found heat stress was associated with impaired cognitive function among outdoor workers in northeast India.⁴⁴ Another found significant productivity losses under high heat conditions in southern India.⁴⁵ Broader modelling suggests work performance in India could decline by 30-40% by the end of the century under high-emissions scenarios because of heat stress.⁴⁶ This matters because infrastructure maintenance is done by human beings. If workers can safely spend fewer hours outdoors, inspections are delayed, repairs take longer, and maintenance backlogs grow.

Why This Matters

Think of a bridge. It’s close to the Western front, but maybe somewhere hot rather than cold. Our troops and civilians use it. When war happens, it risks becoming a chokepoint. This is what climate change is doing to that bridge:

Chemistry

Atmospheric CO₂ rises → carbonation front advances through concrete → alkalinity drops → passive film on rebar breaks down
Simultaneously: Monsoon rainfall carries agricultural fertiliser runoff into the river→ sulfates and chlorides enter river water → they penetrate the concrete of bridge piers standing in the river → chloride ions attack rebar from below while carbonation attacks from above
All of this converges in the same steel. Corrosion begins. The steel expands as it rusts, cracking the concrete around it from the inside. The cracks then let in more water and more chlorides. The process accelerates itself.

Physics

Summer temperatures exceed original design range → expansion joints in the bridge deck are stressed beyond tolerance → micro-cracking at joints
Winter cold → contraction → same joints stressed in the other direction
This thermal cycling repeats every year → cumulative fatigue damage accumulates in the deck and in the connections between the superstructure and the piers
Monsoon floods → river scour around the bridge foundations → soil removed from around pier bases → foundations become more exposed, less supported
The cracks from thermal fatigue now provide entry points for the chloride-rich floodwater. The chemical and physical tracks have merged.

Biology

Heat + humidity + monsoon moisture → mold grows on bearing pads, sealants, and expansion joint filler → these materials degrade faster than designed
Summer wet-bulb temperatures rise → outdoor workers hit safe heat limits earlier in the day → inspection teams spend fewer hours on the bridge → the cracking goes unlogged for longer.
Maintenance is scheduled based on the old assumption of X inspections per year. The bridge now needs X+2. It might get X-1.

The military uses the national grid, national highways, ports, telecom networks, and fuel systems because these already exist at national scale.⁴⁷ Building separate military-only versions of all of them would be costly and, in many cases, impractical.⁴⁸

In forward areas, large fixed installations like wind turbines or solar arrays are visible on satellite imagery and can mark out military positions, a very obvious security liability.

There is also a wider internal security reason for treating civilian infrastructure as a national security issue: power failures, water shortages, and infrastructure breakdowns can contribute to unrest and instability. India has already seen public disorder linked to extended power cuts and water disruptions.⁴⁹ ⁵⁰

This means the military will continue to depend on civilian infrastructure in most cases. As a result, strengthening civilian infrastructure is not separate from strengthening national defence.

Each issue discussed in this post is treated in planning as a separate system with separate vulnerabilities. The problem is that they are not experienced separately.

They fail together.

India has a Ministry of Power, a Ministry of Jal Shakti, a Department of Telecommunications, a Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, a Department of Space, and a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Each has its own climate resilience concerns, its own planning horizon, and its own budget. What India does not have is any institution whose job it is to look at all of these physical risks simultaneously and ask what their combined failure would cost during war, or during a 26/11-style attack.⁵¹ ⁵²

The cascade matters because the response to any single infrastructure failure can usually be managed: reroute the convoy, use the satellite phone, run the generator. It is when several failures occur in the same region simultaneously that the workarounds stop working. In a conflict scenario, an adversary that understands India’s infrastructure dependencies does not need to attack each system individually.⁵³ A weather event that the adversary did not cause, hitting infrastructure that climate change has already weakened, can achieve the same effect at no cost.⁵⁴ The Sikkim GLOF was not engineered. But the military vulnerability it exposed- an entire strategically sensitive zone simultaneously cut off by road, by communication, and by power- is exactly the condition a competent adversary would try to manufacture.

Sources

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

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