Updates for ClimateRISE Alliance – October 2025 to June 2026
Sustainable Cities and Service Delivery:
As climate impacts become increasingly visible across India’s cities, there is a growing need for approaches that strengthen local governance, enable cross-sector collaboration, and translate climate resilience into actionable pathways for cities and communities. During this period, ClimateRISE focused on supporting place-based urban resilience efforts, fostering ecosystem collaboration, strengthening climate governance, and amplifying narratives that can accelerate adoption of resilient urban development practices.
Offerings In Action:
- Programme Management and Strategic Facilitation:
ClimateRISE provided programme management, stakeholder coordination, and strategic facilitation support to place-based initiatives such as Doh Shaher, Ek Rupayan in Assam and the Sustainable Urban Resilience Framework (SURF) in Uttar Pradesh. This included convening government stakeholders, technical experts, and Alliance partners; facilitating consultations; synthesising partner inputs; and supporting the development of shared roadmaps for climate-resilient urban development and service delivery.
- Convenings and Ecosystem Building:
ClimateRISE convened diverse stakeholders across government, philanthropy, civil society, academia, and the private sector through platforms such as Cities Rising: A Leadership Summit, Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026, Mumbai Climate Week, and the Future of Waste Convening. These engagements enabled cross-learning, surfaced emerging practices, strengthened partnerships, and fostered collective action on urban resilience, climate governance, waste management, and circularity.
- Knowledge and Narrative Building:
ClimateRISE developed and launched the Local Councillor Handbook for Climate Action to strengthen climate-responsive local governance and amplify practitioner-led solutions. The handbook documents examples of climate leadership from elected representatives across India and serves as a practical resource for local governments. In parallel, partnerships with ecosystem actors helped elevate narratives on urban resilience, waste management, and community-led climate action through strategic platforms and knowledge-sharing opportunities.
- Capacity Building and Peer Learning:
ClimateRISE enabled capacity building and knowledge exchange through platforms such as the ARISE Cities Forum, Parvat Manthan, and thematic convenings on water resilience and waste management. These efforts supported practitioners, city leaders, and civil society organisations in sharing experiences, strengthening technical understanding, and identifying opportunities for collaboration on climate-resilient urban development.
Health Systems and Services:
Climate-health as an intersection is a relatively nascent field in India. While the impacts of climate change on health are increasingly visible - from heat stress and air pollution to changing disease patterns and disaster-related health risks - the ecosystem is still in its initial phases. There remains a need to build stronger evidence, develop shared narratives around why climate-health matters, create spaces for diverse stakeholders to learn from one another, and identify practical pathways for action. In response, ClimateRISE focused on strengthening the foundations of the climate-health ecosystem by generating knowledge, convening actors across sectors, and exploring collaborative approaches that can translate emerging understanding into action.
Offerings In Action:
- Building the Evidence Base:
ClimateRISE produced a first-of-its-kind climate-health landscape report, ‘Under the Weather,’ to fill a critical evidence gap. The report combines primary and secondary research to map the evidence of climate-health impacts, identify interventions addressing these challenges, and analyse where and what types of capital are currently flowing within the ecosystem. Similarly, ClimateRISE partnered with MSSRF to develop a flagship report for the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) on the impacts of climate change on women’s health and livelihoods, mobilising inputs and validation from 35+ Alliance stakeholders to ensure the report reflected diverse on-ground experiences and expertise.
- Convenings and Ecosystem Building:
ClimateRISE played a catalytic role in creating spaces for dialogue and exchange for the budding ecosystem of climate-health. It convened a COP28 roundtable to explore pathways at the climate-health nexus and identify collaborative strategies for strengthening community resilience, and hosted climate-health discussions at the World Health Summit, helping elevate the issue within broader health and development conversations. To take efforts forward in a more concrete direction, ClimateRISE organised expert discussions on climate-resilient health systems and facilitated conversations on transitioning from disaster response to long-term resilience. Separately, to delve deeper into a critical theme, ClimateRISE hosted a panel discussion during DPW 2026 that brought together funders, practitioners, media, and institutional stakeholders to explore how India can move from episodic disaster relief towards sustained disaster resilience.
- Developing Shared Infrastructure for Action:
As climate-health evolves from an emerging area of interest into a field of practice, there is a need for shared frameworks, coordination mechanisms, and partnership models that enable stakeholders to move from discussion to collective action. ClimateRISE contributed to building this enabling infrastructure by developing tools such as the Air Quality Canvas, which maps actors, functions, and actions across the air quality data chain to identify opportunities for collaboration, and by engaging with ecosystem partners such as Clean Air Fund to explore mechanisms for supporting grassroots organisations working at the intersection of air pollution and health.
Conservation and Restoration:
With an increasing need for collaborative climate action as India’s biodiversity and landscapes face increasing pressures through rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ecosystem degradation, it has been imperative to approach conservation with an intersectional lens that considers communities, biodiversity, and ecosystems alike. During this period, ClimateRISE focused on building the infrastructure to enable a place-based approach through building practitioner capacities, ecosystem mapping, and fostering stakeholder collaboration.
Offerings In Action:
- Programme Management and Strategic Facilitation:
ClimateRISE provided stakeholder coordination and strategic facilitation support to an initiative to build a broader understanding of the 2026 amendments to the FCA guidelines for the larger restoration and conservation community. This included coordinating outreach to and facilitating consultations with multiple experts, and synthesising insights into planning a roundtable convening as a next step.
- Convenings and Ecosystem Building:
ClimateRISE furthered the discussion on place-based conservation efforts at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026 through a panel on community stewardship and a roundtable on building out an oceans collective. Both convenings moved the conversations forward: the Community Stewardship Consortium is consolidating its learnings from the previous year and strategising outreach to newer members to build a collective identity, while the Oceans Collective is moving forward with a mapping exercise of organisations and alliances leading impact across different seascapes in India, with the goal of identifying gaps in ocean action.
- Capacity Building and Peer Learning:
Dasra co-created and launched the Samvardhan Biodiversity & Conservation Fellowship to support early-stage conservationists with flexible funding, structured mentorship, and peer networks. This effort will build capacities at the grassroots level, broadening access to opportunities and learning for conservation practitioners outside established conservation hubs.
ClimateRISE also contributed to formalising the bioacoustics ecosystem in India, conducting a systems mapping exercise with stakeholders through a workshop that led to knowledge sharing and identified challenges, gaps, intersections, and opportunities within the ecosystem. This directly informed a convening to discuss a proposed Bioacoustics Centre India, which will be bringing together stakeholders from industry and government.
Rural:
Climate impacts in rural India are increasingly experienced through disruptions to livelihoods, natural resource systems, and local economies. However, responses often remain fragmented across sectors and institutions. During this period, ClimateRISE focused on enabling a place-based approach that strengthens community ownership, local governance, and sustainable rural economies by building the partnerships, processes, and solution infrastructure required for long-term resilience.
Offerings In Action:
- Programme Design and Strategic Facilitation:
ClimateRISE continued to convene and facilitate two key multi-partner platforms: Sense of the House (SoTH) and the GramEEE Consortium. Through SoTH, partners collectively refined and operationalised a place-based facilitation framework that enables communities to build collective agency, strengthen social capital, and become custodians of their socio-ecological systems. The consortium was further strengthened through the onboarding of new partners and a field immersion hosted by PRADAN, enabling organisations to experience community-led processes and place-based development approaches firsthand.
- Place-Based Demonstration and Ecosystem Building:
The GramEEE Consortium progressed from concept to implementation with the launch of a shared framework and the initiation of a test bed in Melukote, led by Buzz Women and Puttaniah Foundation. The engagement provided consortium partners with an opportunity to collectively experience and reflect on community mobilisation and aspiration-building processes through the GLIDE workshop, while advancing a shared solution stack for sustainable local production, consumption, and entrepreneurship. These efforts strengthened alignment among civil society organisations, solution providers, and knowledge partners around a common vision for resilient rural economies.
- Knowledge Building and Narrative Change:
ClimateRISE leveraged platforms such as Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026 to deepen discourse on place-based development through a dedicated panel discussion featuring practitioners working across diverse geographies. In parallel, a closed-door CSR roundtable was convened to explore how corporate philanthropy can move beyond project-based funding and utilise CSR resources as catalytic capital for long-term, community-owned transformation. These engagements contributed to strengthening the narrative and ecosystem understanding of place-based approaches as a pathway for climate resilience and rural development.
- Leadership and Ownership by Partners:
A key focus during the period was enabling distributed ownership across partners. Buzz Women assumed leadership for on-ground implementation and learning within Sense of the House, while consortium partners such as PRADAN, Jagriti, and others continued to shape thematic pathways and solution architecture within GramEEE. This transition from Alliance-led coordination towards partner-led action reflects ClimateRISE’s broader objective of building durable ecosystem infrastructure that can sustain collective action beyond individual initiatives.
Gender and Inclusion:
Women at the grassroots are often the first to experience and tackle climate disruption, yet governance processes, civil society frameworks, and dominant narratives rarely centre their knowledge or leadership. The Gender Working Group within ClimateRISE therefore focused on building knowledge, ecosystem exchange, on-ground capacity, and policy infrastructure to strengthen both the case for, and pathways towards, gender-intentional climate development.
Offerings In Action:
- Strengthening Policy Infrastructure:
The Gender Working Group focused on influencing policy processes and governance frameworks to ensure that gender-responsive climate action is embedded within decision-making systems. In partnership with VSTF, which works closely with the Maharashtra government, and technical experts from ClimateRISE, the group developed tools and workshops to integrate a gender-climate lens into Maharashtra’s Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) processes, strengthening how local governance systems respond to gendered climate vulnerabilities. Building on this systems-level approach, the group also supported a civil society-led review process on Gender and Climate Change under the Beijing+30 framework by convening a roundtable that informed recommendations for submission to the UN and EU, helping elevate gender-climate priorities within broader policy discussions.
- Knowledge Building and Peer Exchange:
The Gender Working Group invested in knowledge creation and ecosystem learning to strengthen the evidence base and shift dominant narratives around women’s role in climate action. The group launched a compendium on women-led climate action featuring more than 20 case studies that demonstrate how women are actively leading climate solutions and building community resilience, making a stronger case for investing in women as climate leaders rather than viewing them solely as climate victims. This effort was complemented by regular peer-learning convenings that enabled organisations within the working group to exchange experiences, surface emerging themes, and identify opportunities for collaboration. Extending these conversations beyond the Alliance, ClimateRISE partnered with Buzz Women and EquiLead to convene a roundtable exploring how funders, civil society actors, and communities can better support and recognise rural women as green entrepreneurs and drivers of resilient local development.
- Capacity Building:
The Gender Working Group invested in strengthening capacities at both the individual and organisational level, to enable grassroots women leaders and organisations to more effectively shape climate discourse and advance their work. A storytelling fellowship was launched across three regions of India, equipping 30 women leaders from grassroots organisations with the skills and platforms needed to document and publish their own climate stories, thereby strengthening the visibility and agency of frontline voices. Recognising that effective leadership also requires institutional capabilities, the group complemented this effort with targeted masterclasses on priority topics identified by members, including fundraising and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL), facilitated by in-house experts at Dasra.
Climate Communication and Messaging:
As the impact of extreme climate becomes increasingly visible, there is a need for evidence-based, locally grounded narratives that strengthen public awareness and thereby inform collective climate action. ClimateRISE communications focused on amplifying the efforts from within each Working Group through its media and narrative work.
Offerings In Action:
- Knowledge Product Amplification:
ClimateRISE communications supported the creation and amplification of knowledge products launched across Working Groups, including the Report on Women-led Climate Action and the ‘Under the Weather’ report on India’s climate-health intersections.
- Convening and Narrative Amplification:
ClimateRISE communications amplified ecosystem learnings from ClimateRISE convenings such as Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026, along with field insights from SoTH and GramEEE consortium visits.