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CLIMATE JUSTICE AND VULNERABLE POPULATION

Prachi Gupta

Climate change is not just an environmental issue but a social one, it deeply affects the marginalized communities of the society like fisherfolk and tribal groups. They have to disproportionately bear the impacts of climate change due to structural inequalities and geographic exposure. These groups face livelihood disruptions, displacements and cultural loss. The concept of climate justice stresses that those who have contributed least to emission often suffer most, making equity and rights foundational to any climate response.

A vast country like India with socio economic disparities, where large agrarian and coastal populations are the key vulnerable groups and have to face various climate problems like rising sea level, erratic rain patterns, biodiversity loss and frequent extreme climate change for which they do not get proper compensation and justice. Climate justice means putting equity and human rights at the core of decision-making and action on climate change. (UNDP, 2023)

A justice and rights-based adaptation paradigm offers a more inclusive and ethical lens to examine this crisis. It recognizes that climate vulnerability is not distributed evenly and must be addressed through three irrelated dimensions: Distributive justice, Procedural justice, Recognition justice. It is an approach to climate adaptation that centers equity, inclusion, and the protection of human rights, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. Rather than focusing solely on technical or efficiency-based solutions, the paradigm foregrounds social, economic and political fairness in both the processes and outcomes of adaptation efforts.
-Distributive Justice addresses the fair allocation of the burdens and benefits of climate adaptation.
-Procedural Justice focuses on the fairness and inclusivity of decision-making processes.
-Recognition Justice emphasises the need to acknowledge and respect the diverse identities, values,
worldviews, and experiences of vulnerable populations.

According to latest IPCC report, there are four key conditions for effectiveness that are recognitional, procedural, distributive and equity. When these conditions met successfully, ensures the participation of vulnerable community in the decision making, implementation process and subsequent learning. (WFD, 2023)
“Empowering local stakeholders to lead in adaptation gives communities on the frontlines of climate change a voice in decisions that directly affect their lives and livelihoods. Shifting power to local stakeholders, without expecting them to shoulder the burden of adaptation, can catalyze adaptation that is effective, equitable, and transparent.” (GCA, 2022)

This article explores how these marginalized communities get affected due to these climate changes without getting proper compensation and climate justice and critically analyse the policy gaps. It examines how India’s climate response must shift from a techno-centric, mitigation-dominated paradigm to one that incorporates justice, equity and rights-based adaptation particularly for these marginalized communities and vulnerable populations. 

INDIA’S CLIMATE FRONTLINES: COASTAL FISHERFOLK AND TRIBAL POPULATIONS:

India’s coastlines span over 7,500 Km and are home to more than 4 million marine fisherfolk, includes 1,382 islands. These communities rely not just on fishing for income but also for identity, culture, and dignity. But rising seas are eating away their land. In the Indian Sundarbans, over 69% of the coastline experienced significant erosion after Cyclone Amphan (Mishra et al., 2021). Extreme events more frequent and more violent leave behind broken nets, flooded homes, and lost boats.

What’s worse, seasonal fishing bans imposed for marine conservation often overlap with cyclone recovery periods, leaving families doubly stranded. Climate change has destroyed boats, nets, commons, crops and Forests, yet compensation mechanisms are deeply inadequate or exclude informal losses. Most fisherfolk and forest dependent communities are not covered under insurance a disaster funds, even though their climate losses are severe and recurring. In 2024, several fishers in the Sundarbans told Mongabay India that they had to take loans just to survive the ban period after Cyclone Yaas had already destroyed their equipment (Mongabay, 2024). Less than 10% of India’s climate finance reaches local adaptation, most of it goes to urban infrastructure and renewable energy.

In Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, fishers report shifting marine biodiversity, vanishing catch zones, and new diseases affecting aquaculture, all linked to warming waters and erratic monsoons. This is mainly due to the over polluted oceans. According to one of the Fisher, they used to get a lot of fishes about 8 to 10 km within the ocean, but now they have to go further in the oceans for which they would need the motorised boats but cannot afford it. The increased intensity of cyclonic storms and rising sea temperatures causing fish to migrate to higher latitudes and deeper waters (Kuntamalla, V. 2022).

Scheduled Tribes in India are over 104 million, that are largely relies and inhabit forests, hills, and tribal homelands. Their lives heavily depend on biodiversity, rain fed agriculture and shifting cultivation, forest produce and medicinal plants, access to water, land and commons, but climate change has made rainfall less predictable, dried-up village ponds and sparked wildfires in previously cool forest zones. In Koraput district of Odisha, within almost 10 villages, tribal women recently noticed that medicinal plants and fruits central to their food and health traditions had disappeared. Using “dream maps,” they documented this decline and traced it to both climate change and deforestation from development projects. They submitted their dream maps and surveys to local government officials, so that the village development funds can be used to preserve or restore their common areas. Their maps showed a 25% reduction in village commons over a decade (AP News, 2025).

Yet, tribal communities are rarely consulted in forest conservation policies or rehabilitation plans. Despite living in climate sensitive ecosystems, marginalised groups are rarely involved in designing climate policies. Coastal fishers are excluded from marine policy consultations, tribal communities are left out of forest governance, despite constitutional protections under FRA and PESA. This exclusion from governance leads to policies that neither reflect their needs nor protect their livelihoods.

Climate adaptation in green development often became pretexts for land acquisition, leading to displacement and loss of cultural identity. Dams, solar parks and wildlife corridors are built on land historically inhabited by tribal groups, without recognising their legal or ancestral claims. This reflects a denial of their identity, agency and place-based knowledge. Climate change disproportionately burdens the most vulnerable, exemplified by communities in India’s Sundarbans enduring devastating cyclones, displacement, and profound livelihood challenges. Development often arrives as displacement, “green grabbing” in the name of renewable energy, dams, or wildlife corridors (IDS, 2020). Their rights under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) or Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) remain largely unimplemented on the ground.

The vulnerability of India’s marginalised groups is not accidental; it is produced and perpetuated by structures that deny recognition, exclusion from governance and ignore distributive equity.

POLICY GAPS AND STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES:

India has multiple climate policies like The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), State Action Plans (SAPCCs), and a commitment to net zero emissions by 2070. Other that these policies there are some legal provisions and rights that gives a little climate justice to these marginalized communities and gives some autonomy to them like Fifth and Sixth Schedule enables self-governance in forest and hill regions, Recognition of Forest Rights Act, 2006 empowers tribals with ownership of forest land and access to resources, Right to protect and regenerate forest Biodiversity, NDRFs and SDRFs to compensate the losses, Marine Fisheries Bill, 2021(criticized due to insufficient clarity on how climate related losses will be compensated), FIDF(but climate vulnerability is not explicitly addressed in funding criteria), etc.

Despite the robust legal and policy framework, implementation challenges, centralization, and institutional apathy limit the effectiveness of these provisions. Yet these policies do not justify the lens of climate justice and equity, at the end these vulnerable populations and tribal communities have to bear the whole burden of loss of livelihood, little unjust compensation and displacements.

Let’s discuss some of the policy gaps that exists:

1. Lack of Localisation: India’s climate policies are not designed for the local population and adopt a top-down, one-size-fits-all model. Policies are designed at the central and state level and rolled out uniformly, without adequate tailoring to local ecological, cultural, and economic contexts. Standardized approaches fail to address the vulnerabilities of groups like inland forest dwellers or coastal fishers. Therefore, India’s climate response is overly centralised, with limited space for local voices, needs, and priorities. Provisions for consultation under FRA, CRZ, and PESA exist but are poorly enforced. Local voices, especially those of women, small-scale fishers, and tribal leaders are frequently sidelined during planning and implementation. There is no institutionalised role for fisherfolk cooperatives or tribal panchayats in shaping and monitoring these policies, they are excluded from the governance and decision making, leading to procedural gap.

2. Weak Implementation of Legal Rights: Over 1.4 crore claims filled under FRA, however only a fraction has been approved by forest authorities, with community forest resource rights rarely recognised. Bureaucratic resistance and limited legal literacy, especially among tribal groups, further obstruct access. Without recognition of land and resources ownership, adaptation becomes externally imposed rather than community-led. According to a policy brief by Oxfam India, inadequate community awareness, conflicting legislations, lack of dedicated structure for implementation and devoted staff, administrative blocks to smooth processing of claims and governance deficit are key challenges hindering the effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), thereby undermining the rights of forest-dwelling communities.

3. Neglect of Customary and Livelihood Rights: The existing policy frameworks in India often fail to provide adequate climate responsive measures or vulnerable communities. For instance, National policies on Marine fisheries while focusing on sustainability of frequently overly crucial support mechanism for fisher such as relocation assistance, compensation for climate induced losses and tailor Insurance Scheme for those facing impact like seed level rise and extreme weather events. This gap leaves fisherfolk highly vulnerable to the escalating impacts of climate change. “The impact of climate change is already being felt by fishers, small and large. Increasing cyclones, impact of marine heatwaves, impact of coastal erosion, sea level rise, rising costs of operation, lack of safeguards, insurance, and markets all plague the sector in India despite the slew of government schemes. Add to that the vagaries of weather, which will only increase in the future as climate change makes each passing season more unpredictable.” (IndiaSpend, 2025). Similarly, disaster relief frameworks typically focus on asset damage often excluding compensation for informal livelihood losses tight to traditional forest and fisheries-based activities, leaving communities highly vulnerable to climate shocks and undermining their adaptive capacity. (NIDM, 2019)

4. Skewed Climate Finance: Less than 10% of India’s climate investment is directed toward adaptation or local-level resilience. Most funding targets mitigation renewables, EVs, while this techno-centric approach leaves grassroots needs remain under-resourced, ensuring that those most impacted by climate change remain the least supported by current policy and financial flows.

Together these gaps point to a systematic oversight, the already existing policies are more focused on infrastructure development and sustainability, the very important factors for development but simultaneously these policies are not able to address the needs of vulnerable population like tribal people, coastal fisherfolks and various marginalised communities and do not serve climate justice and equity.

RECOMMENDATION AND SOLUTIONS:

1.Prioritize Decentralised and Participatory Climate Governance: To counter the current top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, climate policies must be designed and implemented with genuine local participation. This requires mandating and rigorously enforcing provisions for consultation under existing legal frameworks like the Forest Rights Act (FRA), Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, and Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA). Furthermore, there must be an institutionalised and empowered role for local governance bodies, such as fisherfolk cooperatives and tribal panchayats, in shaping, monitoring, and adapting climate policies to their specific ecological, cultural, and economic contexts. This ensures that India’s climate response is truly community-led, rather than externally imposed.

2.Strengthen and Accelerate Legal Rights Recognition: The weak implementation of legal rights, particularly under the FRA, must be urgently rectified. Policies should focus on expediting the approval of the over 1.4 crore pending claims, with a clear priority on recognizing Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights. “FRA recognises the right of Gram Sabhas to protect, regenerate, conserve or manage community forest resources for sustainable use, also known as Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights, and to regulate access to these CFR areas from destructive practices.” (The Wire, 2025). Recognizing these rights is fundamental to enabling communities to lead their own adaptation strategies, moving away from externally imposed solutions.

3.Integrate Livelihood Resilience into Sectoral Policies and Disaster Frameworks: To address the neglect of customary and livelihood rights, climate policies must explicitly integrate comprehensive climate-responsive measures into sectoral legislations. For the marine fisheries sector, this entails amending policies to include provisions for relocation assistance, compensation for climate-induced losses, and tailored insurance schemes that directly benefit fisherfolk facing impacts like sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Furthermore, disaster relief frameworks, such as the SDRF, must be reformed to explicitly include compensation for informal livelihood losses tied to traditional forest and fisheries-based activities, ensuring vulnerable communities receive holistic support to recover from climate shocks and enhance their adaptive capacity.

CONCLUSION:

Climate change is not a distant environment phenomenon for India’s marginalised groups, it is a daily erosion of dignity, livelihood and security. For coastal fisherfolk and tribal communities, climate vulnerability is not a result of rising temperature or erratic range but of exclusion from governance, denial of rights and invisibilisation in policy frameworks.

The proposed recommendations directly address these structural drivers of marginalised while simultaneously mitigating immediate risks. Prioritising decentralized and participatory climate Governance directly counters the top-down approach, ensuring that local voice is particularly from women, small scale fishers and tribal leaders are empowered in decision making, leading to more tailor and effective response to immediate climate impacts. Strengthening and accelerating legal rights recognition, specially under the FRA tackles bureaucratic resistance and ensures community gain land and resource ownership, which is fundamental for them to lead their own adaptation strategies against immediate threats. Furthermore, integrating livelihood resilience into sectoral policies and disaster frameworks addresses the neglect of customary rights.

In essence, climate justice is not charity for the poor. It is the rebalancing of power, the correction of historical wrongs and the sustainable way forward. If India is to build a truly climate-resilient future, it must begin by listening to and empowering those who have endured the most and been heard the least

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