SUMMARY

In Svalbard, the northernmost human habitation and the fastest-warming place in the world, observing polar bears provides lessons in why it’s important to safeguard the Earth’s last wild places

I almost abandoned my Arctic adventure before it even started. Friends and family heaved a sigh of relief. Many thought my decision to swerve off to Svalbard, one of the northernmost permanently inhabited places on the planet, instead of attending a conference in Oslo, was unwise. At my age (I am only 67!), careening off alone in winter on a snowmobile, looking for the most dangerous land mammal… crazy-or so they thought.

That’s not why I nearly did not go. lsfjord Radio Hotel in Spitsbergen (the old name for Svalbard), where I had planned to stay after I flew into the Arctic Circle from Oslo, was inaccessible. It had lost all its snow in the third week of April, long before it should have. There are very few roads in Svalbard for vehicles. Snowmobiles and dogsleds are the usual mode of transport but they need ice, which has been melting faster over the past few years, making parts of this archipelago unreachable. Most tourists tour the islands on cruise boats in the summer months.

Climate change has impacted the polar regions the most. In just two decades, the glaciers of Slavbard have lost about 5% of their mass, largely, it turns out, due to warmer oceans rather than rising temperatures. At roughly 310 cubic km, this is enough meltwater to raise global sea levels by roughly 0.75-0.8mm on its own.

Not so far in the future, this sea rise will adversely affect every part of the planet.

My guide asked if I was willing to go towards the open Arctic Ocean instead. The east of Svalbard is colder and wilder, with no Gulf Stream to bring warm relief. There was plenty of ice there, with massive glaciers flanking sheets of sea ice and a tad better chance of catching polar bears. There would be no comfortable hotel-we would camp out on the top of Domen Mountain. Gently, he explained that the toilet would be two walls of ice, two holes in the ground and two Styrofoam seats, 50m from the tents.

I remained undeterred though my imagination spun wildly with all that could go wrong. Packing for Arctic temperatures, which fall to minus 20 degrees Celsius with wind chill, was itself an adventure. My survival suit would keep me dry and afloat even if I slipped into an icy hole.

As I boarded the flight from Oslo to Svalbard, after a more than usually tight hug from the husband, a general anxiety crept over me. I had felt the same two months before, on my trip to the Third Pole in the Himalayas. This was a natural fight or flight response that has safeguarded humans for millennia. Too many urbanites and digital citizens have lost fear of the untamed wild. This trepidation was my protector, and should be held with respect. So I kept my fear close to me, and stayed close to my fear.

The Arctic landing was white and smooth. At a latitude of 73 degrees, it did not feel as cold as it should have on the tarmac. “It’s been a devastating year, way too warm,” said the woman who greeted us at the airport. “Most houses here are built on stilts because of the permafrost underneath. But it is melting early and unevenly, putting our homes at risk.” It was a repeat of my recent experience in Ladakh, where unprecedented rain is making traditional mud roofs cave in. In that high-altitude desert, where snow leopards roam and blue sheep graze, there is unscientific tree planting, changing age-old weather systems.

We had a stopover at the old coal mining town of Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in this Norwegian protectorate. People don’t need special visas or permits to come to Svalbard, though some new constraints are coming in, and this little town has people of more than a hundred nationalities, most of whom know each other. There is zero crime.

On a drive that afternoon along the Advent Bay, we spotted a huge walrus, flopped unmoving on the stony shore, no doubt stuffed with clams, blissfully unafraid of curious humans. Here and there, snowy reindeer nibbled peacefully at new shoots of grass, evoking memories of Christmas.

On the cragged hillocks abutting the shore, the first little auks had already arrived for the breeding season from the north-east of Iceland. Chasing these laughing, flying black-and-white birds were Arctic foxes, like Pomeranians dressed up with bushier tails. Winter-hungry, they darted swiftly among the rocks, hoping to surprise a bird. Snow buntings, Svalbard’s only songbirds, hopped around carefully, while gulls sailed boldly overhead, and eider ducks bobbed on the calm grey water. So much life thrives where humans struggle to survive.

The dinner menu offered reindeer, seal, salmon, and whale steak. Licensed hunting is allowed here. I ordered cabbage.

Day blended into night without darkening skies in this season of perpetual daylight, and soon it was time for the real adventure to the east. Getting dressed in five layers to snowmobiles in sub-zero temperatures took almost an hour the first time. Imagine what the first hunters to settle on Svalbard must have experienced, well before modern insulated clothing.

Off we went to seek the polar bear. The stop-and-go, 8-hour journey riding pillion on a snowmobile was simply exhilarating. All around us was a continent of snow, fjords and glaciers glistening in the sun, giant clouds stooping to confuse the horizon and lifting to reveal clear skies. A white wonderland dotted with the irregular browns of jagged mountains that couldn’t hold the ice. How could any life possibly survive here in this intoxicating barrenness?

“It is unlikely you will see polar bears in the two days you are here, said my guide Piet, regretfully shaking his head as my snowmobile driver Chris nodded. “Please don’t raise your expectations. Just enjoy whatever is.” Not 2 hours after landing, we had already seen so much. My heart was nearly full. So I nodded obediently, all the while praying for more.

Soon enough, we spotted some seals, sunning next to their holes. They raise their heads rhythmically and comically every few seconds to look around, ready to escape into the deep cold waters below if a polar bear were to come by for a meal. Seals need to come up for air and must always keep several open holes, free of ice, for their survival.

We then reached a ragged bird cliff, where hundreds of northern fulmars had come up from the south for the breeding season, their warm cacophony shattering the frozen silence.

We drove down the Hayesbreen glacier, which is part of the second largest glacial system in the archipelago. We stood below layered walls of ice, formed over thousands of years, clicking cameras shifting the solid silence.

Climbing on to a plateau overlooking valleys and ranges blanketed in shades of white, we stopped for a picnic lunch. Astride a snowmobile in minus 10 degrees Celsius, boiling water poured into a packet of freeze-dried beans and squash had never tasted better. The mind expanded with the belly to devour the dazzling view, infinitely fulfilled.

We finally reached the East Coast, driving dizzily fast across the frozen ice reaching the Arctic Ocean. A few startling bumps made me grateful for my yoga training as I leaned in and away from edgy slopes. Stopping to gape in wonder, we did a quick scan for polar bears.

Just then, Piet called out, “There’s something out there in the distance. One big, two small.” Could it be the mother and cubs they had seen earlier? Our binoculars disappointingly revealed three dark shapes. We needed yellowish white.

Let’s go check anyway, we decided. Piet took a last look at the ice behind as we started moving.

“I think it’s a bear,” he whispered. A magnificent male appeared as a dot on the horizon, pale yellow fur moving closer and closer across the ice. You think you know how big your first polar bear will appear, but they are even bigger-1,500 kg of muscle and blubber, nonchalantly cruising at 6km an hour.

We stayed with this animal at a safe distance for hours. We watched him dig furiously around an abandoned hut, and leave disappointed. When we checked later, the bear had pulled out a whale bone the size of a door, probably 200 years old, from the whaling era.

We decided to turn back to check out our earlier sighting. Just then, Chris shouted, “Good God, there is another bear!”

Sure enough, another powerful male in all his white glory, shuffled across the ice towards us in perfect golden light, gracing us with his incredible beauty.

Except that he was heading towards our makeshift camp. Keeping in mind laws that forbid humans to go closer than 500m to a bear, our guides expertly drove around the relentless bear, creating a barrier between his path and our safety. He seemed to understand. After a bit of head bobbing, the bear took another route.

For a moment, we stood still, mesmerised by the shifting light. Christiane Ritter, one of the first women to winter in the archipelago, describes it best in her never out of print 1938 book, A Woman in the Polar Night: “I divine the ultimate salvation before which all human reasoning dissolves into nothing.”

The sun swung low in the sky, though it would not set in this season. Reluctant as a child called back for dinner from the playground, I found myself outside the tiny tented camp, a wisp of smoke billowing out of the makeshift kitchen. Welcome home, said the East Camp team, bringing tears to my eyes. How many audacious hunters, trappers and travellers over the past 300 years, might have longed for such words when they had to set down for a rest in this forbidding land.

The crew prepared delicious hot lentils for supper, which we consumed sitting on the floor around a furnace. Soon, a stretcher was unfolded and a sleeping bag spread over. “Sweet dreams,” said Chris. “Cover your eyes. Do not step out without calling out; someone will be up watching out for bears.”

We were to set off back for Longyearbyen after another day on the coast, but the weather had other plans for us. A snowstorm set in as we were sleeping, the winds howling and the loose tent flaps tapping an uneven beat. The furnace gave up at some point, and I was grateful for the miracle of modern sleeping bags.

We hastily packed up everything after breakfast. Our camp team would dismantle the tents and the toilet after us to leave no trace behind.

The snowfall in the light, bright morning felt warm to my face. Until we got on to the snowmobiles, that is. Cold drafts whipped past my helmet and neck warmer, despite the wall of Chris in front of me. The storm enveloped us in mists that reduced visibility to zero. Hoping to outrace the weather, guided by GPS, we sped at 60kmph over glaciers older than human memory. I ignored my panic and simply surrendered to the void. Such white-outs were what I would imagine during my meditation sessions. Now that visualisation would become memory.

A couple of hours later, we were suddenly out in open fields of snow, the sky glittering and the mountains shimmering with a light perhaps found nowhere else on the planet. We stopped at lofty sculptural ice forms carved from broken glaciers, halted to gasp at frozen waterfalls, played “Spot the ptarmigan”, as the stunning black-and-white birds merged into the snow patched mountains.

Small huts dotted the landscape, made just from Siberian driftwood. Nothing decomposes in the Arctic, everything is preserved. These huts were used until recently by those with Spitsbergen Mania, as the madness that draws humans here is called. Precious stories are still shared of the many ships and men lost to this brutal environment. They seem to deter no one.

FAR-REACHING IMPACT

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The ice melt I witnessed is a major driver of global sea-level rise and other climate shifts that affect many parts of the globe, including India. Earlier, research was focused on atmospheric surface temperatures as the main contributor to the glacial melt. Yet recent evidence suggests that warming sea waters accelerate the melting of polar ice sheets much faster than scientists expected. As these hidden processes, which happen at the underside of the glaciers, have been underestimated in past reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global sea levels are now projected to rise faster and more unpredictably. Low-lying cities on India’s 11,000km coastline housing around 360 million people, could be inundated decades earlier than anticipated.

Take Mumbai, for example. By 2100, the local sea waters may rise as much as 50-100 cm. Without adaptation measures, this will wreak havoc on India’s most important commercial hub. What is of equal significance is that Arctic-driven changes in atmospheric circulation are affecting weather patterns. A recent Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology study links declining Arctic Sea ice with a westward shift and intensification of the Indian monsoon, boosting late-season rainfall over western India, and leaving central parts of the country with dry spells. Less ice in June and July in Svalbard means stronger rainfall in Mumbai or tidal flooding in Surat in September and October.

These polar disruptions will cause other structural risks in India. More than 50% of our arable land depends on rainfall, and predictable monsoon patterns.

Unseasonal drought followed by unexpected deluges can destroy crop yields. Warming seas also affect fishing and marine livelihoods. Staple fish like the Indian sardine and mackerel are moving deeper into the ocean or moving northwards in the Arabian Sea to flee warming waters. The temperature rise also affects the biological clock of many species, resulting in egg decay before hatching. Aquaculture and shrimp farming is critical for India’s seafood export revenues. Rising sea levels bring saltwater into marine estuaries, destroying the fragile ecosystem, bringing disease and die-offs.

As part of its adaptation strategy against polar ice and permafrost melt, India conducts year-round research to build predictive models for agriculture and water resilience planning at its Himadri Station within the leased facility at the international research settlement in Svalbard. Food security has been a major focus for India, and decades of progress could be reversed with the climate risks posed by the ice sheet melt far away in the Arctic.

THE LAST SURPRISE

On the final evening in Longyearbyen, I had a request: Could we see beluga whales from the bay? “Not at this time of the year,” said Piet, though I could see the small cruise boats already lined up for the summer. “But I will take a look, for you,” he said. In a minute, he uttered his first curse: “Holy s***, there’s a white beauty right there!”

And so, the belugas graced us with their hypnotic sea dance, domes cresting and sinking in the grey-blue waters against an iridescent sky.

The plankton they feed on were building up in the bay, and soon hundreds of belugas would provide unending pleasure to the thousands of tourists to arrive to shores where barely 3,000 people live.

How much tourism is too much? Back in Oslo, after unloading my winterwear and my fear, I read that the Norwegian government has recently limited the number of ships and passengers, with special rules to protect the flora and fauna of the fragile archipelago. The great north has suddenly emerged as a destination of choice for wealthy travellers. There is worry that overtourism will engulf the ecosystem.

That made me examine my own motivation and privilege. Should everyone with the means go wherever they can on the planet? In her later years, Ritter said, “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone. Then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.”

Would she say that today? Probably not. Stronger policies, laws and resolve might be needed to secure our planet’s bio resources. In my defence, I can say this for certain: my short, wild adventure of a lifetime has made me ever more committed to the conservation of our biodiversity, and to carry the stories so that more people can fall in love and rise in awe at the magnificence of our planetary home.

Insuring food for the future: The Global Seed Vault

The very first stop we made in Svalbard, even before checking into the hotel in Longyearbyen, was the Global Seed Vault, cut deep into a mountain of ice and black rock. Launched in February 2008 by the Norwegian government and managed in partnership with Crop Trust and Nordic Genetic Resource Center, it is the world’s largest secure seed storage, holding over 1.3 million seed accessions-each a unique genetic fingerprint of a crop variety-with room for millions more.

To think that the future of human food may rest within its vaults filled me with awe and gratitude. Its fac;ade rising like the prows of the cruise ships dotting the coastline, the Global Seed Vault is made of black steel that will turn red over the years, like the changing landscapes of the Arctic itself.

Spitsbergen Island in Svalbard was chosen for its low tectonic activity and permafrost. There is no small irony in the fact that the very coal once mined locally is among the forces threatening that permafrost today. This makes the preservation of seeds all the more vital: plant breeders will need access to a vast range of genetic diversity to develop new varieties suited to a warming world of more droughts and more pests.

Duplicate seeds arrive from around the world as insurance. There are roughly 1,700 gene banks globally, but many deposit extra copies at here. When political crisis struck Syria and destroyed local stores, scientists were able to reclaim their seeds from the vault and begin again. No wonder it is also called the Doomsday Vault.

Three-fourths of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species. Maize, rice and wheat account for nearly half the calories consumed by humans. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of varieties of each crop.

Before India’s Green Revolution, 100,000-200,000 varieties of rice were in circulation-though accounting for regional synonyms, scholars believe 110,000 distinct varieties were cultivated. Today, only 6,000-7,000 survive. India’s own seed vault sits at Chang La in Ladakh.

In October 2024, ICRISAT-an agricultural research institute in Hyderabad-deposited 2,950 seeds of 56 species, including pearl millet, sorghum and 28 wild relatives of the peanut, nine of which were new to the vault. It was part of a deposit of 30,000 new samples from 23 institutions in 21 countries.

Even in their dormant state, seeds are not truly inert. Pathogenic microorganisms-microbes and fungi-travel with them, and their microbiome continues to interact with its environment despite the -18° Celsius temperature in the vault. Research is underway to understand the significance and risks of these organisms, which will be unleashed alongside the seeds when they are finally needed.

The exchange of seeds has long been central to community farming, but industrial agriculture shifted toward ownership and patenting. Norwegian law prohibits the storing of genetically modified seeds, but some environmentalists worry that the vault could serve the interests of global elites in a future crisis.

Yet farmers world over have joined the project with open hearts. In 2017, Peruvian farmers deposited their sacred potato seeds, singing and dancing as they said farewell to their “endangered children.” Art soon followed-and today, an abandoned coal mine hosts the Svalbard Seed Cultures Ark. Both art and seeds continue to come to these icy shores as messages of hope and trust.

It is tiger time in India. All over the country, across at least 25 of the 58 tiger reserves, millions of people across economic classes and geographies are on the move despite the summer heat. Piling into jeeps, fancy SUVs, or forest department buses, and armed with mobile phones, point and click cameras or dangerously long lenses, they must jostle for just the right angle while hushing little children and girding for the unexpected bumps in the jungle. All to catch a glimpse of arguably the world’s most striking predator, globally seen almost nowhere else in the wild. When safari goers finally spot a stripe, the mood of the entire vehicle changes. People get a recognisable “tiger face”, a mixture of awe, delight and smugness. Passersby just know, and experience FOMO in turn.

We were particularly lucky recently in the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in Maharashtra, when a two-day trip led us to 10 individual tigers, including the famous Junabai with her four young cubs.

The article was first published in The Indian Express 

It’s a search that must extend higher into the peaks, as lynxes, blue sheep and the Shaan or ghost of the mountains battle an unseasonably warm March.

Heated vests, gloves and socks. Trapper hat, puffer jacket and thermals.

I had packed for the harshest winter Ladakh might spring on me in March, which is typically one of the coldest months of the year — and one of the best times to catch the ghost of the mountains, the Shaan or snow leopard, the main attraction in my journey to the top of the world.

As it turned out, I could have packed lighter. “In my lifetime, I have not seen a March as warm as this,” said 62-year-old Tsering Dolker, sitting in a sunny courtyard in the union territory’s capital city of Leh. “And yet, it is good to not wear heavy winter clothes,” she added with a smile, as she guided younger colleagues weaving a woollen rug.

by Tanya Kak

For at least two decades, one question has structured much of how philanthropy and the social innovation ecosystem think about change: Can it scale? The question appears in grant applications, accelerator programs, and strategy documents. It makes sense: If a solution works for one community, surely the ethical imperative is to help many more? In a world of vast unmet needs, scale promises efficiency, reach, and speed.

Yet something curious has happened as this logic has spread. Increasingly, promising ideas, organizations, and forms of collective action are all filtered through the same lens, held to the same standard. If it cannot scale, why would it be worth investing in?

This assumption has reshaped the architecture of civil society. It has influenced what kinds of organizations get funded, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and even how social problems themselves are defined. But as geopolitical instability grows, inequality deepens, and social systems fracture in new ways—as the world, in short, ceases to behave like a scalable system—it is time to ask the uncomfortable question: Must all social innovation be designed to scale? Where does “scale thinking” make sense, and where must we re-imagine our way of thinking about progress and innovation?

When Scale Is the Only Default Logic

Scale has become such a powerful organizing idea in philanthropy and development because, at its core, scale thinking is built around growth: the idea that a successful system is one that can reach far more people without a proportional increase in resources. In this framing, the most valuable solutions are those that can expand rapidly while maintaining efficiency. Measurement therefore becomes inseparable from design. If growth is the goal, the ability to demonstrate growth, through metrics such as users reached, households served, hectares restored, or units delivered, becomes central to how value is assessed.

This orientation toward scale has deep roots in development practice. Over the past three decades, governments and development institutions have increasingly searched for replicable models that can be transferred across geographies. Microfinance is one of the most cited examples. What began as locally embedded lending groups evolved into large-scale financial systems serving millions of clients worldwide, supported by standardized metrics such as repayment rates and borrower numbers.

These proof points have guided many of the trends that we now see around scale thinking in the social sector. If an intervention works in one place, the next question quickly becomes whether it can be replicated elsewhere at scale.

Yet researchers studying social innovation suggest that impact spreads through multiple pathways. They distinguish between scaling out (replication across sites), scaling up (influencing policies and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting relationships, cultural norms, and local practices). Other scholars describe scaling wide, where ideas spread through decentralized networks rather than a single expanding organization.

Each pathway has its own role to play. However, operational demands of scale thinking require one to think about some of the building blocks consistently: replicability, standardization, and measurable outputs. The implication is often that complex social processes may need to be simplified into stable models that can travel across contexts, often referred to as “datafication of civil society” by sociologists.

In practice, this can shape which kinds of solutions are prioritized, which organizations receive support, and how social problems themselves come to be defined.

Community organizing, collective stewardship, and cultural shifts rarely translate into easily tracked metrics. For example, take the case of watershed restoration. Building check dams and recharge structures can scale quickly across districts and produce impressive numbers, such as hectares treated and structures built. But whether those gains last often depends on something less visible: local agreements about groundwater use, crop choices in dry years, or who decides when a borewell goes deeper. These decisions are negotiated through trust, local institutions, and leadership within communities. Often harder to count, but they often determine whether resilience endures.

The question, then, is what do we stand to lose if scale thinking becomes the predominant lens of looking at social change? When scalability matters, what kinds of change can it meaningfully carry? What might progress look like if impact were judged not only by how far a solution travels, but also by how well it strengthens the systems around it: the communities, ecosystems, and institutions that allow change to endure?

A World That No Longer Behaves Like a Scalable System

The limits of scale thinking are becoming clearer as the world itself becomes less predictable. Climate volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and economic shocks are producing systems that behave less like stable machines and more like living ecosystems. In such conditions, solutions designed once and replicated everywhere can quickly reach their limits. What communities need is the capacity to adapt: to learn, reorganize, and respond as circumstances change.

Societies rarely transform through replication alone. Change more often emerges from ecosystems of actors, relationships, and institutions that learn, negotiate, and adapt within specific places. When innovation begins with the realities of people and landscapes, rather than with the assumption that solutions must scale, different possibilities come into view.

For philanthropy, the task may not be to simply support what works at scale, but to cultivate the conditions in which many forms of change can take root. One way to think about this is through navigation. In uncertain waters, ships matter. But ships alone cannot chart the course. They rely on lighthouses that illuminate shifting terrain and bridges that connect otherwise isolated efforts. Civil society increasingly needs this kind of infrastructure: institutions that help actors see the landscape clearly and work together across it. Yet philanthropy still tends to fund the ships (the organizations delivering visible programs) while the quieter systems that help the fleet navigate together remain underbuilt.

What Philanthropy Can Do Differently

1. Fund the bridges. Philanthropy can invest more deliberately in social infrastructure: convening platforms, shared governance systems, and knowledge networks that allow many actors to collaborate. The Ecological Restoration Alliance, for instance, brings together restoration practitioners, scientists, and community organizations to develop shared protocols and learning systems across landscapes. Rather than scaling a single organization, the alliance strengthens the field’s ability to act collectively.
2. Back technology that communities steward. Digital platforms can scale while still centering community agency. The local disaster mapping effort in Indonesia, which builds on participatory disaster-mapping approaches pioneered by platforms like PetaBencana, enables citizens to report hazards in real time and contribute to open disaster maps used by communities and governments. The technology works precisely because it is co-designed with users and embedded in local response systems rather than imposed from above.
3. Invest in the commons. Shared resources such as open data systems, restoration protocols, training networks, and collaborative tools often act as the soil from which innovation grows. One example is CoRE Stack, developed by the Commons Tech Foundation, which provides open, modular digital infrastructure designed specifically for community-led organizations. Rather than building proprietary platforms, CoRE Stack focuses on shared digital public goods, identity systems, registries, consent layers, and governance protocols that many actors can adapt for their own contexts. Funding such commons-based infrastructure enables diverse organizations to collaborate and innovate without each having to build their own technology from scratch.
4. Build the missing middle. Between grassroots organizations and large global institutions sits a fragile but critical layer of intermediaries: regional networks, knowledge hubs, and field-building organizations that translate ideas across contexts. These actors mentor emerging groups, document learning, and maintain collaboration across ecosystems of practice. For example, the Consortium for Agroecological Transformation exemplifies this approach by supporting networks of farmers, researchers, and grassroots organizations to transition agricultural landscapes toward agroecology.

Looking Beyond Scale

Scale thinking has its place. Some challenges, such as mass vaccination campaigns, disaster early-warning systems, or digital infrastructure for financial inclusion, depend on solutions that can move rapidly across vast populations.

But many of the transformations we now seek from restoring degraded landscapes to rebuilding social trust do not travel in quite the same way. They are shaped slowly on the ground: through experiments that falter before they succeed, through neighbors learning how to respond together in moments of stress, and through local civil society organizations that stay present long after the urgency of a crisis fades. Over time, these everyday negotiations over water, livelihoods, risk, and responsibility begin to form something more durable. Because when crises arrive, systems rarely rise to the occasion overnight; they rise to the level of readiness that has quietly been built in ordinary times, through relationships, trust, and shared norms.

In a world defined by complexity and uncertainty, the task ahead may lie as much in cultivating these enabling conditions as in expanding solutions themselves—strengthening the lighthouses and bridges that help the whole fleet find its way.

First Published in the SSIR 

Whether in education, healthcare, skill building, agriculture or any other sector, there are severe climate adjacencies that will have to be addressed urgently. Philanthropy can provide both the high-risk capital and the patient capital needed to rethink the future.

Can you recall when you last sent a cheque to organisations for disaster relief? If this question were put up 20 years ago, many readers might have responded positively. Unfortunately, since then, we have been witnessing “disaster fatigue” in the country. This is not surprising, yet it is alarming. Just when disasters have become concurrent and continuous throughout the year, people are withdrawing their generosity.

At my philanthropic foundation, we recently released a report, commissioned with Dalberg, titled ‘Resilience — Moving beyond surviving climate disasters to supporting communities to thrive’. We hope it will help shift the mental model in India towards anticipatory action and funding. Climate change has arrived  in all our lives, affecting vulnerable communities in particular.

By Tanya Kak, Portfolio Lead – Climate & Environment 

Picture a mangrove at low tide, its roots holding the shoreline together, sifting silt, breaking waves, and making a home for life that most of us will never see. From a distance, it reads as one green band on the horizon; up close, it is an unruly architecture of roots and relationships, constantly adjusting, failing, and regrowing.

In this moment of cascading climate shocks, adaptation looks more like a mangrove than a sea wall built out of concrete: nurturing the capacities, ties, and institutions that allow people and places to bend without breaking. And while communities have always been adapting, adaptation has finally taken center stage in climate politics and philanthropy, in COP communiqués and high‑level dialogues, in the Adaptation Gap Report, and in the rise of dedicated adaptation and resilience funds. Adaptation finance has grown to an estimated $60–70 billion annually, and overall climate flows climb into the trillions, but developing countries will still need well over $300 billion a year for adaptation by the mid‑2030s. Goals to double adaptation finance by 2025 have already slipped out of reach, even as losses mount and the costs of delay increase.

Hazards are accelerating faster than our ability to rearrange exposure and build capacity. And the language of adaptation finance can feel weightless compared to the lived realities that already shape people’s days: who walks further for water, who can afford to stay indoors during a heatwave, who has the savings or networks to recover after a flood. Does adaptation risk becoming a new label for old habits? How can we prevent it from becoming just a category in a portfolio, a pillar in a theory of change, and a theme for convenings?

In short, what would it mean to use the lived fabric of adaptation to reorient strategy for those working at the intersection of climate, development, and social change? What are the social conditions that make some households absorb climate shocks while others break under their weight?

Adaptation comes down to one deceptively simple idea: climate risk is not just about the hazard, it’s about who is exposed to it and what capacities they can draw upon in responding to it. In this sense, there are four interlocking categories of adaptation required:

1. Hazards: heatwaves, floods, cyclones, drought, sea-level rise, and so on.
2. Exposure: where people and assets sit in relation to those hazards.
3. Capacity: the financial, social, institutional, and service systems that help people respond to their exposure to risk.
4. Institutions and rules: land rights, planning norms, governance, and budgets that shape all three.

For example, a week of extreme heat creates entirely different realities depending on how these categories overlap. In a city where outdoor workers labor in unshaded streets during a heatwave (hazard), informal homes trap heat (exposure), overstretched clinics struggle (capacity), while Heat Action Plans (HAPs) represent a policy response (“Institutions and Rules”): in cities with better shade, labor protections, early warnings, and primary health services, the same hazard event will be far less deadly.

The core proposition, then, is that adaptation is less about shrinking the hazard map than redrawing the exposure and capacity maps: moving people and assets out of harm’s way where possible, and thickening the buffers that absorb shocks where that is not possible. Once the problem is seen this way, the supposed trade‑off between “development” and “climate” begins to dissolve. Safe housing, decent work, clean water, and inclusive governance are simultaneously development gains and adaptation investments.

At Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, the key learning questions are: First, how do we see and act on risk as a function of exposure and capacity, not just hazard? Second, how do we move from reactive coping (selling assets, withdrawing children from school, migrating under duress) to proactive, collective adaptation? Third, how do we strengthen social, ecological, and institutional systems so that adaptation becomes muscle memory, part of how societies function, rather than a string of standalone projects?

Beneath the generic headlines, recent research on adaptation and vulnerability throws up some counterintuitive, even uncomfortable insights that push us to ask hard questions about resilience and adaptation:

1. Shelter doesn’t mean “safety.”

Heat policy often imagines danger as something you step out into: sun‑baked streets, work sites, agricultural fields. Yet low‑income tin‑roof or poorly ventilated housing across South Asia and African cities often show indoor temperatures regularly exceeding already extreme outdoor heat, especially at night. For older adults, children, people with chronic illness, and women whose work and care roles keep them at home, “taking shelter” can mean living inside a slow oven, rather than escaping one.

Are adaptation strategies designed around actual exposure patterns, or around assumptions that only make sense if you already have a cool, safe home to retreat to?

2. “Coping” can undermine resilience.

Households don’t respond passively to floods, droughts, or heat, but by doing everything they can: borrowing at high interest, selling livestock or tools, reducing meals, moving children out of school, or sending one family member on risky migration. Research on climate shocks and poverty shows, however, that survival under constraint can often erode future earning power, health, and bargaining strength. This means that, in aggregate, what can be misread as “adaptive capacity,” is actually people trading away long‑term security to get through the season.

When we celebrate resilience, are we recognizing people’s agency or overlooking the structural conditions that leave them with only harmful forms of adaptation available?

3. Maladaption

Classic adaptation responses (sea walls, embankments, air conditioning, irrigation canals) can reduce immediate exposure while creating new dependencies and blind spots. Hard coastal defenses, for example, can undermine mangrove ecosystems that would otherwise provide flexible protection, while energy‑intensive cooling strategies can entrench fossil‑heavy grids.

There is a growing literature on “maladaptation,” interventions that only shift risk in time by postponing problems or space, protecting one area while increasing risk elsewhere. The critical question, therefore, is not simply whether infrastructure reduces losses in one place or time but who, elsewhere or later, must live with the new risks it creates?

Adaptation as Social Infrastructure

Adaptation is not a catalog of climate fixes; it’s a social project about housing, labor, debt, care, and voice. It’s about who has room to choose how they adapt, and who is adapting because there was never really a choice at all. As a result, the most durable forms of adaptation often look less like projects and more like infrastructures of relationship and practice that hold under pressure, or social infrastructure: the networks, norms, and institutions that determine whether people face climate shocks alone or together.

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of social infrastructure:

1. Relational: self‑help groups, cooperatives, neighborhood committees, migrant associations, and informal mutual aid systems. These structures carry information, coordinate evacuations, pool savings, and make it possible to absorb and share risk. 

   For example, through its “mycelium” approach, Asar, a network weaver in India, builds networks across local governments, civil society, communities, and experts. One of their initiatives, Conference of Panchayats (CoP), brings together village panchayats, community-based organizations, SHGs and local governments. In Jharkhand and Maharashtra, CoPs have convened hundreds of Gram Panchayat representatives and community leaders to share lived climate risk, local solutions, and jointly plan adaptation strategies.

2. Cognitive and cultural: local knowledge of landscapes, seasonal patterns, safe routes, and repair skills; shared stories about what has worked in past crises; norms around reciprocity and care. This is the tacit “software” that allows communities to improvise effectively. 

   For example, in the hills of the Nilgiris in India, the Keystone Foundation has for decades worked as a custodian of Indigenous knowledge systems. Through its People & Nature Collectives program, Keystone archives oral histories, ecological memory, traditional land-use practices, foraging knowledge, food cultures, and seasonal calendars—preserving “community intelligence” that otherwise risks vanishing.

3. Institutional: local governments, frontline bureaucracies, public health and education systems, and civic spaces that are capable of listening, deciding, and acting under uncertainty. Their behavior in a crisis often matters as much as physical defenses. 

   For example, Jan Sahas (India) works at the intersection of labor rights, migration governance, and social protection— all critical levers in climate-affected regions where heat stress and climate-linked precarity are reshaping labor markets. Through secure mobility corridors, legal aid, and worker-protection systems for millions of migrant and informal workers, Jan Sahas strengthens the very institutions that determine whether workers can adapt without slipping deeper into vulnerability.

When these infrastructures are thick and healthy, communities can adapt in ways that are more equitable, anticipatory, and sustainable. When they are thin or frayed, even well‑designed technical interventions struggle to land. A flood barrier is only as useful as the governance that decides who can live behind it, the warning systems that signal when it might fail, and the social networks that determine who is helped first.

Treating adaptation as a single new funding silo misses the point, because social infrastructure is as varied as human society. The central question is not “how many adaptation projects are in the portfolio?” but “how strong is the social infrastructure that will carry people through the next decade of shocks?”

A Three‑Dimensional Shift

If adaptation is to live up to its current billing, we must think along three dimensions.

1. Political, not just technical.
Resilience is a political question about representation and control, not a neutral outcome of technology deployment. Adaptation is often framed as an engineering problem: build sea walls, launch early warning systems, pilot drought‑tolerant crops. These efforts matter, but they remain brittle if divorced from power. Real adaptation demands that those most affected are not merely consulted but centered in decision‑making.

2. Development protection, not a separate track.
For many communities, adaptation is synonymous with preserving hard‑won development gains. When rains fail, or floods surge, schools close, health systems buckle, food prices spike, and housing becomes precarious. Well‑designed adaptation investments function as a form of development insurance: they keep children in school, water systems running, clinics open, and families housed despite climate shocks. Treating adaptation and development as separate silos ignores this interdependence. It also risks double-counting: labelling essential social spending as “climate” without changing its design to address risk over time.

3. Long‑term, not project‑bounded.
True resilience is not built in two‑year cycles with pilot‑phase budgets and pre‑set exit strategies. Institutions that learn, infrastructure that is maintained, and communities that trust the systems around them all take time to grow. Short grants and discrete projects can spark innovation, but they rarely sustain it. Adaptation requires persistent, patient investment: in planning and maintenance, in local leadership, in the capacity to monitor, evaluate, and iterate under changing conditions.

Adaptation Ambitions: Reimagined

Taken together, these three shifts suggest that the heart of adaptation lies less in the novelty of interventions and more in the durability and fairness of the systems in which they are embedded.

The current surge of interest in adaptation offers a rare chance to reset the field’s ambitions. Rather than aspiring to “climate‑proof” societies (an impossibility in a world already transformed), it invites a more grounded goal: to cultivate social infrastructures that allow people to navigate uncertainty with agency, solidarity, and some measure of security.

This is quieter than many slogans, but also more radical. It asks for institutions that are willing to share power, not just funds; for metrics that can hold complexity, not just count outputs; and for strategies that honor the improvisations communities are already making, instead of treating them as footnotes to formal plans.

First Published in Stanford Social Innovation Review 

Almost every morning, from November to February, we can expect magic to happen outside our bedroom window in Koramangala, a leafy suburb in Bengaluru. A male Asian paradise flycatcher, with twin white ribbons in his tail, alights on the lagerstroemia tree branch, chirps out its arrival, and swings into a preening routine. Occasionally diving delicately and deftly into the pool beyond, he then returns to clean his feathers, black head ducking and turning, feathers shivering and satin tail dancing. This bird can lure the husband away from his desk, no matter how urgent the email. Yes, magic does manifest in this season.

Such enchantment might be the gateway to a new reconnect. People want to disconnect from digital devices, but we need something to connect back to. We are so connected to our machines and so disconnected from our people.

A few generations ago, most of our ancestors were in professions relating to the soil, or to the trade of things grown in the soil. Their senses had to be sharp to assess the real world around them — the hiss of a snake, the sawing of a leopard, the screech of a raptor. If you didn’t sense these, you could lose crops, or cattle or worse. You had to know how the wind turns, or the tide; how the rain falls, or if the earth would be scorched.

Few readers would be able to tune in to nature any more. Our ancient instincts are dulled, though other skills have been honed. So, if we want to journey back to the future, to recover what we have lost, we need to start like babies.

Escape into Nature
We need to see everything with fresh eyes. Personally, I started on birding when I was in a postpartum low. Pacing the terrace of my parent’s Pune house in the mornings, to get some exercise and fresh air, while the babies were with the grandparents, I inadvertently started noticing splashes of colour flitting between the trees. The colours had names like coppersmith barbet and purple-rumped sunbird and ashy prinia.

Slowly but surely, the birds whistled and screeched and chirped me out of my shrunken self into the dense tree canopy below and the vast sky above. Soaring Brahminy kites and shikras felt like a stirring hope, the raucous parakeets heralded a bustle outside my own mental life, and I started to emerge again.

Ihave never forgotten that lesson, and to this day, I escape into nature, wherever I can find it, to lose myself, to find myself, to recalibrate, to re-energise, and to feel free. To reconnect. Everyone can do it. It doesn’t cost anything. In most places across the country, if you are still for 10 minutes, you might catch some bird sound or the other. In India, so far, nature is everywhere.

Being, just being in nature is shown to restore attention, and can put you in a flow, beyond time, beyond weariness.

Little by little, observing nonhuman forms of life, we can sharpen our eyesight, hearing, sense of smell. Birdwatchers are known to even feel birds behind their backs. Such are the many possibilities outside the realms of our discovered lives, our rinse and repeat routines. Who knows how such skills might help us in the uncertain times ahead?

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” said William Shakespeare.

Often misquoted, the bard warns us through this line spoken by Ulysses that humans are ever attracted to the new, the shining object, forgetting the gold in the old, and in that we are the same, it is our common failing, our nature. Yet, read another way, it could easily mean that it is only by immersing in nature, in the wild, that we sense our deepest interdependencies, our complex connections. In 2026, read either way, it seems like wise counsel. Let’s reconnect to magic!

First published in The Economic Times