Letters in Economic Research Updates
The Resilience Dividend: Aligning Adaptation, Growth and Equity in India
Abstract
Sanjay Kumar Srivastava
India’s climate risk is compounding faster than the institutions built to manage it. The Belem Adaptation Indicators agreed at COP30, alongside India’s Third National Communication, supply the reporting architecture for resilience. What they do not supply is finance or sectoral coherence. This commentary examines the economics of that shortfall, placing agriculture at the centre of the analysis: the sector employs close to half the workforce and absorbs the largest share of climate-related loss. Its argument cuts against the grain of how budgets are written. Adaptation is not a welfare cost to be contained but a capital investment with a measurable return, and the global evidence puts that return at between two and ten rupees for every rupee committed. Treating it accordingly, by classifying adaptation as productive capital expenditure, financing climate-smart agriculture at scale, and targeting the districts where climatic exposure and pover- ty coincide, would let India shape the Global Goal on Adaptation rather than merely report against it.