Homeless in the Climate Crisis: Voices from the Frontlines
A conversation with Delhi’s homeless community on extreme weather, the right to adequate housing, and what a just climate response must look like.
What does a heatwave feel like when there is nowhere to escape the heat? What does a night of intense rain mean when your “home” is a pavement, a flyover, or a temporary shelter? And what happens when winter arrives and there is no door to close against the cold?
For Delhi’s homeless communities, climate change is not an abstract or distant crisis. It is experienced every day.
More than 300,000 people in Delhi are estimated to be homeless, many living in precarious spaces—on pavements and sidewalks, under flyovers, on bridges, outside places of worship, and in marketplaces. Extreme heat, rainfall, and cold can turn these already precarious living conditions into life-threatening ones.
As part of Climate India Week 2026, this conversation will bring community members to the centre, inviting us to listen to their experiences of surviving Delhi’s extreme weather. Hosted at a government-run homeless shelter, it will also offer an opportunity to see and reflect on the conditions in which people seek refuge, including whether existing shelter infrastructure can provide adequate protection from increasingly severe heat and other climate extremes.
The conversation will explore how climate vulnerability intersects with the denial of adequate housing, livelihoods, food, water, sanitation, healthcare, and social protection. It asks us to look beyond climate impacts alone and consider who is most exposed, who has the fewest resources to adapt, and whose voices are often missing from climate conversations.
Professionals, academics, climate practitioners, students, community organizers, and anyone interested in climate justice are invited to listen, engage, and encounter the realities of climate vulnerability from the perspective of those living it every day.
PARTNERS: Housing and Land Rights Network
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