Roundtable: Scaling Private Investment in Climate Adaptation & Resilience in India
India is already experiencing the impacts of climate change through increasingly frequent and severe heatwaves, coastal storms and flooding, and drought. These risks are no longer distant or abstract but are material to business operations, asset performance, and investment outcomes across sectors. Additionally, by 2030, the country is expected to face an incremental cost of INR 15.5 trillion due to climate-induced damages. At the same time despite stretched domestic resources, India meets around 98 per cent of finance for adaptation domestically. With requirements for adaptation capital stock expected to reach as high as INR 72 trillion by 2030 after accounting for the country’s developmental needs and climate-induced pressures, it is clear public finance alone will not be sufficient. The private sector is not just a supplementary actor, rather a structural achieve India’s Viksit Bharat goals.
The Government of India has undertaken a range of policy initiatives, structural reforms, and regulatory measures to drive increased investment and technological innovation to help accelerate climate action. Estimates also suggest that India could mobilise up to USD 3.1 trillion in climate investment opportunities, including for adaptation and resilience, between 2018 and 2030.
Encouragingly, private sector interest in adaptation and resilience solutions is beginning to emerge, even though many A&R technologies, business models, and revenue streams remain at a nascent stage. With targeted policy support, risk‑sharing mechanisms, and clearer investment signals, there is an opportunity to redirect and crowd in finance toward resilience‑building investments. Recent tools and frameworks-developed by initiatives such as the Global Adaptation and Resilience Initiative (GARI), Standard Chartered, the Climate Bonds Initiative, and the World Bank, provide an important foundation, but their translation into bankable projects and scalable financing pipelines remains uneven.
Against this backdrop, the World Bank is convening an informal roundtable to move beyond high‑level frameworks and advance a solutions‑oriented discussion on adaptation financing. The roundtable is intended as a focused brainstorming forum to identify concrete financing pathways, risk‑mitigation instruments, and enabling actions that can help unlock private and blended finance for adaptation in India.
The conclave aims to bring together:
A. Private Companies, to assess the on‑the‑ground viability of emerging adaptation financing frameworks, identify key barriers to investment, share current business models, and articulate clear “asks” from government and multilateral development banks to enable scale‑up.
B. Think Tanks, to highlight recent research on adaptation financing, identify evidence gaps, and suggest priority areas where additional analytics could support investment readiness and policy design.
C. Government and Regulatory Bodies, to clarify the role of public policy, regulation, and incentives in enabling adaptation finance, and to reflect on how emerging frameworks can better support private sector participation.
D. Financing Institutions, to examine constraints within the current financing landscape, explore risk‑sharing and blended finance opportunities, and discuss what would make adaptation investments commercially viable at scale.