A New Kind of Climate Hunger: The Climate Risk India Has Yet to Recognise
Heat is reshaping diets, work and wellbeing; policy must respond
Paul Stainier: School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Manisha Shah: University of California, Berkeley
Alan Barreca: Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles
SDG 2: Zero Hunger | SDG 13: Climate Action
Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare | Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
India has made extraordinary gains in food production and rural infrastructure. Yet climate change is introducing a quieter risk that shows up in many, but not all kitchens. Hotter growing seasons are subtly reshaping what the poorest rural households are able to eat, even as national consumption averages appear stable. Diets at the top are holding; those at the bottom are hollowing out, widening nutritional inequality.
This matters because nutrition underpins every other form of resilience – health, learning, productivity and even the ability to adapt to the next shock. If extreme heat is pushing the most vulnerable into lower-calorie, lower-micronutrient diets, then India confronts a challenge that production technologies alone cannot solve. The country’s next phase of climate strategy must be as attentive to the stability of the plate as to the stability of production.
Heat is Reshaping Diets, Not Just Yields
Rural India’s food economy is tightly bound to the cycle of the growing season. And like most biological systems, it reacts non-linearly to heat. A broad middle range – from roughly 21°C to the high-30s – is warm but workable: crops grow reliably, storage holds, and households can depend on home-grown food. Within this zone, extra heat does not shift diets.
Days in the high-30s already strain crops and labour, and temperatures above the low-40s cause outright damage, not only in fields but in household diets and welfare. Insights from more than 300,000 rural households’ consumption data from the National Sample Survey – observed across 10 years of India’s growing seasons – are telling. A single day above 43°C cuts major crop output by about 1.3 percent and sharply reduces what low-income households can produce for themselves in the next year.
What follows is not a fall in average consumption but a change in its shape. Families with savings, non-farm earnings or access to credit compensate for lost production by buying more food. Those without such buffers cannot. Their diets thin out in the year after a hot growing season, creating a form of stress largely invisible in national averages. Just one day above 43°C is enough to push roughly 3.1 million people into strong caloric undernutrition and about one million into extreme undernutrition the following year, while aggregate numbers suggest stability.
This is the emerging climate economy of rural India: not widespread collapse, but sharper inequality in who can keep their diet intact when the heat rises.
Micronutrient Deprivation is Deepening
Calories capture only one dimension of diet. Rural vulnerability shows up far more sharply in micronutrients, where households already operate with narrow buffers. More than half of rural households consume less than 80 percent of recommended iron levels, and in the South and Northeast, 80–90 percent of households are undernourished even in normal years. This fragility makes diets especially sensitive to heat.
Here too, thresholds matter. When growing seasons turn unusually hot, the decline is not uniform; it is concentrated at the lower end of the distribution. Even a single day of extreme heat increases the share of households falling into strong deficiency for zinc, thiamine and niacin – nutrients essential for immunity, energy metabolism and cognitive development. Iron consumption, already chronically low, falls even further.
Heat May Also Be Raising Mortality
Extreme heat also leaves traces beyond fields and diets. It appears as a demographic signal – subtle in magnitude, but consequential for how we interpret rural welfare. National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data tied to local temperatures show that each additional day above 43°C during the growing season is associated with roughly a 0.5 percent rise in mortality among adults over 40. Mortality among younger adults moves in the same direction, though not as much.
These are small absolute numbers, but they matter for understanding the full cost of heat. When deaths rise, per-capita consumption can look deceptively stable due to shrinking household sizes. In such cases, national averages can suggest stability even as welfare deteriorates.
As India intensifies its climate response, recognising this demographic dimension is essential. Extreme heat is not only reshaping what households eat – it may be quietly reshaping who survives to eat at all.
Adaptation Occurs, but at a Hidden Cost
Rural households do not face heat passively. When a growing season turns unusually hot, they adjust – shifting effort, drawing on savings and altering how they source food. A clear pattern emerges: extreme heat pushes adults away from their own farms the following year, often to non-agricultural wage work. This movement out of agriculture is a reasonable response when fields become less reliable and cash becomes more necessary to stabilise consumption.
For those with financial buffers or access to steady non-farm work, this transition helps keep calorie intake intact. But for bottom-level households, adaptation may come with hard-to-detect costs. Depleted savings, postponed health spending, sold assets, and more precarious labour market arrangements are all ways that households might cope with their agricultural losses.
What looks like resilience in the data can be erosion in disguise. Extreme heat might not just be pushing vulnerable households into nutritional deficits; it could be forcing them into economic strategies that compromise their ability to withstand the next shock. Understanding these coping strategies is crucial for designing policies that facilitate household resilience.
Climate Adaptation Must Include Nutrition
India’s climate strategy has rightly centred on irrigation, insurance, heat-tolerant seeds and better forecasting. But as heat impacts on diets, micronutrients and livelihoods show, there are limits to an adaptation model built solely around production.
Strengthening rural market access – roads, transport, retail density, cold chains – is therefore no longer just an infrastructure priority; it is a nutrition intervention. And just as India uses anticipatory support during floods or droughts, targeted cash transfers after extreme heat can prevent families from sacrificing savings, health or children’s welfare to keep food on the table. The country already has the digital systems to deliver this support quickly and with low leakage.
The question now is whether India can shield the foundations of wellbeing as the heat rises. The opportunity is real: a climate strategy that protects production is good; but a climate strategy that protects people is transformational.
Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ working paper published in NBER (No. 34047), a revised version of which has been accepted at JAERE. Views are personal.