Mumbai Climate Change Rainfall: Mumbai’s recent deluge reflects a changing monsoon shaped by climate change as much as El Niño. Experts say warming oceans and a hotter atmosphere are driving fewer rainy days but far more intense downpours, exposing the city’s ageing drainage systems and growing vulnerability to urban flooding.

For most of June, the story of India’s monsoon was one of delay and deficit. A strengthening El Niño in the Pacific was pushing the Southwest Monsoon back, and by the end of the month the country was staring at a 40 percent rainfall shortfall. Then, within days, the sky flipped. As the monsoon shifted into an active phase, Mumbai and the rest of India’s west coast were hit by rain so intense that the national deficit collapsed from 40 percent to 20 percent in less than a week, as of July 6.

The whiplash has revived a debate among climate scientists that goes beyond this one season: it is no longer only about how much rain a city gets, but how that rain arrives.

A new briefing from Climate Trends lays out the case that a warmer atmosphere and rapidly heating oceans are loading the air with more moisture than before, which means fewer rainy days overall but far more violent bursts when the rain does come. El Niño, in this reading, still controls the timing and broad strength of the monsoon — but climate change is increasingly writing its character, turning downpours shorter, sharper, and more likely to overwhelm drains built for a gentler era.

Mumbai Climate Change Rainfall Intensifies Monsoon Extremes

Mumbai’s own numbers make the point. In the first seven days of July alone, the city saw four separate spells of triple-digit rainfall. The Colaba observatory logged 791 mm between July 1 and 7 — more than its entire climatological average for the whole month of 768.5 mm. Santa Cruz recorded 879 mm in the same window, brushing up against its monthly normal of 919.9 mm.

Mahesh Palawat, Vice President of Meteorology and Climate Change at Skymet Weather, pointed to a pile-up of weather systems as the immediate trigger. “Monsoon is presently in an active phase, with several weather systems prevailing across the country,” he said, noting a depression over Odisha and a cyclonic circulation over Maharashtra keeping both arms of the monsoon active, while continuous moisture from the Arabian Sea kept regenerating cloud cover over the state.

Dr Raghu Murtugudde, Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland and a retired professor at IIT-Bombay, went further, arguing that the two forces driving this monsoon can no longer be pulled apart. “El Niño just cannot be separated from global warming anymore,” he said, describing how both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal were firing at once, feeding moisture into the core monsoon zone that eventually rides the Western Ghats and dumps over Mumbai.

Rewriting the Monsoon’s Rulebook

Palawat said the shift is structural, not a one-off. Weather systems that form in the Bay of Bengal, he explained, have started tracking west instead of northwest, while the Arabian Sea’s record warming has added extra moisture to the mix, keeping clouds regenerating for days on end wherever a weather system parks itself.

Dr K J Ramesh, former Director General of the India Meteorological Department, framed it as a break from the monsoon India used to know. “We know that the character of the monsoon has changed forever due to global warming,” he said. “Rains will be in the form of short duration and high intensity, whether there is an El Niño or no El Niño.” He pointed to Rajasthan, Gujarat and West Madhya Pradesh, where Western Disturbances alone can no longer explain the volume of rain now falling — an added moisture feed from the Arabian Sea, he said, has changed the pattern across the region.

Research cited in the briefing backs this up on a larger scale: the Middle East has been warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the inhabited world, and that heating has been linked to nearly half — 46 percent — of the intensified rainfall over Northwest India and Pakistan between 1979 and 2022, by pushing moisture northward out of the Arabian Sea.

The Long-term Drift

Zoom out from any single storm and the trend holds. Comparing 1981–2000 with 2001–2024, average monsoon rainfall has climbed by nearly 15 percent in Mumbai and 23 percent in Pune, according to data from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

Looking ahead, a separate report — Indian Coastal Region: Climate Projections 2021–2040 — suggests suburban Mumbai and parts of coastal Maharashtra and Gujarat should expect almost an additional week of heavy rain during the Southwest Monsoon in the coming years, alongside a projected 18 percent rise in the region’s already-massive 1,749 mm monsoon baseline. The same projections point to rising temperatures across the board, including a 1.3°C increase in both summer wet-bulb and winter minimum temperatures.

When Rain meets a City That isn’t Ready

Climate change, though, is only half the story of why Mumbai floods. The briefing frames urban flooding as a climate-plus-exposure problem — extreme rainfall colliding with a city whose drains, floodplains and green cover haven’t kept pace.

Ramesh was blunt about what that means on the ground. “It is no longer a matter of warnings anymore as substantial warnings have been issued well in time. It is now a preparedness and response issue,” he said, calling for full desilting of drains ahead of every monsoon and blaming unchecked concretisation for leaving trees with no room for their roots to breathe.

Dr Vishwas Chitale, a Fellow at CEEW, described the immediate toll of the past week’s rain — an orange alert in Mumbai and a red alert in Pune, both signalling rainfall heavy enough to disrupt daily life. He pointed to early warning systems and structured flood-resilience plans, like the one CEEW helped develop with the Thane Municipal Corporation, as the kind of groundwork cities now need. “We need to come out with some practical solutions on the ground to be able to manage urban flooding better,” he said.

Aarti Khosla, Director of Climate Trends, put the challenge in starker terms: extreme rainfall is no longer a possibility to plan around but a near-certainty to plan for. “The question is no longer whether extreme rainfall events will occur, but whether our cities are prepared to withstand them,” she said, calling for climate-resilient drainage, nature-based flood defences and urban planning that treats risk as a starting assumption rather than an afterthought.

The briefing’s broader point is a simple one: urban flooding happens when saturated drainage meets any of several triggers — torrential rain, storm surge, sea-level rise, groundwater seepage, or simply a city with too little permeable ground left to absorb water. Global warming is intensifying the rainfall trigger, and dense, paved-over cities are amplifying what happens next.

As one line from the briefing puts it, cities designed for yesterday’s climate are struggling to cope with today’s extremes — and, if the projections hold, tomorrow’s will demand even more.

Up to 12 million Indian livelihoods are at risk from the West Asia crisis — Kerala alone accounts for 1.5 to 2 million of them. In the state most built on Gulf money, the jobs coming next don’t match the jobs going away. India’s most literate state is testing whether reskilling, entrepreneurship support and a reimagined green economy can catch its returning workers before they fall through.

When Cinil, who grew up in the hill district of Idukki, boarded his flight home from the Gulf earlier this year, no one had handed him a termination letter. He read the signs instead. For years he had worked in automobile advertising, chasing campaigns for car dealerships across the region — steady, unglamorous work that had financed a life back in Kerala. Then the campaigns got smaller. Clients cut budgets. Contracts that used to renew themselves simply stopped renewing. As the West Asia crisis deepened around him, Cinil made a calculation that hundreds of thousands of Keralites are now quietly making too: better to leave on your own terms than wait to be pushed.

Kerala Gulf Migrants Face an Uncertain Future

For others, there was no such choice to make. “Around 300 to 350 people lost their jobs in a single company in the hospitality sector,” says Baheej, from Kozhikode, a coastal district in Kerala, who has worked in the Gulf for many years. “That means 300 to 350 families were pushed into uncertainty almost overnight.” As tourist arrivals and travel activity declined amid the ongoing crisis, hospitality workers were among the first to feel it. Businesses cut costs to survive, and layoffs followed.

Lijesh’s story, from Malappuram, is a quieter kind of uncertainty. A driver, he has been sent home by his employer on a month of forced leave. He hasn’t told his own family that the leave is compulsory — his two daughters, both still in school, don’t know. “There is a lot of uncertainty,” he tells EdPublica.

Even those still employed are living with a different kind of strain. Workers in oil and gas facilities, particularly refineries, worry that escalating tensions could put critical energy infrastructure at risk. For many, simply reporting to work has become a source of anxiety.

“The ongoing West Asia crisis has affected almost every industry to varying degrees. However, the sectors most significantly impacted in terms of employment and business continuity are Oil & Gas, Construction, Hospitality, Facility Management, Aviation, Logistics, Manufacturing, Shipping and related service industries. The greatest challenges are supply chain disruptions, rising energy costs, project delays and reduced business activity,” said Suresh Kumar Madhusudhanan, a Mumbai-based veteran of the global human resource industry and Managing Director of Seagull International, to EdPublica.

Yet the picture isn’t uniformly bleak — at least not yet, and not for everyone. Net remittances from the region to India rose to $16 billion this April, the second month of the conflict, up 70% over the same period last year, according to data presented by the Union Finance Ministry in its latest report. Cinil’s story and Baheej’s exist alongside that number, not despite it: money is still flowing home even as jobs disappear, a lag that officials and economists are watching closely for signs of how long it can hold.

What Happens to Kerala?

For more than five decades, migration to the Gulf has shaped Kerala’s economy. In districts such as Malappuram — Lijesh’s home district — Kozhikode, where Baheej is from, and Thrissur, remittances have financed homes, education, healthcare and small businesses, woven into the fabric of everyday life rather than sitting apart from it. Idukki, where Cinil is from, has historically sent far fewer workers to the Gulf than the state’s traditional migration belt along the coast — a sign that the crisis’s reach is not confined to the districts usually associated with it.

According to the Kerala Migration Survey (KMS) 2023, the state received ₹2.17 lakh crore in inward remittances that year, with 80.5% of its emigrants living in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

A new study by IPE Global, an international development consultancy, puts a number on the exposure this creates. The West Asia crisis could put 10 to 12 million livelihoods across India at risk, the report estimates. Kerala alone accounts for 1.5 to 2 million of them — behind Uttar Pradesh (3.5 to 4 million) and Bihar (2 to 2.5 million), but still among the states most exposed. (The report’s estimates are built from a triangulated synthesis of migration and remittance data from the Ministry of External Affairs and the RBI, cross-referenced with state-wise sectoral employment patterns, rather than new primary surveys — a methodology the authors say reflects genuine uncertainty in how the crisis will actually unfold.)

“The movement of migrants has always remained relatively steady. Every year, around 2.5 to 3 lakh Keralites migrate to GCC countries, while nearly 1.5 lakh return. We saw similar situations during the 1990 Gulf War, the 2008 global financial crisis, the return of workers from Saudi Arabia following labour reforms in 2013, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our system is seasoned and proven to manage such situations,” said Ajith Kolassery, former CEO of Norka Roots, the Kerala government agency tasked with the welfare and rehabilitation of the state’s Non-Resident Keralites.

“Kerala’s heavy dependence on the Gulf makes it particularly vulnerable. A prolonged West Asia crisis could reduce overseas jobs, cut remittances and bring more expatriates back home, putting additional pressure on the state’s economy. Kerala must respond by diversifying overseas employment, strengthening skills, creating more jobs at home and promoting entrepreneurship,” Madhusudhanan said.

The Green Transition Offers Hope

The IPE Global report argues that the crisis presents an opening to accelerate India’s green transition — and that the money to do it largely already exists inside the government’s own scheme architecture. By converging existing programmes such as PM-KUSUM (India’s mega solar initiative that turns farmers from energy consumers into energy producers by subsidizing solar pumps and rural solar power plants), the National Green Hydrogen Mission, Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes and the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, the report estimates India could unlock USD 42–53 billion (₹4–5 lakh crore) without new outlay.

If implemented effectively, the report projects these initiatives could generate 35 million green jobs by 2047 and contribute to a USD 15 trillion green economy by 2070, spread across agriculture, renewable energy and industry:

• Agriculture: Reframing PM-KUSUM as a “Farmer-as-Energy-Producer” programme — letting farmers sell surplus solar power back to the grid — could create 15 lakh (1.5 million) jobs on its own, add 50,000 MW of agri-solar capacity, raise farmers’ annual incomes by ₹25,000 to ₹40,000, and cut roughly 70 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. The agriculture sector as a whole is projected to generate 6 to 7 million jobs.
• Energy: Hitting India’s 500 GW renewable energy target could generate 3.4 million jobs, while the National Green Hydrogen Mission — backed by up to ₹8 lakh crore in mobilised investment — could add another 1.5 to 2 million, for 5 to 8 million jobs sector-wide.
• Industry: A proposed National Green Steel Mission, decarbonising India’s 140-million-tonne steel sector, could help preserve the country’s USD 8 billion steel export market from EU carbon border tariffs (CBAM) while avoiding 55 million tonnes of CO2e annually. Alongside a Green Transformation Mission for India’s 63 million MSMEs, the industrial sector’s job potential runs past 20 million.

Abinash Mohanty, Head of the Climate Change and Sustainability Practice at IPE Global and the study’s lead author, frames the numbers starkly: with 85% of India’s crude oil imported and 10 to 12 million livelihoods exposed to a single geopolitical shock, he says, “the fragility is real. But so is the opportunity.”

The scale is real too — but so is the catch. The jobs the report says are coming are not, for the most part, the jobs currently being lost.

The Jobs Being Lost Are Not the Jobs Being Created

The workers most vulnerable to the current crisis are largely construction workers, hospitality staff, drivers and domestic workers employed across the Gulf. The jobs driving India’s green transition require a very different skill set.

Solar installation, battery manufacturing, power systems, renewable supply chains and green hydrogen production demand technical qualifications that many returning Gulf migrants have never had the chance to acquire.

Green hydrogen illustrates the gap sharply. The report estimates the sector could create 1.5 to 2 million jobs, but these roles require expertise in electrochemistry, fuel cell technology and industrial-scale systems management. For someone who has spent years working in a hotel, on a construction site or in facility management, moving directly into these sectors is unlikely without substantial reskilling.

A Significant Geographic Mismatch

The mismatch isn’t just about skills — it’s about geography. Rajasthan has the potential to generate around 5 million green jobs by 2047 while facing only about 0.5 million livelihoods at risk from the West Asia crisis. Gujarat could generate 4.5 million green jobs against just 0.28 million at risk. Tamil Nadu’s exposure (roughly 1 to 1.2 million livelihoods at risk) is dwarfed by its green jobs potential of 3.5 million.

Kerala sits at the opposite end of that spread. Despite being among the states most exposed to the Gulf economy, its estimated green jobs potential is only around one million — roughly half its at-risk livelihoods.

The mismatch is rooted in geography and infrastructure. Rajasthan and Gujarat have abundant land, large renewable energy parks and heavy industrial investment. Kerala has limited land for utility-scale renewable projects and few openings for large-scale green manufacturing.

Kerala’s Gulf Paradox: When Prosperity Becomes a Liability

Abinash Mohanty, the study’s lead author, explained to EdPublica why Kerala stands apart from the other states examined in the report.

“There is a peculiar irony embedded in Kerala’s economic story,” he said. “For four decades, the desert sands of the Gulf have nourished the rice fields of Malabar, remittances flowing back to fund concrete houses, college fees, and gold jewellery, transforming the state’s social fabric in the process. Today, Kerala still draws nearly a fifth of India’s entire remittance pie, even as its Gulf-bound workforce has shrunk sharply over the past decade. It is a state living off the echo of a migration boom that has already peaked.”

“Herein lies the mismatch,” Mohanty continued. “The IPE Global study reveals that India’s green transition — its solar parks, hydrogen valleys, and battery gigafactories — is gravitating naturally towards Rajasthan’s deserts and Tamil Nadu’s coastlines, not Kerala’s backwaters. Kerala, like a seasoned sailor stranded as the tide recedes, finds itself with deep economic dependence but a comparatively shallow green jobs harbour to dock in.”

“The solution cannot be importing Rajasthan’s solar playbook wholesale,” he said. “Kerala must instead lean into what it already possesses: a highly literate, internationally exposed workforce. Its future lies not in manufacturing solar panels, but in becoming India’s hub for green services — climate fintech, renewable energy project management, marine and coastal resilience engineering, and the skilled re-export of its own returning diaspora as consultants to other Gulf-exposed states. Kerala’s comparative advantage was always human capital, not hectares of sunlight — and that, fortunately, travels well.”

A Different Transition for Kerala

For Kerala, the transition is unlikely to mirror Rajasthan’s or Gujarat’s. Instead, sectors such as the blue economy, sustainable fisheries, marine industries, eco-tourism and green services may offer opportunities better aligned with the state’s geography and workforce. Alongside these, returning migrants will need structured reskilling programmes that connect training directly to employment.

Even some of the report’s own recommendations run into Kerala-specific limits. The report proposes expanding PM-KUSUM so farmers can earn by selling surplus solar power to the grid — but eligibility under Component A generally requires 3–4 acres of land, clear ownership records and proximity to an electricity substation, conditions that are far harder to meet in a state of small, fragmented landholdings.

Kolassery believes Kerala should focus first on helping returning migrants find immediate livelihoods before chasing long-term structural change. “NORKA Roots has already demonstrated that this can be done,” he said, pointing to the NORKA Department Project for Returned Emigrants (NDPREM), which offers a 15% capital subsidy, a 3% interest subsidy for the first four years of timely loan repayment, and bank loans ranging from ₹1 lakh to ₹30 lakh, alongside entrepreneurship training and technical guidance through the Centre for Management Development.

“Our immediate priority should be short-term absorption. Kerala may not have the industrial advantages of larger states, but it has a knowledge-based economy and a workforce with international exposure,” he said. Rather than viewing returning migrants as a burden, he argues, Kerala should channel their experience into entrepreneurship and niche industries while courting new investment. “The Middle East’s investment landscape has shattered due to security concerns. This is the right time for India, especially Kerala, to position itself as a safe destination for investment. If we provide the right support, we can convert this challenge into an opportunity,” he said.

What’s Actually Working — and What Isn’t Yet

“The recommendations presented in the report demonstrate that climate action is not merely an environmental obligation — it is a pathway to economic transformation, energy sovereignty, livelihood security and long-term prosperity,” said Ashwajit Singh, Founder and Managing Director of IPE Global.

That pathway isn’t purely theoretical in Kerala. NDPREM, the state’s existing returnee-support scheme, already provides a working template — a 15% capital subsidy, a 3% interest subsidy for the first four years of timely repayment, loans up to ₹30 lakh, and hands-on entrepreneurship training through the Centre for Management Development. It is, in effect, a smaller-scale version of what the IPE Global report says the country needs at national scale: existing institutional capacity, redirected rather than rebuilt from scratch. Kolassery points to it as proof that Kerala doesn’t need to wait for green jobs to materialise before it starts absorbing returning workers — it can start now, with tools already in hand.

But the template has real limits, and they mirror the gaps in the national scheme architecture it’s modelled on. NDPREM works best for migrants with capital and a business idea already in mind; it does little for the hospitality and construction workers Baheej describes, who need wage employment, not a loan. And the state’s proposed long-term bet — blue economy jobs, sustainable fisheries, eco-tourism — remains mostly aspirational, without the scheme convergence or funding commitments that agriculture and energy have already secured nationally through PM-KUSUM and the Green Hydrogen Mission.

For Cinil, back in Kerala and weighing what comes next, the choice in front of him is a narrower version of the one facing policymakers: use what exists now, or wait for something better suited to arrive. What would close that gap, according to both the report and Kerala’s own migration officials, is not a single scheme but three things moving together — reskilling programmes that lead directly into named jobs rather than general training, financing that reaches wage-seekers as well as entrepreneurs, and faster investment in the blue-economy and green-services sectors the state is actually positioned to build. None of that requires new institutions to invent. It requires the ones already in place — NORKA Roots, PM-KUSUM, state industrial policy — to move at the speed the crisis demands. As opportunities in the Gulf grow more uncertain, the test for Kerala’s green transition won’t be how large the numbers get by 2047, but whether workers like Cinil find a next job before the wait becomes permanent.

World Bank climate finance target has been abandoned following pressure from the United States, prompting warnings that vulnerable countries could face reduced funding for climate adaptation and resilience.

The World Bank has abandoned its flagship pledge to direct 45% of annual lending toward climate-related activities, a retreat from a commitment it made at COP28 and one that campaigners say will hit the world’s most vulnerable countries hardest.

The decision followed sustained pressure from the United States, the Bank’s largest shareholder, and came despite last-minute appeals from France — the institution’s fifth-largest shareholder — to keep the target in place. The Bank says it will continue reporting on the climate finance it provides, but it is no longer bound to hit the 45% threshold.

Why the World Bank Climate Finance Target Was Dropped

The World Bank has long been the single largest source of climate finance for developing countries. Multilateral development banks collectively delivered a record $137 billion in climate finance in 2024, with the World Bank contributing the biggest share. That funding underpins the Baku-to-Belém roadmap, which assigns development banks a central role in reaching the $1.3 trillion climate finance goal agreed at COP29.

Dropping the target now, critics argue, sends the wrong signal at the wrong moment. Eleonora Cogo, Climate Finance Lead at the ECCO think tank, put it bluntly:

“The World Bank says it is following its clients’ lead, but the data says otherwise: developing countries want solar, wind and hydropower. Scrapping climate targets at the very moment they are being surpassed, under pressure that runs directly counter to what recipient countries are asking for, is not neutrality. It is a choice that leaves the most vulnerable even more exposed to climate impacts and to the fossil fuel market instability that every new global energy crisis brings back into the spotlight.”

One Plan Survives, Another Falls

Amid the fallout, the Bank did extend its Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) — the framework aligning its operations with the Paris Agreement — just before its June 30 expiry. The plan had itself been under threat from Washington, and its survival came only after what one observer called a bruising fight among shareholders.

Jon Sward of the Bretton Woods Project described the outcome as a mixed result: “After a long and difficult negotiation among World Bank shareholders, the Bank’s Climate Change Action Plan has survived, but despite the efforts of other board members, US pressure has weakened the Bank’s climate work with the retirement of the 45% climate finance target.”

He added that the Bank still owes clarity on how a forthcoming independent review will shape the CCAP’s future — and how civil society groups, largely excluded from the negotiations, will be brought back in.

Joe Thwaites of the Natural Resources Defense Council struck a more defiant note, stressing that the Bank’s underlying obligations haven’t disappeared: “Let’s be clear: the World Bank still has a mandate to continue providing climate finance. The Climate Change Action Plan has been extended. Losing the overarching 45% climate finance target is bad, but individual World Bank Group entities still have their own climate targets, which can be a backstop against the bottom falling out.”

He called on shareholders to hold Bank leadership accountable and suggested donors redirect support to other institutions if World Bank climate finance begins to slide.

The Real Damage: Adaptation, Not Mitigation

Several analysts warned that the target’s disappearance won’t necessarily starve clean-energy projects — those are increasingly commercially viable on their own. The bigger casualty, they say, will be adaptation and resilience finance, which has always depended more heavily on concessional, subsidized capital.

Labanya Prakash Jena, Director of the Climate and Sustainability Initiative in India, explained:”There will be a limited impact on capital flows to bankable renewables/mitigation projects, since these are commercially attractive. The real risk is to climate adaptation and resilience financing — urban heat resilience, flood defences, climate-vulnerable agriculture — which relied on subsidised capital and development assistance, precisely because it’s harder to make commercially attractive.”

Jena noted that India, as the World Bank Group’s largest borrower, has diversified funding sources that will cushion the blow to mitigation projects — but adaptation finance will still take a disproportionate hit.

Suranjali Tandon, Associate Professor at NIPFP, connected the decision to a broader geopolitical shift: “Dropping the climate finance target reflects the shifting priorities globally. Not surprisingly, among the representatives that declined to endorse the continued work on climate change are large fossil fuel producers. Abandoning the target means the flow of finance, which so far used a broader co-benefits approach, may decline especially where the outcomes in climate change projects become less immediately discernible.”

A Push for Alternatives

For some, the episode is less a crisis than a call to action. Dhruba Purkayastha, Senior Advisor for Climate and Environment at Dalberg, framed the World Bank’s messaging with skepticism — while pointing toward a possible workaround: “While the removal of climate finance target is being positioned as shifting from ‘inputs to outcomes,’ it surely further erodes the concept of climate action as global public good, and weakens global sustainable development multilateralism. Therefore, there is need to step up on regional green development banks, funds, financial institutions such as maybe an Asia Green Finance Institution or a suprasovereign Asian Green Fund.”

What Happens Next

The World Bank’s decision arrives just months after the G11 group of developing nations formally urged the institution to extend its climate plan — a request partially honored, even as the numerical target that once anchored the Bank’s climate ambitions disappears. With the CCAP’s extension length still unannounced and an independent review pending, the coming months will determine whether individual entity-level targets and voluntary reporting can hold the line — or whether, as campaigners fear, climate finance quietly starts to shrink just as the world needs it most.