In 2014, climate resilience did not have a budget line.
The phrase appeared in academic papers and IPCC reports, but development funders in India were not yet using it. The money sat under “disaster risk reduction”, a frame that treated cyclones, floods and heat waves as separate emergencies to respond to, rather than as patterns that people would need to adapt to.
The fishing communities along the Odisha coast were indifferent to the frame. They knew the weather was changing. Cyclones were arriving earlier and surges were higher. The warning systems, where they existed, used a language and a medium that did not match how coastal communities received information.
That is where the work began.
What we built
The programming started from one premise: coastal communities already know a great deal about weather and risk. They were missing specific, usable information to fill particular gaps in that knowledge, delivered through a medium they already used, in their own language, at a time when they were listening.
Radio was the medium. The Odisha coast already had established patterns of community radio listening, and fishing households tuned in at particular hours. We designed the programming to fit into those hours instead of competing with them.
We built the content from the ground up. First we mapped what communities already knew: which signs meant a cyclone was approaching, where the traditional shelter points were, and which boats were safe in which conditions. Then we identified the gaps. Most households had never seen the IMD’s colour-coded warnings and did not know how to read them. Families routinely forgot which documents to carry when they evacuated. The way to secure fishing equipment against a surge depended on the type of boat.
The result was a curriculum presented as a radio programme. It aired before cyclone season, it was repeated, and it was in Odia. We made it together with fishermen and their families.
Why this was climate adaptation before the term
The programme was commissioned as disaster risk reduction and paid for from DRR budgets. The word “climate” appeared in the project documents only as background.
The work itself was about helping communities adapt to weather patterns that were changing over time. The cyclones were becoming more frequent, more intense and harder to predict, and they could no longer be treated as freak events. The programme was a preparedness curriculum that recurred every year and was meant to build the community’s knowledge over the long term. It was never a one-off emergency response.
In 2014, calling this climate adaptation would have confused the funder. By 2020, every funder in the sector was asking for this kind of work and calling it climate resilience. The communities had not changed, and they had always known the weather was shifting. The sector’s label had changed, and a budget line came with it.
What we carry from this
We have taken three lessons from this into every climate and health project since.
The first is that local knowledge comes first and institutional knowledge fills its gaps. The fishermen knew more about how cyclones behaved than the IMD’s district-level warnings could tell them. The programme respected that by starting from what they knew and adding the institutional information they lacked.
The second is that the choice of medium has real consequences. Radio worked because it was already in the household. A mobile app would have needed a smartphone, an internet connection and a download, and none of these were reliable on the Odisha coast in 2014. The medium has to fit the user’s life, whatever technology the funder prefers.
The third is that timing matters as much as content. A programme that airs during cyclone season is too late, and one that airs six months before is forgotten. The right window was two to four weeks before the expected season, close enough to feel relevant and early enough to prepare. Finding that window meant understanding the community’s own calendar as well as the meteorological one.
We did this work years before “climate resilience” had a budget line. The communities it served had no need for the label. They needed the information in their language, at the right time, on the radio they already listened to.