In our previous blog in the ‘Voices From Climate Frontline’ series, we described how district-level officers from Odisha’s Directorates of Agriculture and Food Production, Horticulture, and Soil Conservation and Watershed Development engaged in two participatory activities during a state-level training workshop on climate change.
This second piece highlights the key insights from those activities that emerged across batches.
Key Insights: Activity 1
Direct and indirect impacts of droughts, floods, heatwaves, and cyclones
Crop loss was the most widely reported direct impact, cutting across all hazard types and the three batches. Hazards such as cyclones, erratic rainfall, and floods were linked to soil erosion, infrastructure damage, transport disruption, and livestock loss. At the same time, heatwaves with extended periods of drought were reported to cause water scarcity and a decline in livestock, fisheries, and crop productivity.
Interestingly, the indirect impacts painted an even more telling picture. Participants across batches repeatedly identified income loss, migration, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss, health risks, and food insecurity as indirect impacts. Some also highlighted labour shortages, mental health stress, and gendered burdens—especially under compounding hazards such as heatwaves with prolonged drought-like conditions—indicating a growing sensitivity to social dimensions of climate risks.
Reflections on how these shape early warning systems or resilience planning
As participants built their climate webs, a sobering insight emerged: our current response systems are reactive, not anticipatory. Post-disaster relief and compensation still dominate the landscape, while the long-term, cascading impacts remain unaddressed.
In flood-prone districts, participants called for block- or gram-panchayat-level early warning systems, infrastructure stress testing, and interdepartmental coordination. In drought- and heat-affected regions, the webs point to the need for seasonal forecasting tools, community water budgeting, and inclusive rural heat action plans.
Importantly, the discussions brought attention to slow-onset vulnerabilities, such as soil and water degradation or livelihood fragility, that often go unaddressed in conventional climate risk assessments. The webs reinforced global findings that participatory, context-driven approaches are critical for surfacing hidden risks and building integrated, locally grounded resilience strategies.
Regional differences in perception of impacts
While there were common themes, the perceived impacts of climate hazards varied by region. Participants from coastal districts such as Kendrapara and Balasore (Batch 3) emphasised impacts tied to cyclones such as infrastructure damage, saltwater intrusion, and disruptions to tourism. In contrast, participants from drought-prone regions such as Balangir, Nuapada, and Rayagada zeroed in on pest and disease outbreaks and rural unemployment, often connecting these to ecosystem degradation and migration.
These regional variations remind us that while some climate impacts are shared, how they play out and how they are understood are deeply shaped by local geography, socio-economic context, and institutional capacity.
Key Insights: Activity 2
Regional voices: What climate risk means across Odisha
Clear regional patterns in how climate risks are perceived, experienced, and prioritised by district officials across Odisha emerged. Participants from the northern districts consistently emphasised drought and water scarcity due to the dominance of rainfed farming and inadequate irrigation coverage. In contrast, officials from the southern and coastal districts pointed to cyclones, flooding, and saltwater intrusion as major climate hazards, reflecting the exposure of these regions. Unseasonal rainfall emerged as a cross-cutting concern across all three regions. Interestingly, participants from coastal districts also spotlighted market-linked vulnerabilities, such as post-flood price crashes, distress sale of produce, and transport disruptions, revealing that for them, climate risk extends beyond biophysical hazards to include economic shocks
These regional perceptions translated into distinct indicator preferences: northern teams prioritised rainfall variability and groundwater depletion, while southern and coastal groups focused on cyclone frequency, salinity levels, and access to storage facilities. Despite these differences, there was a common recognition of the vulnerability of small and marginal farmers and recurring themes such as soil erosion, the need for resilient crop varieties, cold storage infrastructure, insurance, and better marketing and value addition for produce.
The diversity of insights across both region and directorate reinforces the importance of context-specific, locally informed adaptation planning that is aligned with both ecological realities and institutional priorities.
Highlights of innovative methods and indicators
Interestingly, all nine groups instinctively drew on their on-ground experiences to shape their risk assessment frameworks. Rather than beginning with abstract indicators, participants selected indicators based on their lived experiences and departmental implementation. This resulted in an innovative, bottom-up framing of risk to reveal gaps in service delivery and coverage. For example, the lack of irrigation in agriculture, cold storage or marketing in horticulture, or watershed interventions in degraded and predominantly rainfed regions were indicators selected to reflect vulnerability in their respective areas. However, this approach introduces institutional bias, where climate risk is framed through the lens of institutional presence or absence. While this adds practical value to the proposed assessments, it risks overlooking vulnerabilities that fall outside individual institutional mandates. Despite this constraint, the approach adopted by the participants reflects a clear intent to make risk assessments actionable, locally grounded, and policy-relevant.
Cross-sectoral insights and overlaps
As each group shared their findings, something quite powerful emerged: despite working within departmental silos, many of the participants landed on overlapping priorities. For instance, the agriculture groups flagged drought as a major driver for crop failure. Soil conservation and watershed development groups pointed to the same for driving severe groundwater stress and topsoil loss, revealing how one hazard cuts across systems. Similarly, horticulture groups pointed to the absence of storage infrastructure as a key driver of risk in flood-prone areas, which was also identified by the soil conservation and watershed development teams as a driver of post-harvest vulnerability.
These overlaps emerged organically, grounded in experience. But most groups stopped short of proposing shared strategies, reflecting the fragmented nature of planning and implementation at the field level. The only exception was insurance, for which teams acknowledged the requirement of cross-sectoral coordination. These overlaps also underscored an important takeaway: the risks are connected; hence, our responses need to be too. The training offered a rare space to surface these linkages, with the insights hinting at the untapped potential of better interdepartmental collaboration
Conclusion: Reflections and future direction
The training didn’t just build technical capacity on climate change, it surfaced rich, grounded perspectives on how climate risks are understood, prioritised, and addressed across Odisha’s diverse regions and directorates. Although variations in agro-climatic conditions, crop loss, soil degradation, and water stress echoed across batches, their voices pointed towards the pressing need to integrate landscape-level planning and rainfed area development into mainstream adaptation efforts.
Equally important was the recognition that small and marginal farmers remain the most vulnerable group, with unseasonal rainfall and climate uncertainty further lowering confidence in conventional agricultural practices. The recurrence of labour shortages and migration as indirect impacts points to climate change as a chronic disruptor of rural livelihoods, not just a trigger of episodic shocks.
In conclusion, what this training workshop made clear is that transformation doesn’t always begin with new data or big declarations. Sometimes, it begins when people who rarely get a space to reflect—district officers and field-level staff—sit down together to connect the dots. These insights will directly inform upcoming capacity-building modules and shape future engagement. More importantly, the insights will offer a template for what climate resilience planning could look like—grounded in lived realities, aware of institutional blind spots, and committed to equity across sectors and regions.
Lakshmi Menon is a Senior Analyst and Tashina Madappa Cheranda is a Senior Associate in the Climate, Environment & Sustainability sector at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a research-based think tank.
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| Date | 18 June 2025 |
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| Publisher | CSTEP |
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