Climate & Food Security · March 2026

India’s unfolding food-insecurity.

A landmark new study ranks India among the most food-insecure large economies in a warming world — and finds that economic growth alone will not be enough to hold the line. The numbers are stark. The window to act is narrowing.

In the wheat fields of Punjab and Haryana, February is normally a forgiving month — cool enough for grain to fill steadily before the spring harvest. February 2025 was India’s hottest February in 124 years. A farmer in the region told researchers he normally harvests 18 quintals of wheat per acre. That year, he got eight. “The heat all but destroyed not just wheat, but crops like potato and mustard, too. Barely anything survived,” he said.

This is not an isolated story. It is a preview. A major new study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), published in March 2026, has for the first time mapped food security across 162 countries against warming scenarios of 1.5°C, 2°C, and 4°C — and its findings for India are among the most alarming in the world for a large economy.

I. The Index and What It Says

The IIED Food Security Index measures four things: whether enough food is available, whether people can afford it, whether it is nutritious enough to sustain health, and whether the food system is sustainable enough to survive repeated shocks. Together, these four pillars produce a score from 0 to 10. The global average is 6.74.

India scores 5.31 at baseline — already well below the global average, and behind fellow large emerging economies Brazil (6.72), Mexico (6.36), and Indonesia (5.87). But the study is not about where countries stand today. It is about where they are going.

Under 1.5°C of global warming — the aspirational limit of the Paris Agreement — India’s score falls to 4.96.

Under 2°C, it falls further to 4.52. The trajectory is not gradual or gentle. It is a sustained, measurable decline in the ability of a country of 1.4 billion people to feed itself adequately, predictably, and nutritiously.

China, with a considerably stronger baseline score of 7.62, is also projected to see its food security decline — to 7.06 at 2°C.

Even among G7 countries, none rank in the global top five, and all are expected to see drops under warming scenarios. The study makes clear this is a global problem. But it also makes clear that the problem is distributed very unequally.

This research shows that, yet again, it’s the poorest countries with the least responsibility for climate change which will suffer its worst effects. But crucially this work also provides tools for understanding the possible impacts and potential solutions in detail.

II. What Warming Actually Does to Indian Fields

India’s two great staple crops — wheat and rice — are both acutely temperature-sensitive. The Ministry of Earth Sciences and India Meteorological Department have projected that climate change will reduce rice and wheat production by 6 to 10 percent. That figure is from the government’s own models.

Independent projections go further. A 2025 Nature study by the Climate Impact Lab found that under a high-emissions scenario, wheat yield losses of 40 to 100 percent could occur across northern and central India by 2100.

Researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center calculate that a 2.5 to 4.9°C temperature increase could reduce wheat yields by 41 to 52 percent and rice yields by 32 to 40 percent.

These are not tail-risk scenarios. They are central projections from mainstream climate science — and they describe what happens to the food supply of a country where 80 percent of the population depends on government-subsidised grains, and where 1.4 billion people need to be fed every day.

What makes India’s situation particularly acute is the combination of scale and fragility. The country has 1.4 billion people to feed. Over 65 percent of its farmland is rain-fed, with no guaranteed irrigation — meaning it is directly and immediately exposed to monsoon disruption. It has warmed by approximately 0.7°C since 1901, and the pace of warming is accelerating. And it ranks 105th out of 127 countries in the Global Hunger Index — a baseline of nutritional vulnerability that climate stress can only deepen.

III. Growth Won’t Save You

One of the most consequential findings in the IIED study — and one that should unsettle Indian policymakers — concerns the limits of economic growth as a buffer against food insecurity.

The conventional assumption has been that as India gets richer, it gets safer. Wealthier countries can import food when domestic production fails, can afford better storage and supply chains, can subsidise vulnerable populations through disruptions. The logic is not wrong. But it is incomplete.

The IIED researchers found that each additional $1,000 in per capita GDP translates, on average, to about 0.2 additional points on the food security scale. Useful — but uneven. The gains are weakest precisely where they are most needed: in the sustainability pillar, which measures whether a food system can withstand repeated shocks over time.

Economic growth improves access to food today, but it does not make the food system itself more resilient to the kind of repeated, compounding climate disruptions that are now locked in regardless of what the world does in the next decade.

This insight matters globally as well as for India specifically. Climate shocks in major food-producing regions create price volatility that propagates across international markets — as seen when the Ukraine war disrupted wheat supplies, or when El Niño-linked crop failures tightened global rice availability. A climate-driven collapse in Indian or Chinese food production would not stay within their borders. It would ripple through every import-dependent economy in Asia and Africa.

IV. The People Who Bear the Most

Climate-driven food insecurity in India does not arrive uniformly. It follows the geography of existing inequality — deepening the disadvantages already faced by those with the fewest resources to adapt.

Smallholder farmers — who make up the vast majority of India’s agricultural workforce — have neither the capital nor the landholding size to shift crops, install drip irrigation, or absorb a bad season. Only 43 percent of Adivasi and 40 percent of Dalit farmers cultivate more than 0.6 hectares. Those with smaller holdings have fewer options, lower incomes, and weaker safety nets when a heat wave or a failed monsoon strikes. Research links repeated climate-driven crop failures directly to rising rates of rural mental distress and farmer suicide.

Women bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Their roles in food production, household food allocation, and family nutrition — combined with higher nutritional needs during menstruation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding — make them structurally more exposed to food insecurity when supply contracts or prices rise. When grains lose nutritional quality under elevated CO₂, women and children are typically the first to experience the consequences.

V. The Migration Pressure That No One Is Planning For

Food insecurity does not sit still. When farming becomes untenable — when the rains fail three years in a row, when the wheat harvest halves, when the family’s savings drain into failed seasons — people move. Central, northern, and eastern India are projected to lose more agricultural jobs to climate shocks than other regions, and the pressure of rural-to-urban migration is already building.

The problem is that the cities migrants move to are themselves under climate pressure — from urban heat islands, flooding, and water stress. The migration is real, it is already happening, and it is heading toward infrastructure that was not designed to absorb the volumes that warming will produce. Unplanned settlements grow. Social services strain. And the new urban poor are often more food-insecure, not less, than the farming communities they left — because they have traded subsistence agriculture for wage work that vanishes when a city’s economy stumbles.

VI. What Would Actually Help

The IIED study is deliberately not a counsel of despair. Its authors are explicit that catastrophic declines are not inevitable — that the difference between a 1.5°C world and a 2°C world is real and significant, and that adaptation investments made now can reduce the severity of what is coming. What would those investments look like for India?

None of these are new ideas. Many have been in policy documents for years. The gap is not between knowing what to do and not knowing. It is between knowing and doing — at the scale, and with the urgency, that the trajectory of warming now demands.

At 2°C of warming — a scenario that is not worst-case but is, by current global emissions trajectories, close to likely — an additional 291 million people worldwide could fall below the food security threshold.

India has achieved remarkable things in agriculture over the past half-century: the Green Revolution, successive record harvests, the feeding of a population that has nearly tripled since independence. But those achievements were built for a stable climate. The next half-century will not have one.

The Punjab farmer who harvested eight quintals of wheat where he expected eighteen is not an outlier in a data set. He is an early signal in a series. The question is whether India’s food system, and the policy architecture around it, is being rebuilt fast enough to receive what comes next.