Climate change has fundamentally altered the way societies think about development. For decades, much of the global climate conversation focused on mitigation: reducing emissions, transitioning to renewable energy, improving energy efficiency and limiting the activities responsible for global warming. That conversation remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient. Climate impacts are already affecting where people live, how they work and what they can afford. As floods become more destructive, heatwaves more intense and coastal risks more pronounced, governments and communities are increasingly turning towards adaptation. Flood embankments, coastal protection systems, drainage infrastructure, heat action plans, climate-resilient housing and disaster preparedness are becoming central to the idea of a safer future.

Yet there is an uncomfortable question that is often missing from the discussion: who pays for that safety?

At first glance, climate adaptation appears to be an inherently positive proposition. A flood barrier protects a settlement. A coastal buffer reduces exposure to storms. A heat action plan prevents workers from being exposed to dangerous temperatures. A relocation programme moves families away from areas that are increasingly vulnerable to flooding or erosion. From an engineering and risk-management perspective, these interventions can make perfect sense. But climate vulnerability is not only about physical exposure. It is also about economic security, access to employment, social networks and the ability of households to absorb disruption. When these factors are ignored, an intervention designed to protect vulnerable communities can end up creating a different form of vulnerability.

This is the quiet contradiction at the heart of modern climate adaptation. The people who are most exposed to climate change are often the least equipped to absorb the economic and social costs of adapting to it.

The scale of the problem is significant. More than one billion people globally live in informal settlements, many of them in areas exposed to flooding, extreme heat and other climate risks. Informal settlements are often located on marginal land because affordable housing is unavailable elsewhere, placing residents in areas that may be vulnerable to environmental hazards but close to employment opportunities. When governments seek to make cities more resilient, these communities can become the first to be relocated or reorganised. The physical risk may decline, but the economic risk can increase.

Consider a low-income household living in an informal settlement close to a city centre. The settlement may be vulnerable to flooding, but its location allows residents to work as domestic workers, construction labourers, street vendors, delivery workers or small traders within relatively easy reach. If the settlement is cleared to make way for drainage infrastructure or flood protection and families are relocated to housing on the outskirts of the city, the new homes may be physically safer. However, the residents may now face longer commutes, higher transportation costs and reduced access to employment. A two-hour journey to work may be manageable for someone with a salaried job and predictable working hours, but it can be devastating for a daily-wage worker whose income depends on being able to reach a workplace quickly and consistently.

The same challenge can be seen in coastal communities. For fisherfolk, the relationship between location and livelihood is particularly direct. A fishing community is not simply a collection of households living near the sea. It is part of an economic ecosystem built around landing points, boats, storage facilities, fish markets, processing activities, transport networks and informal relationships developed over generations. When coastal protection programmes require these communities to move inland, the loss is therefore much larger than the value of the house that has been left behind. A family may receive a replacement home but lose access to the sea, customers, markets and the informal networks that made its livelihood possible.

This is why relocation cannot be evaluated only through the number of houses constructed or households moved to safer locations. A successful relocation must also consider whether people can continue earning a living. If a fisher is moved away from the sea, a street vendor away from customers or a domestic worker away from the households where they work, the intervention may have reduced physical exposure while increasing economic vulnerability. In effect, the risk has not disappeared. It has simply changed form.

Extreme heat presents an equally important example of this contradiction. India is already experiencing the economic consequences of rising temperatures, particularly among people whose work requires them to remain outdoors. Estimates indicate that extreme heat wiped out approximately 247 billion labour hours in India in 2024, representing around $194 billion in economic losses. Agriculture and construction, sectors that depend heavily on informal and daily-wage labour, are particularly exposed. For workers who are paid only when they work, the consequences of extreme heat are not limited to discomfort or health risks. They directly affect household income.

Research on informal workers across Indian cities has found that outdoor workers can lose around 24 working days a year because of heat, with the resulting income loss representing a significant share of annual earnings. Indoor workers also experience losses, although the impact is generally lower. Other research has indicated that every one-degree increase in wet-bulb temperature can be associated with a substantial decline in the daily earnings of outdoor workers. These figures illustrate a crucial point: climate change is already functioning as an economic shock for some of the country’s poorest workers.

Heat action plans are essential because excessive heat can be deadly. Restricting outdoor work during the most dangerous hours, issuing early warnings, establishing cooling measures and encouraging behavioural changes can save lives. But an adaptation strategy becomes incomplete when it considers only the health benefit and ignores the income loss. If a worker is told not to work for several hours because conditions are unsafe, the question of who compensates for that lost income becomes part of the adaptation conversation. Without some form of income protection, the cost of protecting workers from climate risk can effectively be transferred to the workers themselves.

This is a broader feature of climate inequality. Those who have contributed least to the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions are often among those who have the fewest financial resources to respond to climate impacts. A salaried employee may have savings, insurance, paid leave or the ability to work remotely during an extreme weather event. A street vendor, farm labourer, construction worker or domestic worker may have none of these protections. For such households, one lost day of income can mean less food, delayed rent, unpaid debt or reduced spending on education. Repeated disruptions can gradually push a family deeper into financial insecurity.

By 2030, heat stress alone is projected to put tens of millions of jobs at risk globally, with low-skilled and informal workers particularly vulnerable. This means that extreme heat should not be viewed simply as an environmental or public-health issue. It is also a labour-market issue and, increasingly, a poverty issue. When people lose productive working hours because of heat, the economic consequences accumulate at household and community levels. When these losses occur year after year, climate change can become a structural driver of inequality.

The problem becomes even more complicated because many adaptation projects are evaluated primarily through engineering indicators. How many kilometres of flood protection have been constructed? How many households have been moved? How many hectares have been protected? How much infrastructure has been made climate-resilient? These are legitimate measurements, but they do not tell the complete story.

What happens to the income of the households affected by the project? Did commuting times increase after relocation? Did informal businesses lose customers? Did workers receive support during periods when extreme heat made working unsafe? Did communities retain access to schools, healthcare, markets and social networks? Were affected people consulted before the project was designed? These questions determine whether resilience has been achieved in a meaningful sense.

The challenge is that economic and social resilience is harder to measure than physical infrastructure. A flood wall has a measurable height and length. A drainage system has a defined capacity. The value of an informal market network, however, is less visible. The economic importance of living near a workplace or fishing ground may not appear on an engineering blueprint. Yet these factors can determine whether a household is capable of recovering from disruption.

This is why climate adaptation needs to move beyond an infrastructure-first approach. Infrastructure matters enormously, but infrastructure cannot be separated from the lives that surround it. A technically successful adaptation project can still be socially unsuccessful if it reduces one form of vulnerability while creating another. A project that protects people from flooding but pushes them into chronic unemployment has not eliminated vulnerability; it has redistributed it.

The solution is not to stop building climate-resilient infrastructure. The world urgently needs stronger flood protection, safer housing, better drainage, heat preparedness, early-warning systems and climate-resilient public services. The challenge is to design these interventions around people’s livelihoods rather than treating livelihoods as a secondary consideration.

That requires a different definition of project success. Climate adaptation should be evaluated not only by what it protects, but also by what it preserves. Household income, access to employment, mobility, market access and social networks should be considered alongside physical safety. Communities should participate in planning before major decisions are made. Where relocation is unavoidable, livelihood restoration should be treated as a core component of the project rather than an administrative obligation added later.

There is also a larger question of fairness. Climate change is a shared global problem, but its costs are not distributed equally. If the poorest households lose income, employment and access to economic opportunities every time society adapts to a new climate reality, adaptation itself can become another mechanism through which inequality is reproduced.

This is where corporate social responsibility can play a meaningful role. CSR is often associated with disaster relief, environmental conservation, tree plantation, healthcare, education and livelihood development. These remain important areas of intervention. But there is an opportunity to think more specifically about the social costs that arise during climate adaptation. Companies can support livelihood restoration, income protection, skills transitions, transport assistance, community consultation and local economic recovery in areas undergoing climate-related transformation.

The principle is straightforward: if climate adaptation creates a transition cost, someone has to absorb that cost. It should not automatically fall on the people with the least capacity to bear it.

A resilient future cannot simply be a future in which infrastructure survives increasingly extreme weather. It must be a future in which people remain capable of earning, living and recovering despite those changes. A safer coastline that leaves fishing communities without access to the sea is not a complete success. A heat action plan that protects workers’ health while leaving them without income is not a complete success. A resettlement programme that provides housing but destroys access to employment is not a complete success.

Climate adaptation is necessary. But adaptation should not become another pathway into poverty.

The real test of resilience is therefore not only whether a city can withstand the next flood or whether a community can survive the next heatwave. It is whether the people most exposed to these risks are stronger, safer and economically more secure after the intervention than they were before it.

A safer future cannot be built by asking the poorest to pay for their own protection.

SDG Focus: SDG 1 – No Poverty · SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities · SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities & Communities · SDG 13 – Climate Action