A landmark assessment released by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) during the ongoing COP30 climate negotiations in Belem warns that countries like India face escalating economic losses unless resilience is urgently embedded into every layer of new infrastructure. The Global Infrastructure Resilience Report 2025 is the first fully probabilistic and publicly accessible assessment of global infrastructure risk. It estimates the world was losing $732 billion to $845 billion annually to climate and geology-related disasters, and identifies India as one of the most hazard-exposed regions — yet also one of the countries making some of the most significant strides towards systemic reform.
The report finds that power, transport and water networks globally will face the highest annual average losses from climate extremes, with heatwave-related damage projected to “escalate sharply” as warming accelerates. India, alongside Bangladesh, Vietnam and Thailand, is singled out for its high vulnerability in the irrigation sector.
The modelling shows that irrigation systems across South and Southeast Asia will be among the hardest hit by climate extremes, amplifying risks for agrarian economies.
For India — where new highways, metros, renewable energy parks and water systems are being built at a never-before-seen pace — these findings underline what negotiators have long argued in global climate talks, that is strengthening resilience needs to be as central as reducing emissions, particularly for developing economies with high growth trajectories. The report draws on the Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI), a modelling framework that quantifies both direct losses and cascading economic shocks. It finds that indirect losses caused by disruptions to services such as electricity, water supply, logistics and digital networks are 7.4 times higher than the direct physical damage to infrastructure.
This is a crucial point for India, where even short interruptions — whether power failures during heatwaves or road closures during floods — trigger large productivity losses. One of the critical warnings contained in the report is that annual economic losses from disasters can reach 7 per cent of GDP in countries where reconstruction takes two decades or more. Rebuilding within ten years cuts those losses by half, and countries capable of restoring services within four years prevent far deeper long-term economic scars. For India, which frequently faces extreme rainfall, cyclones, floods and heatwaves, the implication is direct.
It is in this context that CDRI director general Amit Prothi emphasised the significance of the new modelling framework, saying: “For the first time, we have a fully probabilistic and publicly accessible assessment of global infrastructure risk. Making this risk data open and searchable is critical because it finally gives governments the evidence base they need to prioritise resilience investments before the next disaster strikes,” he told The New Indian Express. He added that COP30 discussions are prompting more countries, including India, to integrate resilience into their National Adaptation Plans.
The report’s coordinating lead author, Ede Ijjasz Vásquez, highlights the depth of economic losses already emerging across climate-vulnerable countries. “Infrastructure disruptions account for the vast majority of disaster losses, and the real economic cost can exceed physical damage many times over. Without urgent investment, annual GDP losses in vulnerable countries could rise steeply by 2050,” he said, noting that faster recovery can halve long-term economic losses while resilience investments routinely deliver returns many times higher than their cost. His comments reinforce the report’s central conclusion that resilience is among the most cost-effective climate actions available. The more optimistic message running through the report is that resilience investments pay for themselves many times over. On an average, investments in resilience deliver benefits that are four times larger than their costs. A more detailed India-specific analysis cited in the report goes even further. A study applying the Resilience Cost Benefit Analysis (RCBA) tool to India’s National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) shows that resilience upgrades in roads, railways and power systems produced returns as high as 12:1, with typical ratios between 4 and 12.
India also figures prominently in the report's case studies, illustrating how the country is attempting to operationalise resilience in multiple sectors. A case study on early warning systems describes how India’s hydropower operator NHPC has adopted sophisticated disaster management planning, real-time digital monitoring and cloud-linked river discharge systems to minimise flood risk across its plants. These upgrades cost less than 0.1 per cent of capital expenditure yet deliver outsized risk reduction, according to the report. Another major case study highlights India’s pioneering effort to embed climate resilience in its telecom network — an essential service that often fails during cyclones, heavy rains or earthquakes. The Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF), developed jointly by the Department of Telecom, NDMA and CDRI, is among the world’s first attempts to institutionalise resilience at a national scale. The pilot mapping covers 7,70,000 towers across five states and recommends redundancies such as satellite backups, Cells on Wheels, multiple submarine cable landings and stricter governance standards for digital infrastructure.
The report also lists India’s National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) as an example of a dedicated mechanism that speeds up post-disaster financing.
On global findings, the report shows a dramatic increase in risks to renewable energy systems. GIRI estimates $8.3 billion in annual losses to solar assets from cyclones and flooding globally and $13 billion in annual losses to hydropower plants from earthquakes and floods. For a country planning hundreds of gigawatts of new solar and hydro capacity, these are warnings that cannot be ignored. The report suggests that without built-in resilience — elevated platforms, wind-proof racking, flood-resistant substations — India risks billions in stranded assets.