Funding Heat Resilience: Rethinking Priorities, Pathways, and the Role of Funders

Held on the sidelines of Mumbai Climate Week, the roundtable will bring together a small group of senior leaders from Indian and international philanthropy, CSR, and foundations to reflect on extreme heat as a growing development risk in India. While heat is receiving increasing attention across funder portfolios, responses remain fragmented and are often confined to individual sectors or programmes.

​The discussion will provide a space for funders to step back from specific initiatives and examine heat as a systemic challenge affecting productivity, livelihoods, public health, urban systems, and service delivery. Drawing on experiences across portfolios and contexts, the conversation will explore where current public, private, and philanthropic responses are not delivering at scale, surface priority action areas where catalytic funding could realistically drive near- to medium-term resilience outcomes, and distil early signals on partnership and delivery models that have shown promise across contexts and could be adapted or scaled in India.