Sri Lanka faces escalating climate vulnerabilities, with intense rainfall events, prolonged droughts and rising temperatures threatening communities across the country. These climatic shifts jeopardize essential sectors, including agriculture, water resources, and biodiversity. The most recent climate modeling predicts that by 2040, extreme rainfall events are expected to increase sharply, leading to more frequent and severe flooding, especially in the dry and intermediate zones. This will impact over a million people, damaging critical infrastructure and crops. Warmer temperatures, projected to rise by 1°C, will bring increased heat stress, together with prolonged droughts further reducing soil moisture, accelerating evaporation from reservoirs, and putting essential agriculture practices under threat. These changes endanger livelihoods, food security, and water access, with smallholder farmers, women, and vulnerable groups bearing the greatest impact. Urgent adaptation measures are needed to protect communities and help Sri Lanka’s vital sectors, particularly the agricultural systems, withstand these growing climate challenges.

Sri Lanka’s first Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI) recently published by UNDP Sri Lanka and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), report titled ‘Understanding Multidimensional Vulnerabilities: Impact on People of Sri Lanka’ outlines that 55.7% of Sri Lankans are multidimensionally vulnerable, and that 82% of the multidimensionally vulnerable live in rural areas. Water is the second greatest contributor to vulnerability after household debt. Nearly half of Sri Lanka’s population, 48.8%, lack disaster preparedness, a key vulnerability factor aggravated by accelerating climate risks, while 35.6% are vulnerable and deprived of water sources, compounding the impacts of the poly-crisis.

Sri Lanka’s socio-economic crisis has led to significant resource constraints, and the shrinking global development assistance space has reduced the financing that may be available for sustained climate action. As these challenges deepen, the need to invest in large-scale, replicable, and innovative climate adaptation strategies becomes urgent.