An hour away by car from the busy Indian port city of Visakhapatnam, the countryside is changing rapidly. Vast stretches of what once were paddy fields are now home to gleaming, modern housing developments.

A generation ago, this land would have grown all manner of crops from rice and sesame seeds to sugar cane and banana plants. But climate change is driving a rapid transformation. With crops routinely withering and dying, farmers must now look elsewhere for a living. It is just one symptom of India’s shifting agricultural landscape, as many farmers are wading through impossible choices forced on them by a changing climate.

An hour away by car from the busy Indian port city of Visakhapatnam, the countryside is changing rapidly. Vast stretches of what once were paddy fields are now home to gleaming, modern housing developments.

A generation ago, this land would have grown all manner of crops from rice and sesame seeds to sugar cane and banana plants. But climate change is driving a rapid transformation. With crops routinely withering and dying, farmers must now look elsewhere for a living. It is just one symptom of India’s shifting agricultural landscape, as many farmers are wading through impossible choices forced on them by a changing climate.

Soaring heat waves, increasingly frequent cyclones, and disrupted rain cycles—the southeast coast of India is deeply vulnerable to these extreme weather events caused by climate change, and few feel that more acutely than the country’s farmers. Most of them have worked the land their entire lives, but climate change is now forcing them into an impossible choice: Leave their homes in search of work elsewhere or stay put and try to adapt to an era of climate catastrophe.

India is rapidly urbanizing, with the percentage of its population living in urban areas jumping from around 28 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2024, according to data........

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