South Asia, home to nearly two billion people, is no longer peering at climate risk through the telescope of 2050; it is living it now.

Heatwave clusters, glacial-lake outburst floods (GLOFs), erratic monsoon dynamics, and saline intrusion across deltaic systems define a new climate regime of compound extremes, as attribution science increasingly ties these hazards to anthropogenic warming.

Yet its regional governance remains fragmented. Instead of interoperable, risk-informed planning and transboundary early-warning systems, each nation defaults to ad-hoc relief and infrastructure quick fixes that too often slide into maladaptation for another. With hydrometeorological losses mounting season by season, the whole region keeps kicking the can down the road when it should be rowing in the same direction.

The elephant in the room is the lack of regional cooperation, however. A cohesive South Asian climate agenda is conspicuously absent. Saarc summits have been stalled since 2016, freezing progress on shared adaptation standards, interoperable disaster response, and low-carbon trade. Sub-regional venues have emerged, but none match the breadth required for whole-of-region climate security. When the hegemonic New Delhi deprioritises Saarc or securitises regional fora, its neighbours become compellingly hesitant to invest political capital in climate cooperation.

On top of all that, long-standing security tensions further compounded the problem. Decades of India-Pakistan contention with Indian pigheadedness have paralysed regional multilateralism and diverted attention and budgets from climate risk governance. When geopolitics eclipses disaster management, joint exercises, data sharing and interoperable relief logistics fail to mature.

Nowhere is the cost of non-cooperation more obvious than on water in our part of the world. As the saying goes, ‘rivers do not recognise borders,’ the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra basins stitch together the region’s food, energy,........

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