What the BRICS New Delhi Declaration 2026 means for India's climate and sustainability agenda

BRICS commitment to carbon markets, energy, critical minerals, AI, food, and health, and India's next steps.

 

In 2014, about eight kilometres from the cool, glistening Atlantic shoreline of Praia do Futuro, the ‘Beach of the Future’, Brazil’s Centro de Eventos do Ceará witnessed a promise. The word “sustainability” was put front and centre as the BRICS summit's theme for the first time. The New Development Bank (NDB) was also established to mobilise resources for sustainable development projects–a show of ambition–though discussions on sustainability had long been a part of the bloc, all the way back in 2009, in a landscape much different in Russia’s Yekaterinburg, east of the Ural Mountains.

Twelve years later, at the 18th Summit in India on 12 September 2026, the BRICS New Delhi Declaration made progress on that promise. The dialogue saw the coming together of India, China, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the UAE. Emphasis on cooperation, capacity building, experience-sharing, and developing-country interests provided a strong foundation.

Key areas of climate finance, carbon market partnerships, unilateral trade measures, distributed renewables, critical mineral supply chains, smart grids, energy storage, Artificial Intelligence (AI), urban mobility, community-based climate adaptation, agroecology, and early-warning systems for infectious diseases all found a voice in the Global South’s push to balance the scales towards an equitable green growth.

This blog dives into key takeaways from the 2026 BRICS summit, breaking down nine important themes emerging from the Declaration and offering insight and data-backed recommendations based on the latest research and analysis from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

How do India and BRICS see carbon markets and climate-trade measures?

To translate the New Delhi Declaration into actionable impact, BRICS policymakers must bridge opposition to unilateral measures by building supply chain resilience through interoperable dMRV systems, alignment under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, linking of carbon finance to adaptation goals, measures to undertake technology transfer, concessional climate finance and capacity-building, ex ante consultation and a more structured WTO–UNFCCC interface that drives investment and industrialisation in developing countries.

Climate-trade measures and carbon markets have emerged as important areas of multilateral engagement in 2026. This year marks the beginning of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) subsidiary body dialogues on climate-linked trade measures, which will run through 2028. Meanwhile, the adoption of the Declaration on the Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets (OCCCM) has given greater momentum to cooperation among countries developing compliance carbon markets.

The India-EU Free Trade Agreement also identifies areas for cooperation on the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). But bridges still need building. Earlier this year, prominent countries from the Global South, like India, China and South Africa, were left out of the invitation to the first Conference on Transition Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF) in Santa Marta, and did not engage with the Presidency's efforts for a TAFF Roadmap, emphasising the need for the UNFCCC to be free from any new top-down mandate.

The BRICS New Delhi Declaration is significant because it brings the two strands of this debate together. While opposing ‘unilateral, punitive and discriminatory carbon border measures’, the Declaration simultaneously advances cooperation on carbon markets through the BRICS Carbon Markets Partnership, capacity building and exchange of experiences. It also signals a broader shift, with countries using minilateral platforms to pursue cooperative, coalition-led approaches to carbon markets.

However, a stark narrative gap emerges in the bloc’s treatment of small businesses. It ignores the acute compliance burden small exporters may face when navigating unilateral carbon border taxes. Addressing these gaps could help translate BRICS’s broad commitment to carbon-market cooperation into a more operational framework that responds to developing-country exporters' concerns.

The Declaration’s approach is broadly consistent with CEEW’s research on carbon markets. A joint study by CEEW and King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC) finds that emerging economies are increasingly adopting compliance carbon markets to enable cost-effective decarbonisation. CEEW research on Indian perspectives on the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) further shows that carbon pricing and trade are increasingly interconnected, with Indian exporters, particularly MSMEs, facing significant challenges in product-level emissions measurement, supply-chain traceability and verification.

To translate the New Delhi Declaration into actionable impact, BRICS policymakers must bridge opposition to unilateral measures by building supply chain resilience.

• Increase cooperation on digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (dMRV) systems and make them interoperable.
• Supporting MSMEs to manage the compliance burden imposed by such measures is crucial, given the punitive default values used in the absence of verified actual emission data.
• Bridging the gap between carbon finance and adaptation goals is a significant stride made by this Declaration through reference to a Dialogue on Aligning Carbon Markets with Adaptation Goals.
• Leveraging the BRICS Climate Research Platform to further international carbon markets cooperation through Article 6 of the Paris Agreement amongst member states.
• Greater ex ante consultation and impact assessment for unilateral measures, particularly on developing-country exports, industrialisation and development.
• Designing and implementing measures that respect the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC principle) and are accompanied by technology transfer, affordable and concessional climate finance, and capacity-building, to enable countries to upgrade production.

• Greater alignment of emissions-accounting methodologies, reporting requirements and verification systems to reduce unnecessary compliance barriers and facilitate trade.
• A more structured interface between the World Trade Organisation and UNFCCC to identify areas for cooperation, ensuring emerging climate-trade architecture drives investment and technological progress in developing countries.

Is it time for a roadmap of distributed renewables deployment?

With DRE now explicitly recognised as a BRICS priority and increasing engagement, there is a timely opportunity to develop an indicative roadmap for cooperation to accelerate deployment through a shared long-term ambition, create demand through knowledge, and strengthen distributed-renewables system integration.

Over the past decade, distributed renewable energy (DRE) has shifted from the margins to the mainstream in the global energy transition. What was initially identified as a key instrument of expanding energy access is now increasingly recognised for its role in strengthening energy security, supporting economic development and enhancing grid flexibility. Distributed solar now accounts for 43 per cent of global solar installed capacity. CEEW’s research indicates that DRE could reduce the cost of supplying agricultural power by up to 24 per cent by 2030 and prevent the production of around 160 MtCO₂e annually. Additionally, it could also affect the livelihoods of 37 million people.

In 2015, BRICS formally acknowledged energy as a core pillar of its economic partnership. This was followed by the establishment of the Energy Research Cooperation Platform (ERCP), which reinforced the importance of advancing energy transitions and implementing sustainable development goals. The Roadmap for BRICS Energy Cooperation 2025-2030, adopted in May 2025, marked an important shift by explicitly identifying DRE as a priority under the broader renewable energy (RE) thematic area.

The 18th BRICS Summit reinforced the importance of balanced and diversified energy mixes that reflect national circumstances and recognised that a wide variety of energy sources and technologies are important enablers of energy security and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

BRICS members are at different stages of DRE deployment, policy development and institutional maturity. While India, China and Brazil are at the forefront of deployment, several African and Middle Eastern members remain at an early stage of developing distributed energy markets. The drivers of DRE adoption also vary across countries, shaped by energy security, energy access, affordability, and resource optimisation. This diversity in experience and market maturity creates an opportunity for peer learning, knowledge exchange, and collaboration. With DRE now explicitly recognised as a BRICS priority and increasing engagement, there is a timely opportunity to develop an indicative roadmap for cooperation to accelerate deployment.

• Setting a shared long-term ambition: Develop a common DRE data and indicator framework, leveraging existing institutional capacity to enable comparable measurement across BRICS. This creates a common basis for measuring progress while allowing members to reflect their different resource endowments, needs, and market maturity.

• Creating demand through knowledge sharing: Leverage the ERCP and BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage to establish a standing knowledge and skilling exchange covering policy and regulatory practices, financing and business models, and workforce development. This would draw on complementary national experiences to help members adapt proven approaches to their own context.
• Strengthen distributed-renewables system integration: Establish a common learning and pilot agenda on distribution-level flexibility, distributed storage, network-cost recovery, and utility and prosumer business models, translating shared learning into joint demonstration projects and scalable solutions.

The proposed roadmap focuses on the cooperation architecture, with ERCP being the lead institution for its delivery. The section on smart grids and energy storage below covers integrating DRE as a grid resource, distributed storage, connectivity standards for BESS and inverters, and market and tariff reforms. It sets out the BRICS Centre of Excellence's technical mandate.

What could India do to build secure critical mineral supply chains?

The BRICS bloc offers an alternative plurilateral platform for India to advance its National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) by gaining mineral access from resource-rich countries, anchoring its relationship with China and leveraging the New Development Bank, among other steps.

The Declaration highlights that critical minerals are essential for the “development of zero- and low-emission energy technologies, energy security, and resilience of energy supply chains.” Earlier, representatives stressed this at the India-chaired BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs/International Relations dialogue held on the margins of the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 80) in 2025.

The geographical concentration and geopolitical volatility in critical minerals supply chains pose a risk to sustainable development for India and several Global South countries. Prominent examples include China’s rare-earth export controls, currently suspended until 10 November 2026, which pose a risk to India and other import-dependent countries. At the same time, resource-rich countries such as Indonesia are adopting policies that restrict access to unprocessed ores to promote domestic processing and value addition.

CEEW research underlines the dual risk in India’s context: rising demand and economic risk. India is 100 per cent import-dependent for several critical minerals, including cobalt, lithium, and rare earths, required to manufacture clean technologies such as solar PV, wind, and batteries. To address this, India’s National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) allocated INR 34,300 crore over seven years, adopting a whole-of-value chain – exploration, mining, processing, and recycling – in 2025. India is also exploring international critical mineral partnerships to further NCMM, with over 20 bilateral partnerships and participation in multilateral platforms such as the FORGE Initiative (Forum on Resource, Geostrategic Engagement), Pax Silica, and the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative. It also established Khanij Bidesh India Limited (KABIL), as an institutional arm, to secure access to critical minerals.

However, limited international partnerships have translated into tangible outcomes.

First, CEEW research shows that India has limited processing know-how, underdeveloped R&D-commercialisation linkages, and gaps in access to the technologies needed to produce and recycle high-purity critical minerals. Second, firms face financial constraints due to scarce commercial-scale know-how and uncertain demand amid volatile global mineral prices. Third, trade barriers imposed by partner countries, auction processes, and tax regimes further complicate project implementation.

For India, the expanded BRICS bloc offers an alternative plurilateral platform to advance NCMM, with partners sharing principles of multipolarity and equitable development. It could consider the following recommendations:

• Gain mineral access from resource-rich countries. For example, Brazil produced ~90 per cent of the world's niobium in 2024; Indonesia accounted for 62 per cent of global nickel production and was the second-biggest producer of mined cobalt; and South Africa accounted for 70 per cent and 46 per cent of global platinum and chromium production, respectively.
• Anchor its relationship with China, which dominates global critical mineral markets, to avoid the consequences of impending export controls. CEEW research shows that China was responsible for more than 90 per cent of global rare earth processing, 95 per cent of graphite processing, and 79 per cent of refined cobalt production in 2024.
• Leverage the BRICS-associated New Development Bank (NDB) and co-invest in mineral processing projects, including offtakes in developing countries with the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

India could also propose the following measures to BRICS members to leverage their unique resource endowments and capabilities to build a reliable, global critical mineral ecosystem.

• Introduce an Energy Transition and Mineral Fund: The NDB could extend co-financing to mining activities, geological mapping and exploration, mineral processing and recycling facilities, and cross-cutting infrastructural development projects.
• Establish a BRICS Critical Minerals Business Platform: BRICS could provide institutional support to co-finance cross-border public and private transition mineral partnerships by adopting a friend-shoring approach that ensures resource-rich countries gain value-added benefits.
• Introduce a Framework for Reducing Mineral Trade Barriers: Members and partners could develop a nonbinding framework to mitigate mineral export restrictions, tariffs, and non-tariff barriers among BRICS members.
• Promote Technology Co-development and Transfer: Develop national guidelines to propel low-carbon processing and recycling technology transfer; relax IP mandates and encourage co-development for mineral processing technologies.

Where does the future of smart grids and energy storage lie?

India’s growing energy requirement needs the Centre of Excellence on Smart Grids and Energy Storage to be given a working mandate that allows flexible operation for grid management, share best practices on consumer engagement, retail electricity pricing using smart meters, and use the NDB to test and scale innovative market mechanisms.

The BRICS New Delhi Declaration highlights digitalisation, specifically AI and advanced data analytics, as holding significant potential to improve system planning, grid management, renewable integration, operational efficiency, and cyber-resilience of energy infrastructure. The Declaration also adopted the Guiding Principles of Smart Grids and Energy Storage, and noted the establishment of the Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage. The four Guiding Principles are: sovereignty, non-intrusiveness, equity, and technological neutrality; strengthening energy security and promoting sustainability; fostering collaboration through enabling mechanisms; and Financing and investment.

CEEW research shows that India must successfully integrate 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity into the grid by 2030 to reliably meet projected power demand. If demand exceeds expectations, 100 GW of additional solar and wind energy could save INR 13,000 to 42,400 crore in annual power procurement costs in 2030. However, this will also require five to six times more grid flexibility, making battery energy storage systems (BESS), flexible operation of existing thermal power fleets, and deeper wholesale and retail markets critical for reliable and affordable grids.

In the context of India’s growing energy requirement, advanced generation, transmission and distribution planning will be key. Additionally, new procurement mechanisms will play a role in attracting investment in the right mix of resources, ensuring consumers have access to secure, affordable, and sustainable energy. Innovations in market and bid design, such as the recent contract-for-differences (CfD) pilot auction and the 1 GW round-the-clock RE tender by the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), will help utilities source clean, flexible power to meet peak-time demand cost-effectively, which is otherwise expensive to meet through traditional long-term contracts.

Principle two specifically mentions distributed renewable energy (DRE) and demand-side management as levers for energy efficiency, affordability, reliability, and accessibility. CEEW research shows that shifting demand from evening to solar hours through time-of-day pricing and demand-flexibility programmes could lower system-level costs by India’s mission-mode deployment of smart meters has achieved over 70 million installations. Using this digitalisation layer and the data it generates to nudge consumers to consume more during solar hours will be central to an efficient, RE-rich grid. The Centre of Excellence on Smart Grids and Energy Storage will provide an important platform for collaborative research and sharing of best practices on this front.

The way forward for cooperation on grid and energy storage, then, is clear:

• Give the Centre of Excellence on Smart Grids and Energy Storage a working mandate, particularly to standardise connectivity specifications for BESS and inverter systems that allow flexible operation for grid management. These technical and standards mandates for the Centre of Excellence should feed into the wider cooperation architecture set out in the distributed renewables roadmap above.
• Share best practices on consumer engagement and retail electricity pricing using smart meters. The Centre for Excellence should also explore innovative ways to use data analytics and AI to actively manage demand to help cost-effectively utilise RE.
• Use the New Development Bank to test and scale innovative market mechanisms. The NDB must use innovative financing to support market-based scale-up of clean energy technologies, suited to the needs of respective grids.

How will India put people, planet, purpose, and process at the centre of AI?

India could do so through resource-conscious development, enabling novel forms of crop diversification, platforms democratising climate-data intelligence, and tools that turn data into actionable, near-real-time outputs.

The BRICS New Delhi Declaration’s discourse on artificial intelligence (AI), one of today’s fastest-growing sectors, is explicit in only one paragraph. However, six other paragraphs that do not explicitly mention AI also shape the agenda for half the world’s population—focusing on digital public infrastructure (DPI), digital skilling, capacity building, research cooperation, and a safe digital environment.

BRICS views AI as an innovation with major economic and sustainable development opportunities, and names five priority sectors for international cooperation: trust and accessibility, energy efficiency, innovation, risk mitigation, and leveraging it for growth and social good. The need for a just and equitable future, especially for countries in the Global South, underscores the importance of these sectors. Further, the bloc commits to implementing the BRICS Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, issued at Rio on 6 July 2025.

CEEW co-chaired the Climate and AI Expert Engagement Group (EEG) for India’s AI Impact Summit Presidency, which outlined three grand challenges in sustainably scaling AI and leveraging it for climate action. First, responsible scaling with respect for the planetary boundaries, without stifling innovation. Second, ensuring the development and deployment of locally grounded, inclusive applications for equitable benefit distribution. Third, enabling institutional ownership to overcome the pilot trap and embed systems at scale within public and private institutions.

The Expert Group’s solutions to these grand challenges reflected a shared set of underlying principles. Planet: Stakeholders should design, deploy, and operate AI systems within the planet’s ecological boundaries; Purpose: Governments and stakeholders should steer AI innovation and deployment toward clearly defined public priorities (particularly where societal benefits are high and market incentives alone are insufficient); Process: AI actors should promote transparency on environmental footprint, performance, and broader impacts of AI systems; And People: AI systems should be developed and deployed with communities as active stakeholders, reflecting local context, consent, and lived realities.

CEEW’s work with AI demonstrates how innovation can persist and thrive alongside these principles.

• Planet: With resource efficiency in mind, CEEW and Systemiq mapped the rapid growth in data centre capacity in India, which poses substantial implications for land, energy, and water systems, and argued that decisions taken today on siting, power sourcing, and cooling technologies will shape India’s long-term environmental and infrastructure footprint.
  
  In addition, to diversify crops, reduce import burdens, enhance nutritional security, and build climate resilience, CEEW recommended integrating AI-based geospatial image-processing tools with India's foundational Agri Stack to address key bottlenecks in scaling direct benefit transfer schemes for crop diversification in India.
• Purpose: CEEW built CRAVIS (Climate Resilience Analytics and Visualisation Intelligence System) to provide insights and forecasting for climate resilience, democratising climate data intelligence. It is an integrated platform that brings together historical trends, future projections, and sectoral data, with a built-in Agentic AI layer for source-backed insights on heat stress, changing rainfall patterns, and extreme events.
• Process: The challenges facing large-scale strategic infrastructure development, from clean energy assets to data centres, relate to their demand for land, water, and energy. Extractive assets quickly lose social license to operate when they overwhelm resource systems locally. CEEW estimated India’s clean energy potential by dividing the entire Indian landmass into 5 x 5 km rasters and evaluating each for clean energy resource potential, overlaid with land-use criteria, exclusion factors, water-related constraints, and other limiting constraints. It showcased that realisable potential was a fraction of what aggregate sectoral estimates portray. A transparent accounting of resource demands from developers is critical for siting decisions and to mitigate the loss of social license to operate, whether for clean energy or AI.
• People: CEEW and IIT Gandhinagar also developed an AI-Air Quality Decision Support System (AI-AQDSS) for Thane by integrating data from multiple sources to provide near-real-time pollution levels. VayuChat was also created to simplify analytics and generate actionable insights using simple natural language queries. Another people-focused example is CEEW’s work on vector-borne diseases—an early warning system for dengue in Madhya Pradesh that uses a two-stage machine learning system to forecast risk 2-8 weeks in advance across 51 districts.

What does the Urban Mobility Hub bring to the table?

The Urban Mobility Hub could add practical solutions for cities to manage and electrify informal shared transport and electric micro-mobility, robust governance and AI-tech adoption, developing further institutional networks and focusing on right-sized and context-appropriate public transport.

The BRICS Urban Mobility Hub is a cooperation platform ratified by member countries, under India's BRICS Chairship in 2026. The BRICS Transport Working Group identified urban mobility as one of six flagship areas, alongside circularity in infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel, transport decarbonisation, resilient logistics, and railway research. The Transport Ministers' Meet in Nagpur adopted, by consensus, a Ministerial Declaration for two frameworks and an Urban Mobility Hub. Two BRICS frameworks of cooperation on Transport Decarbonisation Knowledge Exchange and Supply Chain also promote the exchange of knowledge through structured training, expert workshops, and scalable models. The joint ministerial working group adopted a Sustainable Aviation Fuels Forum and Voluntary Principles for Climate-Resilient Urban Infrastructure.

BRICS cities share the diagnosis of congestion, informal settlements, weak services, and air pollution but lack collaborative power to solve issues together and faster. Several reforms to address these issues run in parallel, but member nations share limited best practices and successful strategies. The Urban Mobility Hub will organise training programmes, seminars, and technical exchanges, including developing curricula and learning modules for officials. It will also document and disseminate best practices, case studies, toolkits, and reference frameworks. The Hub will support research, innovation, and pilot initiatives. Since its stated purpose is knowledge exchange and cooperation, the Hub is positioned as a learning platform; India may plan and lead a physical facility.

BRICS members also face issues arising from rapid urbanisation, such as high travel demand, resulting local pollution, deteriorating livability, and, ultimately, a declining economy. Member countries are solving these urban mobility problems in isolation, with limited infrastructure in dense habitats, affordability constraints, road safety for vulnerable users, and limited access to technology and financing for clean fleets. Urban Mobility Hub will potentially leverage BRICS financing institutions like the NDB, BRICS platform for Environmentally Sound Technology (BEST), and BRICS Business Council.

Several CEEW mobility and transport studies closely align with the Urban Mobility Hub’s interest in scalable, inclusive, and low-carbon urban mobility solutions across BRICS. Four priorities could help transform the Hub into a cooperative success:

• EV adoption: CEEW’s city-level research examines practical solutions for cities to manage and electrify informal shared transport and electric micro-mobility. CEEW's recent study provides a tiered cooperation pathway, from national action and core-BRICS coordination to emerging BRICS members, for Electric Heavy-Duty Vehicle (E-HDV) adoption.
• Robust Governance and AI-Tech adoption: The Hub's targets include knowledge exchange, where strong urban transport governance and technical training are critical to keep pace with AI and Technology.
• Institutional Network: India has ready analogues such as the Institute of Urban Transport, the National Institute of Urban Affairs, and MoHUA's four Centres of Excellence in IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, NIT Warangal and CEPT University Ahmedabad. CEEW plans to support the Hub’s institutional setup, build institutional network links with its Indian analogues, provide Global South evidence, and offer convening support.
• Bus-based transit focus: CEEW research on right-sized and context-appropriate public transport, including formalising para-transit with microbuses, behaviour nudges for EV adoption, robust communications, and inclusivity, remains critical to the transition. Together, these insights could strengthen the Hub’s bus-first, demand-aggregation and capacity-building agenda, while enabling BRICS cities to share and adapt solutions across different urban contexts.

How would community-based climate adaptation work in India?

Strengthening inclusive governance, making climate risk information locally accessible and actionable, channeling funds where climate risks are experienced and enabling systemic change could be critical for BRICS principles to be translated into on-ground practice.

The BRICS New Delhi Declaration is an important new push toward people-centric and community-based adaptation. It recognises the value of traditional knowledge systems, Indigenous and local communities’ practices, local innovations, and communities' experiences in enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening climate resilience and sustainable development. It also calls for greater integration of traditional knowledge and local best practices with scientific knowledge and technological innovation to tackle rising climate challenges.

This commitment builds on work undertaken while India chaired BRICS. In August, the 12th BRICS Environment Ministers’ Meeting adopted the Principles for Advancing Climate Resilience through People-centric and Community-based Adaptation built on Traditional Knowledge, along with four knowledge compendiums capturing practices, innovations and local knowledge from member countries.

This framing matters because it recognises communities as active agents in building long-term adaptation. Climate risks are experienced locally, and solutions that draw on lived experience can better align with local ecosystems, livelihoods, and vulnerabilities. However, implementing traditional knowledge requires communities to have a meaningful role in setting priorities, accessing resources, and executing policy.

This is where the BRICS principles could draw from emerging evidence on locally led climate action (LLCA). CEEW research, drawing on evidence from more than 75 community-based initiatives across 16 countries, identifies three core design features for operationalising people-centric, locally led climate action: devolved finance and decision-making; inclusive and accountable local leadership; and climate-informed local planning that integrates scientific and indigenous knowledge.

Four priorities could help transform the BRICS Principles into on-ground practice:

• Strengthen inclusive governance: Climate planning must begin with and account for community needs and enable local actors to co-create and lead context-specific solutions. Embed traditional knowledge and local leadership in planning and institutions, rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
• Make climate risk information locally accessible and actionable: Climate data needs to be downscaled, accessible, and interpretable at the local level. It should combine scientific information with community knowledge to help identify differentiated vulnerability to enable continuous monitoring, feedback, and course correction.
• Channel funds where climate risks are experienced: Predictable and accessible adaptation finance must reach local institutions and communities. This demands effective horizontal and vertical coordination, greater fiscal subsidiarity and accountability that flows downwards. CEEW’s research highlights devolved decision-making and predictable finance as critical enablers of locally led adaptation.
• Enable systemic change: Funders, implementation partners, and local governments need to reimagine traditional project cycles toward flexible, iterative approaches that allow communities to learn, adapt, and build institutional capacity over a longer timeline.

What will centres of excellence for agroecology contribute to India’s food-system resilience?

To translate the intent into reality, member states, starting with India, must build domestically aligned policies and ground-level capabilities. India needs to develop risk-calibrated transition roadmaps, strengthening the domestic ecosystem for lower-input agriculture, and making BRICS’ agroecology cooperation farmer-first.

The New Delhi Declaration formally established a BRICS Network of Centres of Excellence (CoE) on Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture for Climate Resilience and Productivity. Coordinated initially by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research (IIFSR), its stated mandate is to advance "practices that cut dependence on external inputs while restoring soil health."

Across an expanded bloc uniting major agricultural producers and importers, including India, Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia, this initiative represents a constructive macroeconomic alignment. Rather than relying solely on securing imported agri-inputs during market disruptions, BRICS is charting a long-term resilience strategy: strengthening internal soil health and ecosystem capacity so agricultural systems gradually require fewer external inputs.

For India, this strategy also has a climate resilience imperative. 310 of 651 agricultural districts are highly climate-vulnerable. Healthier soils and diversified farming systems can strengthen farm resilience to climate change while reducing dependence on inputs. But the transition from input-intensive, monoculture systems must be calibrated. Sri Lanka’s case shows the food security risks of moving too fast, while CEEW’s research in Andhra Pradesh shows the transition depends strongly on local conditions.

Across an expanded BRICS, the strategic signal is clear: build long-term food security resilience. However, a global knowledge platform such as the CoE is only as effective as the domestic policies beneath it. To translate this diplomatic intent into reality, member states, starting with India, must build domestically aligned policies and ground-level capabilities. Three actions, then, become particularly relevant:

• Developing risk-calibrated transition roadmaps: The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare should identify regions where lower-input agricultural practices can expand based on irrigation dependence, soil conditions, cropping systems, baseline yields, and institutional capacity. The NITI Aayog targets of increasing natural farming from currently less than 5 per cent to 25 per cent of net sown area by 2070 provide a long-term direction. Translating this ambition into policy will require spatially differentiated pathways that account for agronomic feasibility, food-security exposure and transition costs.
• Strengthening the domestic ecosystem for lower-input agriculture: Scaling agroecological practices will require reliable access to bio-inputs, local resource centres, technical services and distribution networks. Public finance can play a catalytic role by reducing early-stage investment risks and crowding in private capital for local entrepreneurs and larger enterprises to meet these needs. The Government of India and the New Development Bank could leverage instruments such as the INR 66,310 crore sanctioned by the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund to support commercially viable enterprises and decentralised infrastructure. The implementation challenge, however, is significant. According to the latest data available, as of July 2025, only 2,045 were set up against 7,934 identified Bio-input Resource Centres under the National Mission on Natural Farming are currently operational.
• Making BRICS’ agroecology cooperation farmer-first: The 2026 BRICS theme offers an opportunity to put farmers and communities at the centre of agroecological transitions, strengthening local adaptive capacity and food-system resilience. Building on traditional knowledge, farmer organisations and grassroots innovations, the Network on Regenerative Food Systems and Agrobiodiversity and the CoE can connect scientific and farmer knowledge through joint research, field experimentation and farmer-to-farmer learning. BRICS AGRIN can strengthen farmer participation, while the Basic Agriculture Information Exchange System (BAIES) can document and share lessons.

How should India leverage climate-anchored early warning systems for infectious diseases?

For India to leverage climate-anchored early warning systems for infectious diseases, it is important to integrate meteorological, environmental, entomological, and epidemiological information to draw out better insights. Building on granular data and validated subnational systems, investing in strengthening local capacity and institutional learning and linking every warning to action and validate deployment will go a long way in making a difference.

The BRICS Declaration calls for stronger cooperation on health security, resilient surveillance, and effective early-warning mechanisms. It specifically welcomes establishing a dedicated sub-working group to advance the BRICS Integrated Early Warning System (IEWS) to prevent and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. The declaration also reaffirms cooperation on people-centred digital healthcare systems and highlights digital health technology and artificial intelligence for preparedness for future health emergencies. This creates an opportunity for India to connect existing public health and surveillance capabilities with climate-informed early warning systems.

CEEW's climate-anchored early-warning system for vector-borne diseases (VBD), developed across 51 districts of Madhya Pradesh, combines weekly dengue surveillance and laboratory data from 2017-2025 with IMD rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity; satellite-derived vegetation; and population data. The two-stage ensemble model first identifies whether dengue transmission is likely and then estimates potential outbreak severity. The model was tested on 2024 data from major districts it had never encountered before, simulating real-time use. Depending on data availability, each district was observed for a different number of weeks, covering a total of 1716 ‘district-weeks’. On this test set, it achieved 84 per cent sensitivity, catching 765 of 916 outbreaks and alerting them with 87 per cent precision.

The research also highlights the challenges of scaling early warning systems. Forecasting remains constrained by data quality and missing drivers such as serotype circulation, water stagnation, and entomological conditions. It is also important to integrate meteorological, environmental, entomological, and epidemiological information to draw out better insights.

The three priorities for actionable early warning systems for infectious diseases:

• Build on granular data and validated subnational systems: Use existing district-level VBD surveillance under the National Centre for Vector Borne Disease Control (NCVBDC), alongside Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP)-Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) disease surveillance, as building blocks for BRICS IEWS, with joint protocols that standardise data quality practices and integrate climate, environmental, epidemiological and entomological data.
• Invest in strengthening local capacity and institutional learning: Equip health officials to interpret and act on forecasts through regular training, while establishing feedback loops between model developers and programme teams to continuously improve the system.
• Link every warning to action and validate deployment: Translate risk categories into predefined actions, with clear responsibilities and timelines for surveillance, vector control and resource mobilisation. Complement retrospective model performance with prospective validation during live transmission seasons to assess operational utility before scaling the systems.

The New Delhi Declaration's primary strength lies in its structural design. Rather than imposing top-down mandates, this year’s BRICS has prioritised institutional platforms, collaborative hubs, and shared principles across carbon markets, distributed renewables, critical mineral supply chains, smart grids, artificial intelligence, urban mobility, community-based climate adaptation, agroecology, and health security.

This approach offers a pragmatic strategy that enables member states to pivot toward equitable green growth through multilateral cooperation amid increasing global fragmentation. Nevertheless, frameworks alone will not guarantee outcomes. The ultimate impact of these newly established mechanisms will depend on four decisive elements: establishing clear operational mandates, ensuring interoperable data and emissions-accounting methodologies, directing climate finance toward entities closest to climate risks, and empowering local communities facing these vulnerabilities. While the Declaration creates a robust foundation, domestic policy integration and diplomatic execution will determine whether these collaborative platforms achieve tangible impact.

Ishita Gupta, Kushi Naidu, Neeraj Patel, Neeraja Kulkarni, Rishav Thakur, and Sandhya Subramanian are Research Analysts; Aishwarya Jain, Darshna Singh, Debanjan Bagui, Mohana Bharathi Manimaran, Nikhitha Jagadeesh and Simran Sukhija Mohana are Programme Associates; Ayesha Dash is a Foresight Associate; Shreya Wadhawan and Vaibhav Chugh are Programme Leads; Saru Gupta and Ankit Sharma are Consultants; Bhawna Tyagi, Chandan Jha, and Dhruvak Aggarwal are Senior Programme Leads; Ganesh Dileep is Chief of Staff; and Disha Agarwal, Himani Jain, and Vishwas Chitale are Fellows at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

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