The recently released Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) gives major reasons to be wary. It ranks the United States at 57th out of 67 countries, painting a sobering picture of a global power lagging behind its commitments despite its vast resources and technological edge.
The country has not been immune to the escalating impacts of climate change. Record-breaking heat in Texas and Arizona pushed temperatures past 115°F (46.11°C) in 2024, while California faced wildfires that burned over 57,000 acres in January 2025, and New York City alone incurred flood damages of $512 million in 2021, underscoring the need for accelerated, localised climate action.
Simultaneously, India’s fast-urbanising cities are straining under the weight of compounding climate risks: blistering heatwaves, relentless floods, and overstretched infrastructure. Amid this shared vulnerability lies a shared opportunity. Cities in both nations—sprawling, dynamic, and home to hundreds of millions—are where the climate battle will be won or lost.
As federal actions in both countries struggle to keep pace with the scale of the crisis, cities are emerging as the most agile and impactful sites of innovation, resilience, and reform. Even after Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, an opportunity lies in city partnerships. It is within and between these urban centres that a new chapter of India–U.S. cooperation must be written—one rooted not only in diplomacy but in practical, peer-driven collaboration to unlock climate solutions that are both scalable and deeply local.
Clean energy financing emerges as a powerful entry point. Cities in India, such as Pune and Mumbai, stand to benefit immensely by partnering with U.S. cities such as Austin and Boston. For example, Austin currently sources around 50% of its electricity from renewables and is working toward a goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 through initiatives such as battery storage pilots, demand response platforms, and virtual power plants (VPPs).
Pune, which has achieved more than 259 MW of installed rooftop solar capacity as of 2024, faces challenges in grid integration and smart infrastructure. Despite rapid expansion in renewable energy, only 20% of its rooftop solar is connected to smart grids, creating barriers to optimisation. Austin’s experience with VPPs and advanced grid technologies offers tangible lessons to improve renewable integration and build grid resilience in Indian cities.
Moreover, financing mechanisms need innovation and scaling. The US–India Clean Energy Finance (USICEF) facility, operational between 2016 and 2023, helped de-risk early-stage investments for clean energy through technical assistance and grants, supporting 40 solar projects across 20 Indian states. A renewed facility with a sharper focus on city infrastructure, especially one aligned with subnational climate targets, could unleash similar gains.
Additionally, municipal green bonds present another avenue, as seen in Pune and Surat, though these remain underutilised. According to recent estimates, Indian cities can raise up to INR 20,000 crore through green municipal bonds by 2030. However, more than 60% of previously issued bonds failed to qualify as "green" due to the lack of formal labelling, missing out on access to concessional financing.
Here again, U.S. cities like Boston provide a useful reference, having raised $850 million through its green bond issue in 2021 alone. Technical guidance from Boston and similar cities on bond structuring, marketing, and labelling could enhance Indian municipal capacities and open access to international capital flows.
These exchanges are not theoretical. Existing examples of city-to-city collaboration demonstrate the potential. The sister city agreement between Carmel, Indiana, and Visakhapatnam, initiated in 2023, is one such case. Carmel’s mayor noted that practices like floating solar panels implemented in Visakhapatnam could be adopted in his city, showcasing how climate innovations can flow in both directions when platforms for structured collaboration exist.
A second promising area for bilateral city engagement lies in leveraging technology for building resilient infrastructure. As per NITI Aayog (2021), over 70% of the infrastructure that India will require by 2040 is yet to be built. Urban India is already facing increased climate variability—frequent floods, prolonged heatwaves, and rising sea levels—yet most cities lack predictive modelling, real-time flood alerts, and granular risk assessments. U.S. cities like New York, Houston, and Miami have made significant strides in deploying resilience-focused urban infrastructure.
New York’s $1.45 billion Lower Manhattan Coastal Resilience Plan integrates IoT sensors, digital elevation models, and automated floodgates, while its “FloodNet” program leverages low-cost ultrasonic sensors and GIS mapping to provide minute-by-minute flood data. Houston, post-Hurricane Harvey, has adopted a cloud-based GIS platform to map flood-prone areas in real time, enhancing early warning systems.
For Indian cities like Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru, which are similarly prone to flooding yet continue to rely on outdated historical flood maps, such technologies can be transformative. Mumbai, which records about 30 flood days annually, could greatly benefit from predictive flood models and real-time monitoring tools.
Establishing focused partnerships—Mumbai with New York or Chennai with Houston—could advance technical capacity, facilitate technology transfers, and co-create scalable urban resilience models fit for the Global South. The third and final area of collaboration is urban and industrial emissions management. With 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities located in India, the challenge is both acute and chronic.
Cities such as Delhi, Muzaffarnagar, Faridabad, and Noida are hotspots for PM2.5 pollution, driven by a mix of vehicular emissions, biomass burning, and clustered small and medium industries. Traditional command-and-control approaches, including blanket bans and generalised action plans, often falter due to weak enforcement and lack of emissions monitoring.
For instance, despite regulations, many industrial units evade penalties or operate without clearance. In Haryana, ₹499 crore was imposed as a penalty on industrial units for operating without environmental clearance. However, only ₹132 crore was recovered, highlighting weak enforcement.
In contrast, U.S. cities have pioneered regulatory innovations that rely on data-driven and incentive-based frameworks to reduce industrial emissions effectively. Los Angeles, for instance, implemented the RECLAIM program—an emissions trading scheme that successfully cut industrial NOx emissions by more than 60%. The program worked by setting a cap on total emissions and allowing industrial units to trade emission credits.
While India has experimented with Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) in Surat, the next phase could include scaling these projects in other mega-cities and integrating real-time data monitoring. Similarly, Denver and Pittsburgh have developed systems for source-specific permitting and fence-line monitoring, improving transparency and compliance in industrial corridors.
Source-specific permitting involved assigning tailored emission limits to individual industries based on their pollution profile, rather than having uniform limits across sectors. While fence line monitoring uses real-time data sensors placed at boundaries of polluting industries to detect pollution levels and thus enables early detection of violations and greater transparency.
For Indian cities, where enforcement is often based on limited on-site inspections and generalised permits, it offers valuable lessons. These innovations offer clear roadmaps for Indian cities that are currently constrained by limited technological solutions and traditional enforcement approaches.
A collaborative effort between U.S. and Indian cities to design market-based and tech-enabled emission control mechanisms can bridge the enforcement gap and ensure more sustainable urban air quality management. Collaborative pilots and peer-to-peer regulatory exchange programs could serve as catalytic platforms for reform.
The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat—it is an immediate urban reality. India and the United States, as two of the world’s largest democracies with diverse yet complementary urban experiences, have much to gain from structured city-level climate cooperation. U.S. cities bring mature regulatory frameworks, advanced technologies, and financing models. Indian cities, on the other hand, offer scale, urgency, and opportunities for implementation at speed.
If bilateral ties are to reflect the climate realities of today, they must devolve deeper into cities, where the stakes are highest, the impacts most visible, and the opportunities most tangible. The time is ripe for a reimagined India-U.S. urban partnership to emerge as a lighthouse for global city-level climate action.
(This article was co-authored by Radhey Wadhwa, Ph.D. candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi & Research Intern at ORF.)
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of ETV Bharat)
