How rural women in Odisha, India, are navigating climate change

By Abhijit Mohanty, Somyashree Tripathy, and Trinath TaraputiaApril 23, 2026

Key takeaways

•Participatory rural exercises (PRAs) with 150 women in four Odisha districts reveal local climate impacts including links between forest loss, migration, health, and nutrition that standard data collection methods often miss.

•Rural women in these communities are directly experiencing the effects of climate change as declining rainfall, water scarcity, and extreme weather increase their labor burdens, disrupt livelihoods, and worsen household nutrition.

•The PRAs generated concrete, community-led solutions, with women identifying priorities such as water harvesting, forest restoration, mixed cropping, and better policy coordination grounded in their lived experience.

In Goudaguda village in the Koraput district in the Indian state of Odisha, a group of women sit in a circle on the ground, sketching a rough map of their village on the soil with colored chalk and sticks. They mark streams, forest patches, farmland and homes. Soon, another layer appears on the map: places where water sources have dried up, forest patches have thinned, and fields no longer yield what they once did.

These simple sketches are part of a broader attempt to understand how climate change is reshaping everyday life in rural Odisha. In September and October 2025, the Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), an NGO working in India’s rainfed regions, conducted a series of Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) with around 150 women across four districts: Koraput, Kendrapara, Keonjhar, and Bargarh. These represent four distinct physiographic zones of the state: the Southern Ghats, Eastern Coastal Plains, Northern Plateau and Western Drylands.

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