Sectors Catalyst

Enabling cross-sectoral investments to accelerate climate action.

Civil society and philanthropy require support to expand beyond traditional project boundaries or sector silos and apply levers such as finance, policy, and technology in India's climate ecosystem. However, several challenges exist.

Stakeholders operate in silos, limiting coordination and learning, with a high probability of duplicated efforts.
Pilots succeed only in controlled settings and face critical bottlenecks.
Entry barriers hinder the growth of new sectors and conversations.
Information asymmetry among ecosystem stakeholders limits sectoral decision-making.

The ICC seeds, co-designs, and supports critical climate solutions - to help stakeholders scale existing solutions, or develop new scalable, replicable interventions. We adopt a collective approach, bringing together multiple stakeholders, to impact multiple actors.

Seed new spaces

Targeting sectors that are nascent yet critical to climate and resilience.

Create prototypes for scale

Ensuring solutions move beyond the pilot stage and can be replicated.

Curate multi-stakeholder coalitions

Effecting immediate action in sub-sectors hampered by siloed functioning

Key Collaborations

The ICC seed funded Akshvi, India’s digital platform for climate resilience, in partnership with SEEDS to quantify and report household-level loss and damage by creating disaster e-wallets. Real-time, self-reported, disaster-specific loss and damage data will then be aggregated to calculate state-level and national-level losses, a first for India. The effort will eventually serve as an online Digital Public Infrastructure platform, developed with Societal Thinking and Ashoka’s Aspire Programme.

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Supported by the ICC and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation, the Council on Energy , Environment, and Water is developing a Climate Risk Atlas (CRA) for India to identify and assess climate risks at national, state, and district levels. CRA is a tool to map and understand India’s critical vulnerabilities to climate risks, such as extreme weather events, urban heat stress, monsoon variability, and vector-borne diseases. This effort aims to enhance data-based climate decision-making including risk-proofing critical infrastructure, implementing nature-based solutions that build resilience, and embedding the data into State Action Plans for Climate Change.

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The Consortium for Agroecological Transformation (CAT) is a collective initiative of seven partner organisations, including the ICC, to enable a systemic shift towards an equitable and resilient food system through agroecology in India. It envisions a multi-stakeholder model that promotes a farmer-centric, landscape-level approach. In the next decade, the goal is to enable 40 million small and marginal farmers to transition to agroecology-based practices, while generating multiple biodiversity and climate outcomes, and ecosystem services.

WELL Labs and the ICC are co-creating Jaltol, an open-source comprehensive data analytics tool for water management, in close collaboration with civil society organisations. Launched in November 2021, decision-makers in the rural water security planning processes can get accurate data, estimate water budgets, and manage water efficiently.

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The ICC has supported the creation of a collaborative platform with 38 organisations called the India Agrivoltaics Alliance (IAA) in October 2023. The National Solar Energy Federation of India anchors the Alliance as the secretariat. The IAA seeks to build partnerships and platform voices from the agriculture and solar sectors, to chart out a low-carbon pathway and address issues at the nexus of food-energy-water to account for rising food insecurity and a need to enhance agrarian livelihoods and land productivity.

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The ICC launched the India Clean Air Connect portal in August 2023 along with Sensing Local, Asar Social Impact Advisors , EdelGive Foundation, and Open Philanthropy. It works with the air quality ecosystem in India to foster greater coordination for clean air initiatives across geographies by aggregating relevant resources and amplifying efforts to tackle air pollution.

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In partnership with the Clean Cooling Collaborative and initiated in 2024, the ICC is working to scale up micro-cold storage (MCS) solutions for agri-value chains in India. Titled Sugam CSS, this initiative envisions that farmers cultivating perishable produce have access to affordable and sustainable cooling. It aims to install 150-200 micro-cold storage units across multiple agri-clusters in 2-3 states in India, over the next three years. This is a cluster-based, multi-donor, multi-partner approach that adopts multiple levers – across technology, policy, finance, and capacity building.

The partnership between WOTR and ICC, the Maharashtra Sub-national Programme for Rural Resilience, is part of a sub-national consortium effort that seeks to build resilience in the agriculture and allied sectors in rural Maharashtra, in close collaboration with communities and government. This includes promoting nature-friendly farming practices and water stewardship, strengthening digital advisory agriculture systems, and integrating ecosystem-based adaptation across policies and sectoral plans.