As the EU and India pour billions into energy grids, transport corridors and digital infrastructure, something vital keeps slipping through the net: the people who live, work, migrate and grieve along these routes. Two young woman climate leaders from South Asia argue that the next frontier of EU–Global Majority cooperation must be a social architecture, one that supports the people – their health, their rights, their dignity and their knowledge – behind systems, not just the systems alone.
When it comes to policy and partnerships between the EU and the Global Majority, the social dimensions of climate change – labour rights along green corridors, gendered impacts of energy transition, mental ill-health, the mobility of climate-affected communities, the livelihoods of informal workers and the voices of frontline communities in the design of the very infrastructure built in their name – regularly go missing. They are consistently underweighted in initiatives like the India-EU Connectivity Partnership and the Global Gateway: frameworks that speak the language of megatons and megawatts, but are less fluent in terms of displacement, care work or grief.
The Global Gateway alone pledges €300 billion by 2027, yet its social accountability is far thinner than its investment targets. Across 2023, 2024 and 2025, roughly half of all Global Gateway flagship projects have been in the climate and energy sector, while less than 10% are in education and research, and health makes up just over 10% of the total, despite evidence that economic and social returns to infrastructure are significantly higher when accompanied by similar levels of investment in health and education. The Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman estimates that every dollar invested in early childhood education yields returns of up to $13 in lower-income countries – a ratio that dwarfs most hard infrastructure investments.
Lived experience as adaptive logic
Too often, lived experience in the Global Majority is documented as a tragedy, rather than intelligence that can be trusted, both within recovery and with regard to prevention of crisis. Across Nepal and India, and other vulnerable contexts, we've seen from our experience that young people are designing responses in spaces where formal systems and resources fall short – whether it is through education initiatives or community support circles or developing social projects that cater to local issues at the root. In South Asia alone, over 750 million people are estimated to be highly vulnerable to climate impacts, yet the region receives a fraction of global adaptation finance relative to its exposure.
In Nepal, one such signal is what we call ‘the 8-year gap’: the stretch between a child’s first encounter with a climate disaster, which is often around age five, and their first formal lesson about it, which is typically at 13. This gap is problematic because it can lead to a variety of challenges, from new, evolving experiences like eco-anxiety, to fractured learning pathways, which could prompt solution-oriented thinking and learning. And for many, the chance to re-engage with education is lost altogether. Nepal alone experienced over 44,000 climate-related disasters between 2010 and 2020, displacing hundreds of thousands – many of them children in the middle of a school year.
Resilience has a lot to do with people and how they engage with crises rather than just material infrastructure. Research increasingly shows that psychosocial support after climate disasters is among the strongest predictors of long-term community recovery, yet it remains one of the most chronically underfunded response categories globally. Initiatives like ReGen Climate Lab (led by this blog’s co-author Aakriti) centre climate education for children in remote, vulnerable places. By integrating psychosocial and learning support into schools, they transform classrooms themselves into resilience hubs for climate-affected contexts. Meanwhile, co-author Muskan’s thesis on eco-anxiety among South Asian youth revealed that of 245 young people across the region, 78.8% identified with climate anxiety and related emotions – yet 93% had never sought psychological help for it. The gap between felt experience and available support is a structural failure.
Further, projects and investments cannot function in isolation from the community. Muskan’s research reveals that healing and coping in many parts of the world has always been collective, between extended families, spiritual communities and intergenerational networks. What Aakriti’s work in Nepal makes visible is the texture of that silence: The children who experience a flood at eight are not simply waiting for a classroom lesson. They are developing emotional responses like fear and grief in silence, without vocabulary or validation, and often within families and communities where older generations feel the same anxiety but have been taught to endure rather than name it. Teachers - the adults closest to these children during climate disruption - carry this unrecognised psychosocial labour daily, with no training, no framework, and no support to hold what children bring into the classroom.
As opposed to being an ‘add-on’ to adaptation, emotional and social capital helps build foundation.
From knowledge extraction to social circularity
The European Union has shown global leadership through the European Green Deal and its growing investment in sustainable infrastructure abroad. The Green Deal Industrial Plan and associated external investment instruments represent the EU’s most ambitious attempt yet to align climate diplomacy with development finance – but the governance structures underpinning them remain largely designed in Brussels. As such, there are significant gaps in the exchange and reception of diverse forms of knowledge.
Historically, international cooperation has leaned towards ‘knowledge extraction’: documenting climate impacts in the Global South without proportionate investment in the solutions from those same contexts, in their own language and capacities. A 2023 analysis found that less than 15% of climate adaptation research published in high-impact journals was led by researchers based in the countries most affected by climate change.
This extractive dynamic cuts especially deep in topics of health and wellbeing. The frameworks, diagnostic tools, support and therapeutic models that dominate global health systems were largely developed in and for the Global North. So communities provide the lived experience that fills academic literature on climate distress, while receiving back interventions that are culturally misaligned, linguistically inaccessible or simply absent.
But a different model is within reach. We’re calling it ‘social circularity’: a shift from uni-directional learning to shared design - from Global South to Global North as readily as the reverse. Consider the ‘offline-first’ digital ecosystems developed in rural Nepal. Born out of necessity in contexts of unstable connectivity, they ensure continuity in education and communication even during disruptions. With over 2.6 billion people globally still lacking reliable internet access, and climate shocks increasingly disrupting what connectivity does exist, these are not niche solutions, they are scalable blueprints. These solutions are globally relevant prototypes for any region, including parts of Europe facing climate-induced infrastructure stress.
This is where diplomacy can evolve: beyond transferring resources and toward co-creating systems. EU–South Asia cooperation has the potential to become a two-way architecture of resilience, where ideas can circulate as dynamically as capital and where solutions can be shaped by those who live the problems most intimately.
Recommendations
A meaningful EU-South Asia partnership must complement economic metrics with a deeper commitment to intergenerational wellbeing. This requires the following shifts:
- Invest in social infrastructure: Funding community-based psychosocial support systems alongside physical infrastructure, and recognising the valuable work of families, peer networks and community spaces. This investment must explicitly include teachers in climate-affected communities, who currently absorb children’s climate distress without any institutional recognition, training, or support. The Lancet Commission on Climate Change and Health has identified mental health as one of the most neglected dimensions of the climate crisis, with climate-related psychological distress already affecting hundreds of millions globally.
- Institutionalise youth-led R&D: Move beyond consultation. Create formal pathways for youth, especially from the Global South, to co-design the adaptation projects they will inherit. Young people under 30 make up over 40% of the population in South Asia.
- Broaden the scope of loss: Integrate Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD), including loss of identity, belonging, community and psychological safety, into climate finance and diplomatic frameworks. At COP27, the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund was a landmark step, but NELD is largely excluded from its operational criteria, despite being among the most acutely felt consequences of climate change in frontline communities. This exclusion is particularly consequential for children, whose developmental trajectories are shaped by losses - of routine, of belonging, of safety - that no financial instrument currently recognises.
- The EU must pursue pathways co-developed with partners that respond to local needs on equal terms – moving away from approaches rooted in normative superiority, which are seen as paternalistic in much of the Global South where memories of colonialism remain raw. Studies on EU development partnerships consistently flag ‘conditionality creep’ – the attachment of political and governance conditions to finance – as a key trust barrier in the Global South.
- Actively target inequalities as a key objective in partner countries, including gender, caste, disability and migration status, all of which compound climate vulnerability in ways that aggregate metrics routinely obscure.
Resilience will not be built through concrete alone. It will be built through the ‘social architecture’ that allows the next generation to remain grounded, adaptable and hopeful.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
