Urban climate resilience in central India: Trends, inequities, and spatio-temporal dynamics (2001-2021)

Strengthening climate resilience is essential for safeguarding vulnerable regions from escalating climate risks. Despite India's exposure to diverse climatic extremes, district-level assessments of resilience remain limited. Study develops a comprehensive, multidimensional framework to evaluate climate resilience across ten highly vulnerable districts in Central India from 2001 to 2021. The framework integrates four key dimensions: Robustness, Rapidity, Adaptability, and Sustainability, and employs the Entropy Weight Method to construct the CRI. A novel methodological contribution of this study is the combined use of CRI and CCD, offering a more granular understanding of resilience interactions than existing vulnerability-focused or single-index approaches. Findings reveal a 12.2% increase in overall resilience, primarily driven by improvements in adaptability linked to enhanced literacy, improved health outcomes, diversified livelihoods, and enhanced disaster response capacity. Rapidity also showed notable gains, whereas sustainability stagnated due to persistent ecological degradation, land-use change, and long-term environmental pressures. Spatial analysis indicates a gradual narrowing of disparities, with districts such as Palamu, East Nimar, and Bhandara showing faster improvement, while Durg, Dewas, and Ratlam continue to face structural and ecological constraints. Service-oriented districts, such as Jaipur and Nashik, consistently perform better, whereas agriculturally intensive and industrial districts remain more vulnerable to environmental stress. By linking district-level resilience patterns with national climate governance frameworks such as the NAPCC and SAPCCs, the study provides a scalable and policy-relevant approach for localized climate adaptation. The integrated CRI-CCD framework enhances methodological robustness and provides actionable insights for improving long-term socio-ecological resilience in Central India.