<p>Climate-related environmental hazards—including floods, cyclones, landslides, heatwaves, and extreme precipitation—are increasingly shaping risk conditions within India’s coupled human–environment systems. While advances in forecasting, early warning, resilient infrastructure, and professional emergency response remain essential, the effectiveness of disaster risk management is strongly influenced by response latency during the early phase of hazard onset, when exposure pathways and cascading impacts are first activated. This article presents a science policy analysis of India’s nationally institutionalised community-based response programmes, Aapda Mitra and Yuva Aapda Mitra, and examines their role within the country’s climate risk governance architecture. Grounded in socio-environmental systems theory and resilience science, the analysis draws upon aggregated administrative and operational records from 2018 to 2024 to assess programme scale, spatial deployment, preparedness depth, activation during climate-related hazard events, and early-phase coordination characteristics. Trained community responders are conceptualised as a distributed, high-availability human response layer operating between hazard onset and the full mobilisation of professional response agencies. The analysis indicates that these programmes have evolved into a large-scale, nationally coordinated response system with extensive presence across climate-vulnerable districts, enhancing early-phase response through evacuation support, basic first aid, local hazard communication, and facilitation of access for authorities. Variability in refresher training participation highlights governance challenges in sustaining preparedness depth at scale. The article concludes that institutionally embedded community-based response systems constitute a core operational component of climate risk governance and provide a science-informed pathway for strengthening early-phase response capacity under increasing climate variability.</p>