India’s heatwaves require urgent climate action

After extreme heatwaves grip the country, Nilanjana Bhowmick advocates for a multi-pronged approach to mitigate the impacts of climate change in India.

A couple of years ago Noor Jehan was working at a construction site as a mason’s helper when she got a phone call. Her husband – a rickshaw puller – had fainted while ferrying a man in his vehicle, succumbing to the sweltering sun and an empty stomach. This was not a one off. ‘Throughout summer, he keeps fainting,’ she says. ‘Someone calls from his phone then we go and get him.’

India – home to 1.4 billion people – has been getting hotter every year and the poor have been bearing the brunt. Many work in outdoor jobs, such as on construction sites, or are homeless and live in makeshift housing making them particularly vulnerable to the extreme heat.

Jehan, for example, lives in a park in New Delhi with her family. Every day when she gets back from work she fills a single use plastic bag with water and ties it along the iron railings to quench their thirst during the night. ‘Sometimes we sit right next to the road to catch a breeze as vehicles zoom past,’ she says.

We need policy interventions that take into account how the country as a whole experiences heatwaves

India has developed a ‘Climate Hazards and Vulnerability Atlas’, providing detailed district-level maps of events such as heatwaves and flooding, as well as vulnerabilities. Twenty-three states have also implemented Heat Action Plans including daily heatwave bulletins, colour-coded warnings, and specific advisories to mitigate heat impacts. But they have been far from effective.

Between March and June this year India recorded more than 40,000 cases of suspected heatstroke. The media reported birds and bats falling from the sky, dehydrated from the heat. The International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology found that the Heat Action Plans of nine cities and five districts did not allocate separate resources or mention financial allocations in their plans.

We need policy interventions that take into account how the country as a whole experiences heatwaves, identifying the most vulnerable populations and increasing resilience in local communities to rising temperatures, including developing low cost, sustainable housing and providing access to affordable cooling for the population.

We also need global action on climate change. After another heatwave hit Asia and the Middle East in April, scientists at the World Weather Attribution group found that it was made 45 times more likely in some parts of the continent because of human-caused climate change.

There is little doubt that India faces a significant challenge in balancing development and environmental sustainability. With heatwaves set to increase sixfold by 2060 there will be more of a need for cooling facilities – but air conditioning and refrigeration causes around 10 per cent of global CO2 emissions.

India’s Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), introduced in 2019, seeks to reduce cooling demand by 20-25 per cent and refrigeration demand by 25-30 per cent by 2037, recommending adopting solutions like air-tight buildings, white-painted roofs, green roofs and urban design improvements, to reduce heat impacts. This is a start, but most importantly we need to begin at the beginning, by taking bold action on climate change and declaring extreme heat a national disaster.

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