New Delhi: Summer is fast approaching, and temperatures are already surging across many parts of India. However, nine cities that are home to slightly more than 11% of India’s population and are most at risk of heat waves are not well-prepared for them over the long term, a report by the Delhi-based Sustainable Futures Collaborative has found.
A team of researchers from the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, King’s College London, Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley examined the implementation of heat resilience measures across nine Indian cities: Bengaluru, Delhi, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai and Surat.
In these cities, the team conducted 88 interviews with city, district and state government officials responsible for implementing heat actions.
The report, published Wednesday (March 19), found that all nine cities focus on immediate responses to heat waves. For instance, all cities reported short-term emergency measures such as ensuring access to drinking water, changing work schedules and boosting hospital capacity before or during a heat wave.
Many short-term measures were a result of emergency directives from higher levels of government, including national and state disaster management and health authorities that were issued before or during a heat wave, the report said.
It also noted that Heat Action Plans (HAPs) – which contain long-term measures – seem to have a weaker effect on shaping heat actions because they are not well-implemented.
Long-term actions – such as making household or occupational cooling available to the most heat-exposed or developing insurance cover for lost work – are rare, the report found.
And where long-term actions are taken, they are poorly targeted.
Many important actions are missing or unlikely to reduce heat risk; without effective long-term strategies, India is likely to witness a higher number of heat-related deaths due to more frequent, intense and prolonged heat waves in the coming years, the report said.
“These findings are a warning about the shape of things to come,” said Aditya Valiathan Pillai, visiting fellow with the Sustainable Futures Collaborative and doctoral researcher at King’s College London, who is one of the co-authors of the report.
He said in a press release: “With the ongoing retrenchment of global decarbonisation efforts, it will fall upon countries in the Global South to rapidly adapt to a hotter, more dangerous future. While progress on systems to respond to ongoing heat waves is both necessary and urgent, equal attention needs to be paid to gearing up for the future.
“Many of the long-term risk reduction measures we focus on will take several years to mature. They must be implemented now, with urgency, to have a chance of preventing significant increases in mortality and economic damage in the coming decades. At its core, this calls for the re-imagination of how India’s cities expand and develop.”
Some of the report’s recommendations include strengthening HAPs in local governments using disaster mitigation funds to prepare for heat waves, and creating a “targeted capacity-building programme” for the implementation of HAPs in the most heat-vulnerable cities in the country.
Another is creating a highly targeted active cooling programme. For instance, people in many of these urban areas will turn to air conditioning during intense heat waves, and state and national governments should deploy a subsidy or large-scale purchase programme that allows these families to buy energy-efficient air conditioners, the report recommended.
“They must be targeted at portions of Indian cities with the highest heat risk, determined by the vulnerability assessment of its HAP,” it said.
