In the past month, heatwaves have been declared across India and around the world, affecting millions of people. In the third week of June, the temperature in Boston was the same as in Delhi and Ahmedabad, crossing 40 degrees Celsius. According to global climate projections, the number of hot days and nights will continue to rise globally. With continued inaction, parts of the world that are currently populated will be too hot to live in. Even more troubling is that we do not actually know how hot it is — and subsequently do not fully understand the impact that prolonged and high heat will have on the health, well-being and livelihoods of millions of Indian workers.
Data from weather stations or data remotely sensed by satellites populate apps and websites that inform our understanding of weather. These data are not available — especially in India and the rest of the developing world — at a spatial scale that can account for the heterogeneity of the lived experiences of millions. In other words, in one square mile in any major Indian city, there can be hundreds of thousands of people experiencing very different temperatures. Discounting the minority that has access to air-conditioned spaces, Indians experience heat very differently, depending on whether they are working on salt pans or construction sites, breaking ships, loading lorries, sowing fields, or pushing fruit carts, working on shaded streets or under the hot sun, or working from indoor spaces that are ill-ventilated or covered by tin roofs. The majority of the global middle and lower classes’ living conditions make the situation worse — permutations of concrete, tin, thatch, and other suboptimal building materials prevent homes from cooling down adequately at night, even when outdoor temperatures remain high.
What extreme heat can do
In a pilot experiment in the houses of home-based workers in Ahmedabad, we found that indoor temperatures persisted in a zone of permanent discomfort from 36 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius, even when outdoor temperatures fluctuated from a high of 40 to a low of 28 degrees Celsius. The kerfuffle over the isolated weather station in Delhi earlier this month was therefore largely misplaced — in all probability, the temperatures that people were experiencing in many parts of Delhi, at work and home, were much higher.
Accuracy matters. How will we set thresholds for interventions if we do not know how hot it is where people live and work? We need to better understand what temperatures and exposures we need to incorporate into early warning thresholds, insurance payouts, building and work codes, and so on. Even this downscaling of weather data won’t be enough. The medical sciences do not entirely know yet what kinds of exposures are the most dangerous: Are three 45-degree days worse than ten 40-degree days? Worse for what? Our kidneys, our sleep, our productivity at work or school, or general well-being and mental health? After all, the poor experience heat in multiple ways — the ground they work and sleep on becomes unbearably hot. Heat illnesses result in wage losses and new medical bills. Children cannot go to school. Heat compounds the oppression of poverty.
Simple, affordable solutions
Sustainable solutions for making our habitats more bearable in the medium term require a bold reimagination of how we build and organise our communities. However, there is an urgent need to identify and protect the most vulnerable. We must not shy away from simple achievable solutions in pursuit of the unattainable. In fact, on May 31, the Indian Meteorological Department released this catchy informational video: “Yeh garmi nahin hai aam” (This heat is not ordinary), targeting, primarily, outdoor workers. Scripted by researchers from Harvard and produced by the National Foundation of India, the message focuses on simple, affordable interventions for the masses.
Communities are self-organising now to adapt to heat. Home-based workers are cooling their homes by installing vents on their roofs or using cooling paint. Street vendors are investing in ice-chests to keep their produce cool, but need fairly priced microloans to do so. Necessity breeds innovation — members of the Self Employed Women’s Association are working with insurance companies to develop parametric insurance products to trigger cash payouts on extremely hot days. Earlier this month, SEWA’s insurance product paid 46,339 members up to Rs 750 to help mitigate lost wages on extremely hot days — a first in the world, engineered and implemented by India’s working poor.
We propose three prerequisites to guiding climate change preparedness and adaptation for the hundreds of millions of workers in India and around the world, with little to no formal protections:
A three-point plan against heat
First, recognise who is most at risk: Nearly 93 per cent of India’s workers are in the informal sector with little to no protections. Identify the trades in both the formal and informal economy that comprise the most vulnerable — those engaged in arduous physical labour, those who work outside or in poorly ventilated spaces, with unstable incomes.
Second, localise the data: Expand capacity to collect and model hyper-local climatic data to craft solutions that are relevant to the local community. Measure the impact of heat in the lived environments of the poor.
Third, test interventions quickly but rigorously before scaling: Government agencies tasked with addressing climate change, including disaster management authorities must create sandboxes for communities to test and validate small and big solutions — whether they be financial, technical or behavioural. Financial institutions should prioritise adaptation for and by the poor. The Self Employed Women’s Association is working with Harvard’s Climate platform, for example, to measure the actual impact of heat adaptation interventions on microenvironments and human physiology, providing a sound scientific basis for further investments.
Heat is but one facet of climate change. Heavy rains, cyclones, floods, unseasonal rains and crop failure will be other drivers of forced population displacement. Despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to impending disaster, data and knowledge that are helpful at local scales are not available. We cannot plan if we do not know. Strategies that downscale data and knowledge to empower local communities to prepare, innovate, test and validate adaptation practices are one sustainable path to justly address the challenges that lie ahead.
Balsari is an associate professor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and directs the Climate Platform at the Harvard Mittal South Asia Institute. Patnaik is the executive director of the National Foundation of India. Shah is the national secretary of the Self Employed Women’s Association
