Heatwaves are coming. Can India handle it?

It is a difficult question to answer because the current experience of dangerous heat, terrible as it is, is very different in scale and consequence from what is coming next. Climate models suggest that heat extremes are going to get much worse — especially through longer, more intense, hotter, earlier heatwaves. Policymakers must strike a balance between dealing with a very difficult present (India has seen its hottest and driest February in 124 years) and putting the building blocks in place for future heat.

The rate at which the atmosphere is warming suggests that we have a narrow window to prepare for this future. June 2024 marked the 12th consecutive month of global mean surface temperatures being 1.5°C above the pre-industrial mean. Worse, the window to adapt will probably be made even narrower with major historical emitters, corporations, and financiers backtracking on decarbonisation commitments. The poorest and most vulnerable — in the global south and north — will bear the brunt.

In our new research, we analysed the state of heat action implementation in nine cities in nine states with very high levels of future heat risk, covering 11 per cent of India’s urban population. We used CMIP6 climate model output to identify these cities. We interviewed 88 government officials in city, district and state governments responsible for implementing heat actions in a variety of departments to understand how they are responding to present and future heat.

In all nine cities, heat actions were skewed towards short-term responses meant to prevent the immediate loss of life. Long-term actions were either absent or poorly targeted at vulnerable people and places. India will likely see heat waves with higher mortality levels more frequently in the coming years as short-term life-saving responses and communities’ adaptive capacities are overwhelmed by rising temperatures.

All the local governments in our sample claimed to implement emergency response measures: Awareness campaigns; repurposing hospital wards for heatstroke cases; and changing work times among others. Further research is needed on how effective these measures are, and whether they are reaching the most vulnerable populations.

Their focus, then, is on survival today. Their blind spot? Tomorrow. Key long-term measures like residential or occupational cooling for the most heat-exposed, developing insurance for lost work hours, and electricity grid retrofits to keep the grid stable during a heat wave – among several others – were missing.

Some measures, like tree planting, rooftop solar programmes, and creating open spaces, were not targeted at the most vulnerable people or areas. Tellingly, we found that city planners, essential to making cities resilient, were not involved in heat policymaking or implementation. Around a quarter of city planners reported that they did not have a legal mandate to act on heat, indicating the urgent need for institutional changes.

With heat, much like other climate hazards made worse by climate change, risk governance must move past its 20th-century moorings that focused on providing relief after the fact through a disaster management apparatus. The risks of the future are likely to be so severe, frequent and interconnected that they will require proactively identifying and tackling risk, girding the system for a state of permanent tumult, and relying on all-of-government coordination. The governance of extreme heat seems to be in that process of transition with commonly seen short-term actions across multiple departments, but limited preparation for the future.

How to shift from firefighting to future-proofing? First, the institutions governing heat require an achievable set of tweaks and changes. Creating a new set of institutions, funds, and policies is unlikely to be helpful; what is needed is a set of precise changes that can re-focus the existing resources of the Indian state on an emerging policy problem.

Over a quarter of the 88 local government officials we spoke to identified coordination with other government departments as their biggest challenge. The best way to solve this is by improving technical capacity to understand heat’s threats and consequences. Officials united behind a common mission or threat are more likely to cooperate. These officials are tasked with governing some of the largest and most complex cities on earth everyday; they must be convinced that heat is a problem worth dealing with, especially proactively.

Some of this imagination-building can be done by more precisely deployed science. Less than five percent of government officials had access to climate projections that indicated what the world would look like with 1.5 or 2-degrees of warming.

Once local governments are convinced of the problem, they must be supplied with scientifically rigorous assessments of impacts and solutions. This responsibility will fall to civil society organisations and universities, from global to local scales. We found that governments were more likely to be heat-progressive when they had long-term civil society partners.

Much will also rely on incentivising action through finance. The constitution of the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds (with a sole focus on long-term actions) by the 15th Finance Commission, and the recent inclusion of heat wave projects within their ambit, is a welcome move. Many officials are already using existing schemes from the national and state governments for heat resilience. More of this is needed. In a previous analysis, we found that around a quarter of all Centrally-Sponsored Schemes (CSSs) could fund over a dozen heat solutions that commonly appear in the country’s HAPs. Minor tweaks in scheme implementation procedures could yield big gains.

These procedural shifts must happen locally, and be spelled out in locally-developed heat action plans. These plans must contain targeting mechanisms that let implementers know where the most vulnerable are. Equally, to get local government officials to take them seriously, they must have some legal grounding. A well-designed heat plan could make solving the heat problem much cheaper.

Aditya Valiathan Pillai is Visiting Fellow, Tamanna Dalal is Research Associate, and Ishan Kukreti is Programme Lead at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC)