India’s Heat Actions Rely On Short-Term, Reactive Measures, Under Emphasising Long-Term Solutions

A new report by the New Delhi-based research organisation, Sustainable Futures Collaborative, titled ‘Is India Ready for a Warming World? How Heat Resilience Measures Are Being Implemented for 11% of India’s Urban Population in Some of Its Most At-Risk Cities’, examines how nine major Indian cities are preparing for the growing threat of extreme heat. These nine cities – Bengaluru, Delhi, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai, and Surat – together make up over 11 percent of India’s urban population (Census of India, 2011) and are some of India’s most at-risk cities to future heat.

The report is the first to assess the implementation of heat actions in multiple Indian cities. The report finds that while all nine cities focus on immediate responses to heat waves,
long-term actions remain rare, and where they do exist, they are poorly targeted. Without effective long-term strategies, India is likely to see a higher number of heat-related deaths
due to more frequent, intense, and prolonged heat waves in the coming years.

Using an ensemble of climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), the study identified cities with populations over 1 million (based on the 2011 Census) that are expected to experience the largest increases in dangerous heat index values, which combine temperature and humidity, relative to their recent historical average.

For the analysis, SFC conducted 88 interviews with city, district, and state government officials responsible for implementing heat actions in these nine cities. Because heat adaptation requires a coordinated, cross-sectoral response, interviews were conducted with representatives from disaster management, health, city planning, labour departments, as well as city and district administrators.

KEY FINDINGS:

1. All cities report short-term emergency measures: These include actions like access to drinking water, changing work schedules, and boosting hospital capacity before or during a heat wave. If these measures are being implemented correctly, verification of which is beyond the scope of this study, this could be read as a positive story in achieving a minimum baseline of life-saving actions across cities in just over a decade since India’s first heat action plan (HAP) was published in 2013.
2. Guidelines and directives from higher levels of government drive short-term response measures, heat action plans (HAPs) seem to have a weaker effect on policy: Many of the life saving short-term actions reported across cities are a product of emergency directives from higher levels of government, including national and state disaster-management and health authorities, issued before or during a heat wave. HAPs, which often house long-term measures, seem to have a weaker effect on shaping heat actions because they are weakly institutionalised.
3. Many important long-term actions are entirely absent or poorly targeted: Actions like making household or occupational cooling available to the most heat-exposed, developing insurance cover for lost work, expanding fire management services for heat waves, and electricity grid retrofits to improve transmission reliability and distribution safety are missing from all cities. Expansion of local weather stations for more granular data on heat variation within a city, mapping urban heat islands and training heat plan implementers were only seen in some cities. Other actions like expansion of urban shade and green cover, the creation of open spaces that dissipate heat, and the deployment of rooftop solar that could help with active
   cooling, among others, were implemented without adequate attention to populations and areas that experience the greatest heat risk.
4. Long-term actions are focused mostly on the health system: Long-term solutions were most commonly reported for the health system. These included actions like heat-specific training for health workers and creation of systems to monitor heat deaths. As a result, what emerges is a picture of very weak mainstreaming of long-term heat concerns in other crucially important sectors such as urban-planning departments. Health-system preparedness, while foundationally important to heat resilience, is meant to deal with the consequences of heat overwhelming the adaptive capacity of societies rather than prevent such situations from occurring.
5. Short-term actions are inexpensive, the shift towards long-term climate adaptation will require more finance: Over two-thirds of respondents reported adequate funding for heat actions and that they were drawing from a diverse range of existing sources spanning local, state and national funds. This is a consequence of a focus on short-term actions that are relatively inexpensive and temporary. Long-term structural changes, such as those mentioned above, will require dedicated resources.
6. Institutional constraints limit the possibilities for long-term action: The top problem identified by respondents was local coordination between government departments, both within and between municipal, district, and state government departments. More than half of all responses identified an inter-linked mix of personnel shortages, competing priorities, weak technical capacity, and insufficient acknowledgement of the heat problem as constraints.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

1. Institutional Changes

a. Strengthen HAPs in local governments: HAPs could help institutionalise long-term actions and monitor their effectiveness. They could also make crucial targeting mechanisms such as vulnerability assessments and the identification of urban heat islands mandatory.

b. Draw on disaster mitigation funds that provide for heat wave preparation: As of late 2024, sub-national governments were allowed to draw on National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds to execute projects that mitigate heat wave risks. States should harness this line of finance to set up a pipeline of long-term risk reduction projects.

c. Heat officers need appropriate institutional backing: Nascent conversations about creating Chief Heat Officer-type (CHO) positions should also consider how to equip them with adequate authority to solve the underlying institutional problems we have identified. In their absence, CHOs will probably face the same hurdles ‘nodal’ heat officers face today.

The writer of this article is Dr. Seema Javed, an environmentalist & a communications professional in the field of climate and energy