NEW DELHI: A new report indicates India is poorly prepared to handle the increasing number of extreme heatwaves in the future. It claims the country primarily focuses on immediate responses to heatwaves while long-term strategies remain scarce.
It warns that India may witness more deaths due to more frequent, intense, and prolonged heatwaves in the coming years. The report is produced by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC), a non-profit based in New Delhi, and co-authored by scholars from King’s College London, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
“Many long-term measures must be implemented now, with urgency, to have a chance of preventing significant increases in mortality and economic damage in the coming decades,” says Aditya Valiathan Pillai, a researcher at King’s College London and coauthor of the study.
Experts pointed out that a major problem with short-term measures is that their impact cannot be easily verified until long-term measures are implemented.
Short-term measures are life-saving actions, while long-term actions look at strengthening and capacity-building health systems and environmental steps to reduce future impact.
It surveys nine major metro cities and identifies short-term and long-term emergency measures to mitigate rising heatwaves. These cities – Bengaluru, Delhi, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut,Mumbai and Surat – together make up over 11 percent of India’s urban population, according to Census 2011, and are some of India’s most at-risk cities for future heat. The report finds that the surveyed cities focus on immediate responses to heat waves, while long-term actions remain rare. Even where they do exist, they are poorly targetted.
The report recommends urgent institutional changes to measures, including assessing vulnerability and identifying urban heat islands, building the capacity of health staff and implementers of the heat action plan, and investing in technology to provide energy-efficient cooling devices.
However, the report also underlined barriers to implementing the heat wave mitigation action plan. It states that ‘coordination problems among institutions’ emerged as the top barrier, followed by competing priorities limiting the focus on heat. Around 14% of surveyed people said they do not see heat as a problem.
The study used different climate models to identify the nine cities with a recent rise in dangerous heat index values and a population above one million. For analysis, interviews were conducted with city, district, and state government officials responsible for implementing heat actions in these cities.