CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu government and the UK jointly launched a Heat Resilience Centre, positioning the state as one of India’s first to set up a dedicated institutional mechanism for heat-risk management.
The initiative, announced during the signing of a Letter of Intent (LoI) between the Tamil Nadu Green Climate Company and the UK Government, will run under the UK’s Climate Action for a Resilient Asia (CARA) programme until September 2026.
The centre will function as Tamil Nadu’s nodal institution for coordinating heat-risk management across departments, helping build scientific governance frameworks, strengthening technical capacity, generating climate data, developing heat action plans and designing bankable climate-resilience projects.
“Extreme heat is one of the most urgent climate challenges we face. Tamil Nadu has already demonstrated visionary leadership,” said Parliamentary under secretary of State (Indo-Pacific) Seema Malhotra, praising the state for recognising heatwaves as a state-specific disaster.
Additional chief secretary (Environment, Climate Change and Forests) Supriya Sahu stressed the need for accurate heat mapping to guide climate planning.
The state also joined the global Beat the Heat Implementation Drive, launched at COP30 in Belém (Brazil) , with 11 Tamil Nadu cities among the 15 Indian cities participating. The initiative aims to accelerate sustainable cooling and passive heat-resilience solutions worldwide.