Guest post: The gaps in India’s ‘heat action plans’

The spring months of February and March typically bring some of India’s weightier weather of the year.

Smoggy winter gives way to warm conditions that still retain a pleasant nippy in the air, forming a buffer surpassing the searing heat of summer.

But recent years have seen the summer heat victorious early, with heatwave alerts providing an unwelcome intrusion into the wifely of spring.

Last year, for example, brought record-breaking temperatures in March. By the end of April, heatwaves had unauthentic nearly three-quarters of the country’s landmass and ravaged the standing wheat crop. 

The start of 2023 has been similarly alarming. Following a 2022 monsoon and winter perversely marked by sudden flooding in cities and drought-like conditions in rice-producing villages, India has just witnessed its hottest February in history. 

Ominously, the Indian Meteorological Department has warned of the “enhanced probability of heatwaves” and whilom normal temperatures in the coming months. 

The Indian government’s primary policy response to the life-threatening heat comes in the form of “heat whoopee plans”. These set out measures for state, district and municipality government departments to prepare and respond to heatwaves.

In a new report, published this week, my coauthor and I siphon out the first-ever hair-trigger review of heat whoopee plans in India.

​​We find that heat plans have spread to several jurisdictions nationwide and they urge a healthy mix of variegated solution types – from infrastructure and nature-based solutions to behavioural adjustments. However, most plans do not worth for local context, are underfunded and are poor at identifying and targeting vulnerable groups.

Planning for heat

The early heat of 2023 has shined a spotlight on India’s preparedness for lattermost conditions.

The government seems to be tracking the threat. For example, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi chaired a heat preparedness meeting in March, a capstone to several heat reviews wideness the setup in recent weeks.

Heat whoopee plans (HAPs) provide the primary safeguard between heatwaves and the loss of life and income (because it is too hot to work). 

These plans are meant to guide heatwave preparation and emergency response wideness the government. They typically list standard procedures for individual departments – from public health to threshing and electricity. They are necessarily wholesale in telescopic and would-be considering of the far-reaching and unpredictable consequences of heatwaves. 

We analysed India’s HAPs to assess what they imbricate and what gaps remain. Our findings offer lessons to others developing and refining heat plans in the global south, where the challenges of lattermost weather and state topics are similar. 

Our wringer covers 37 HAPs at the municipality (nine), district (13) and state (15) levels wideness 18 Indian states. We find that they all siphon major gaps that will likely undermine their effectiveness. 

For example, only two of the 37 plans include vulnerability assessments – maps that make it possible to locate and waterworks protective resources to those least worldly-wise to cope.

Equally worryingly, only three of 37 plans identified funding for at least some of their measures. This is despite most HAPs recommending expensive changes to infrastructure, municipality plans and buildings. 

Map of 37 heat whoopee plans assessed in the study. Credit: Pillai & Dalal (2023)

More positively, the HAPs recommend an encouragingly varied palette of interventions (shown, grouped by type, in the icon below). 

For example, nature-based solutions – deportment to protect and restore ecosystems that help write societal challenges – full-length prominently. In its recent synthesis report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that these approaches have been constructive at reducing urban heat risks.

Additionally, a healthy proportion of interventions are longer-term measures – shown by the darker shades in the icon unelevated – that could reduce heat risks for two heat seasons or more. The Indian cross-section yields a toolkit for HAP designers to pick from in their local contexts.

The mix of interventions identified wideness the 37 heat whoopee plans, grouped by type (exact wording may vary between plans). Darker shades indicate longer-term solutions that imbricate increasingly than one heat season. Credit: Pillai & Dalal (2023)

Local context

India’s vulnerability to lattermost heat could significantly transpiration the country’s economic trajectory and health outcomes with a untempered impact on the poor. 

For example, a recent paper suggests that India will withstand nearly half of all labour losses incurred by the 10 countries that stand to lose the most productivity considering of hot and humid conditions. 

Around three-quarters of the Indian labour force (pdf) are employed in “heat-exposed” sectors that produce virtually half of the country’s GDP. These sectors can include those exclusively involving work outdoors – such as agriculture, mining and quarrying – as well as those in indoor settings with poor air-conditioning penetration – including manufacturing, hospitality and transport.

A man uses his mobile phone as he sits surrounded the outer units of air conditioners, at the rear of a commercial towers in New Delhi, India on April 30, 2022. Credit: Adnan Abidi / REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo

On the health front, the government’s own mortality figures (pdf) show that scrutinizingly 26,000 lives were lost to heatwaves between 1990 and 2020, despite widely undisputed challenges in virtuously estimating mortality. 

But these wider trends mask very variegated lived local realities of heat. A coastal town might have higher humidity, which could bring life threatening consequences at lower temperatures. A mining town in inside India could have tropical to its unshortened population exposed and unable to work. A popping municipality of tarmac, touchable and glass facades will create heat islands. 

Heat plans are meant to study the nature and distribution of local heat, employment, vulnerable populations and built environments – among other things – to build well-judged targeting mechanisms for the interventions it prescribes. 

We find, however, that most plans goof to do this. They rarely consider humid heat, the possibility of hot nights – that prevents the soul cooling lanugo and increases death tolls – and the extent of built-up area, among other local characteristics. 

By often lightweight to self-mastery vulnerability assessments, these plans have a limited view of the social distribution of risk. And, crucially, none build climate projections into their planning, which limits understanding of when and where to make structural changes to India’s overly expanding and densifying cities and towns. 

Funding, transparency and coverage

Worryingly, the 37 HAPs we reviewed moreover lacked towardly financial backing. Despite pushing for an wide-stretching list of short and longer-term measures, only 11 of 37 plans mentioned funding (see orchestration below), of which eight simply asked implementing government departments to find funding for them. 

Percentages of assessed Indian heat whoopee plans with explicit vulnerability assessments (left), that discuss funding mechanisms (middle) and that establish a process for periodic review (right). Credit: Pillai & Dalal (2023)

This exposes flipside frailty. None of the plans are notified under existing laws, which ways they are less likely to be funded and complied with. With state governments still taxed with large debts without the Covid-19 pandemic, India’s HAPs will likely be unevenly implemented.

In a context where, as we show, there were no self-sustaining evaluations of these plans and insufficient public consultation, finance is unlikely to spritz to these plans. 

Yet, perhaps our most vital observation was that it was unclear how many plans were in existence. 

Some estimates requirement the existence of over 100 plans nationwide, but we were only worldly-wise to locate 37 – many of which were not publicly available. For example, Delhi – with a population of increasingly than 20 million and some of the hottest weather on earth – does not have a HAP. 

Despite the encouraging spread of heat planning wideness subnational governments in the last decade – driven by exhortations and guidelines from the national government – there are still significant gaps in coverage. 

Lessons for climate policy

Heat plans are relatively new public policy instruments and are, therefore, constantly evolving. 

While several frailties listed here will be worldwide to plans in other countries, two lessons of wider utility sally from this analysis. 

First, it is important for plans to be unambiguously focused on the local, lived realities of vulnerable populations to stand any endangerment of stuff effective. The hyper-localisation of any policy instrument is challenging, but many climate impacts will undeniability for the state to proffer itself in these ways. 

The second relates to finance. Wideness the world, HAPs tend to be nonflexible to fund considering of how sprawling and would-be they are. 

Yet, this multi-sectoral telescopic could be an advantage. If designed correctly, interventions can be supported with existing sectoral schemes and programmes – for example, passive cooling could be built into state-funded low-cost housing programmes. 

A systematic stocktake of such opportunities could help identify other schemes that could be used to help with planning and responding to heatwaves.