New Report Says Heat Action Crumbles When It Needs Cross-Deptt Coordination
Automatic weather stations can help authorities plan for heat actions, but few cities are expanding these networks (Image by Dr. Ajay B. MD via Wikimedia Commons)
- Heat mitigation actions aren’t keeping pace with the long-term consequences of frequent and extreme heat, a new report finds.
- The study on heat action in cities facing a future of heat found that long-term action to mitigate heat impacts crumbled when they required coordination between different departments.
- Interviews with officials from the various departments, as well as district and municipal administrative heads revealed that the most common actions for heat mitigation were “reactive measures.”
Summer will be dominated by higher-than-normal temperatures over most parts of the country, the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) forecast for the season says. Apart from higher temperatures through the day and night, most regions will also see more heat wave days than normal this year.
Several places had already reported unusually high temperatures by mid-March. Boudh and Jharsuguda in Odisha recorded temperatures above 40 degrees by the beginning of the month, while areas in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Telangana also saw temperatures much higher than normal. The IMD’s projections mark the continuation of a worrying trend that led to record-breaking heat in 2023 and 2024.
Heat mitigation actions aren’t keeping pace with the long-term consequences of such frequent and extreme heat, a new report finds. Instead, actions are focussed on interim solutions that mainly target health impacts. There’s one big flaw with this approach: “When responses are geared towards the short term, policy is constantly catching up with the ever-shifting frontier of a hazard,” explains Aditya Valiathan Pillai, Visiting Fellow at Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC) – an environmental research institute – and lead author of the report.
Researchers from the SFC, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley interviewed dozens of government officials to learn about how heat action is carried out in key cities facing a future of heat. They found that long-term actions to mitigate heat impacts crumbled when they required coordination between different departments.
Focus on reactive measures
Interviews with officials from the disaster management, health, labour, and urban planning departments, as well as district and municipal administrative heads revealed that the most common actions for heat mitigation were “reactive measures.” These include changing work hours for workers, increasing availability of oral rehydration salts and water, repurposing hospital wards for heat stroke patients, and creating temporary cooling centres, for example.
These methods are widely used – a separate assessment survey of 5,690 health facilities by the National Programme on Climate Change and Human Health found that in 2024, most health facilities had employed such measures to counter impacts of extreme heat.But as extreme heat becomes more common, authorities may be mistaking the trees for the forest.
“These improvements in health system design, while crucially important, are designed to absorb the impacts of a catastrophic heat wave rather than reduce them in the long-term,” the SFC report notes.The researchers interviewed 88 government officials working in nine key cities – Surat, Mumbai, Meerut, Faridabad, Kota, Delhi, Gwalior, Ludhiana, and Bengaluru.
These cities, housing 11 percent of the country’s urban population (42.7 million people), are projected to see the highest high heat index days in modelled scenarios where global mean surface temperatures cross 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The report found that long-term actions implemented with the intent of mitigating heat were skewed towards the health sector, resulting in “very weak mainstreaming of long-term heat concerns in other crucially important sectors.”
For example, most cities reported training health staff and undertaking death surveillance, which are actions that help improve long-term capacity. But other actions – such as installing automatic weather stations, mapping urban heat islands, conducting vulnerability assessments, and training government staff – were observed in four cities or fewer.One reason why actions are skewed towards the health sector is because impacts are visible in the form of heat illness and death.
“The bureaucracy is motivated by past disasters a lot, so if people die, that becomes an object of focus for policy. The problem with that is actions are based on immediate previous history, rather than an idea of what’s coming,” says Pillai.
Mapping vulnerability is particularly important because it can help authorities act within a narrow window of opportunity when a crisis hits, says Dr. Vikas Desai, Technical Director at the Urban Health and Climate Resilience Center of Excellence (UHCRCE) in Surat.
“Preparation must be done every year in anticipation of the crisis, and not only after directives are issued from higher authorities, because those may come too late,” she says, adding, “Urban heat islands can change every year as new constructions come up. Those changes need to be captured consistently so that actions are targeted towards vulnerable populations over the long-term.”
The lack of vulnerability assessments and urban heat maps resulted in long-term solutions being misaligned with heat management. For example, in most cities surveyed – with the exception of Ludhiana – tree planting was driven by beautification and not heat considerations. “If tree planting were designed with heat resilience in mind, trees would be planted in the hottest, densest, and usually least well-off, areas of the city that are shade poor, likely under the logic of an urban heat island map,” the report says.
Local administrators also didn’t have access to climate projections of future heat scenarios, which limited their imaginations of what a city would look like under worsening heat conditions. Only two out of 42 administrators reported having access to climate projections. “Cities need to look at temperature and humidity trends, spatial trends, and health outcomes to plan,” says Desai.
The most common mechanism motivating heat action across the cities surveyed were guidelines and directives issued from higher authorities. More than 70% of those interviewed say they acted on directives – usually issued by state government, disaster management or health authorities – before heat waves or during periods of extreme heat.
While the short-term actions prescribed in directives are lifesaving, they don’t usually focus on long-term strategies the way Heat Action Plans (HAPs) do. The report found that HAPs – documents providing a framework for preparedness in cases of extreme heat – had a “weaker effect” on shaping heat actions, “because they are weakly institutionalised.”
“Usually, it’s disaster management authorities who hold the heat file, and so they’re able to send out directives for impending heat waves. But they can’t take over the day-to-day functioning of other departments, or start directing schemes for urbanisation, water, electricity which could help over the long-term,” says Pillai.
Desai, who was not a part of the SFC study but has designed gender-integrated heat action plans for Surat, says that plans needed to properly consider the fact that vulnerable populations – pregnant women, children under the age of five, and elderly – tend to spend most of their time indoors. “The home needs to be made comfortable enough to survive the heat. When these groups are poor or migrants, their vulnerability increases further. Plans to mitigate heat need to consider such factors, and it can’t be done overnight,” she says.
Implementing Heat Action Plans are often undermined by competing interests, incomplete town planning, or insufficient technical capacity and coordination, the SFC report says. Government officials cited land scarcity as an obstacle to planning for heat mitigation in urban contexts. “Pressures on land availability were being driven by informal settlements, encroachments into open spaces, the rapid concretisation of open spaces, and the expansion of housing stock, all of which decreased land availability for public goods aligned with climate adaptation,” the report finds.
While the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) released guidelines on designing Heat Action Plans, there is no legal mandate for states and cities to do so. Ludhiana and Gwalior did not have HAPs at all. A quarter of the city planning and urban development authorities interviewed in the SFC report cited a lack of legal mandate as a stumbling block for taking cross-cutting actions prioritising heat in city planning and bye-laws.
“A law won’t solve everything, but implementing agencies are in a situation where they have low technical capacity and coordination has emerged as the biggest issue,” says Pillai, adding, “It’s very hard to get consistent and effective coordination across the board without a legal reason for it. A legal mandate could give authorities the impetus to execute.”
(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay India. Read the original article here)
