New Report Says Heat Action Crumbles When It Needs Cross-Deptt Coordination

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.