In the sweltering heat, I came across a woman working in the field alone. I went closer and introduced myself, and saw that Shakuntala Devi was sowing seeds. I offered her a bottle of water and was curious to know a field-working woman’s thoughts on the changing climate.
I asked her if her agricultural practices had changed, to which she replied that she had been sowing seeds earlier than usual because patterns of rain and heat had changed, and that her crop yield had been decreasing over the years. I was curious to know why she thinks the patterns have changed, and she looked at the sky and said, “Yeh toh kudhrat ka hi khel hai, wahi samjhe!” (It is God’s play, he only understands!).
Shakuntala Devi banks on her individual resilience to adapt to the changing climate for her livelihood, but as a society, aren’t we testing these limits?
Rising Heat in the Anthropocene Era
While there are both natural and man-made drivers of climate change, especially concerning heat, there are reasons to believe that man-made drivers currently predominate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report has unequivocally made it clear that the rise in surface temperatures is due to heat-trapping Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from human activities rather than natural processes. The global mean surface air temperature (GSAT) in 2010–2019 relative to 1850–1900 is 0.8°C–1.3°C warmer with the best estimate of human-induced global warming of a rise of 1.07 degrees Celsius with GHGs being the main driver.
These man-made drivers interact cumulatively with the natural drivers such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to create a catastrophic heat crisis for the Earth.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has three states: the neutral ENSO state and the two extremes. It is one of the climate phenomena that describes the interaction between the water in the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere, which is measured in terms of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure, which impacts temperature and precipitation around the globe.
The neutral phase maintains near-stable sea surface temperatures close to the long-term average, lasting for years unless pushed to extreme phases- El Niño (warm phase) and La Niña (cool phase) that typically last 9-12 months. In the last several decades, the world has been seeing longer extreme phases of ENSO that have led to catastrophic weather events around the globe.
But since the beginning of the anthropocene epoch - the geological period of human impact on Earth there has been “a very rapid human-driven trajectory of the Earth System away from the glacial-interglacial limit cycle toward new, hotter climatic conditions and a profoundly different biosphere.”
With GHG emissions reaching new levels, it is only a matter of time before the El Niño phase exacerbates the already devastating heatwaves, especially in the southern hemisphere. The compounded effect of rising surface temperatures and El Niño could lead to unprecedented heat.
India at the Center of the Cause and Effect of Heat
India is ranked third (3.06 billion tCO2e in 2023) in the world, after the US and China, for total annual Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, surpassing the entire European Union in 2019. Electricity and agriculture are the top sectoral emitters. However, its per capita GHG emissions are significantly lower (2.1 tCO2e in 2023) than the global average (6.76 tCO2e in 2023), indicating that a substantial portion of emissions is attributed to major corporations and industrial powerhouses.
In 2025, India’s renewable-based energy capacity is expected to have reached 217.62 GW, surpassing the committed target of 500 GW by 2030. India is also, already the world’s third-largest generator of electricity from solar and wind and has committed to achieve 50% of its power capacity from renewable sources by 2030 in its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
This has set up India as an emerging global leader in renewable energy and climate commitments. However, at the same time, India is also expanding operations of 45 new coal projects that can have a significant environmental impact. Alongside this, there have been several instances of mass deforestation being performed for various development projects.
This split identity of India as a Climate Action Leader and a major Greenhouse Gas Emitter requires scrutiny. At the heart of India’s climate action is a ticking time bomb - a contradiction of identities.
The Climate Risk Index, which examines human and economic losses resulting from extreme weather events from 1993 to 2022, ranks India sixth among highly impacted countries, with Dominica, China, Honduras, Myanmar, and Italy ranked above. Within the country, climate change vulnerability varies with age, gender, caste, location, and socio-economic status, further compounding the risk.
With injustice built into the soul of climate change, it is clear that entities that are the main drivers of rising temperatures might not be the ones to face the brunt of climate change. These vulnerabilities suggest that India needs to urgently prioritize reconciling its split identity in favor of that of a Global Climate Action Leader.
Heat and Health
According to the Lancet Countdown, in 2023, India experienced an average of 35.1 health-threatening heat days per year attributable to human-induced climate change. Moreover, there is an estimated 89.1% increase in annual heat-related deaths among 65-year-olds from 1990-1999 to 2014-2023. A WHO modeling study showed that an additional 22,000 heat-related deaths by the 2030s and an additional 63,000 by the 2050s in the South Asia Region, with a heavy concentration in the Indo-Gangetic Basin, putting major cities in India at risk due to heat-related health impacts.
Although increased surface temperatures last between February and May (even longer in the past decade), the impact of heat spills over for extended periods on the health and socio-economic aspects of vulnerable individuals.
The IPCC defines climate resilience as "the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event, trend or disturbance, responding or re-organizing in ways that maintain systems' essential function, identity, and structure while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation.” - this essentially places the onus of coping with climate change impact on the communities with the expectation that we need to fit or mold ourselves in a continuously heating world.
Ultimately, without strong heat mitigation policies and strategies at the forefront of climate action, we are inevitably bound to reach our resilience and adaptation capacity thresholds, with specific climate-reliant populations, such as farmers, coastal, and tribal communities, bearing the most severe brunt.
Can India Reimagine Development from a Green Lens?
The most recurring argument for inaction on heat mitigation is the consolidation of power and energy politics, which involves the acceleration of fossil fuel-based growth in the industry and energy sectors.
However, while our country is looking at economic growth, a potential loss of 46% of labor hours was observed in 2023 compared to 1991-2000 in the agriculture, construction, and manufacturing sectors due to heat alone. Heat stress is estimated to cost 35 million jobs and a 4.5% decrease in our GDP, according to a World Bank study.
So, there is no choice but to rethink our development strategies with a green lens.
India is in a unique position to leverage growing workforce demographics and potential for harnessing renewable resources to implement green growth strategies through concerted, cross-cutting, multi-sectoral involvement towards an environmentally sustainable future.
India, being a growing economy, has incredible potential for heat mitigation, with immense scope for building renewable energy, like the focus on national electrification, by overcoming the intermittency of renewables through Battery Energy Storage Systems.
Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) also plays a crucial role in decarbonizing emissions from the industrial and power sectors.
Even though India is paving the way for renewable energy sources, which, when achieving its targets, can abate one-third of its total emissions, the remaining 70% of emissions are still fossil fuel-dependent, including industries and agriculture.
India needs to fast-track and mainstream CCUS technology with strong policies, transfer, and adoption of existing technology, and promotion of R&D for cost-effective and indigenous CCUS innovation.
While there are some success stories of cost-effective climate-friendly CCUS technology emerging through the Department of Science and Technology-supported R&D, many industries piloting CCUS projects, and India committing to setting up carbon sequestration technologies in NDCs and the National Action Plan for Climate Change, with the ever-so-fast rising temperatures and net-zero targets, a concerted finance-evidence-policy-governance momentum needs to be institutionalized to sustain CCUS.
New research published in Nature has found that forests have immense capability to act as carbon sinks, absorbing twice as much carbon as they emit when they undergo deforestation or fires.
A recent Global Forest Watch report revealed that between 2002 and 2024, India lost 5.4% of its total humid primary forest. Although the forest cover in India has improved, as indicated by the latest State of Forest report, which includes orchards, palm, and plantations, the country is facing a significant loss of biodiversity-rich forest cover, which is crucial for carbon sequestration.
Even though India has made concrete efforts to pursue low-carbon development strategies, given the background of accelerated coal-based development and reduced carbon sinks in India, heat mitigation may seem ambitious; however, prioritizing geoengineering solutions that can offset the effects of climate change could bring us closer to our goal.
Heat Action Plans and Green Growth
Heat Action Plan (HAPs) is our primary strategy to combat the impacts of rising surface temperatures. Although comprehensive HAPs have been formulated covering over 18 states for major heat-affected cities and districts, a policy review by the Centre for Policy Research showed a gap in local contextual data on heat vulnerability and risks that can inform customized and differential adaptation strategies as well as lack of linkages with existing policies and government programs for heat mitigation.
The review demonstrated how integration with existing centrally sponsored schemes could help address the climate financing challenges of HAPs. This emphasizes the importance of making ‘heat’ everybody’s problem that requires inter-departmental action.
The latest CEEW report on district-level heat risk has provided high-resolution evidence, utilizing contextual data on hazard, vulnerability, and exposure, which indicates that 57% of districts are at high to very high heat risk. The report also revealed that the increase in warmer nights over the past decade has been faster than the increase in very hot days, thereby preventing the body's natural ability to cool down from excruciating heat.
Several studies have shown that strong heat mitigation policies and strategies have significant benefits for human health, especially among vulnerable populations. The importance of a well-formulated and executed heat action plan is underscored by the 2013 Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan, which has been estimated to avoid over 1000 deaths attributable to heat.
A systematic review has revealed that mitigation measures related to nature-based solutions and green infrastructure planning have the highest health co-benefits. Transitioning towards renewable sources can reap the benefits of a cleaner and cooler environment, promoting healthy lifestyles in communities and restoring ecosystems. A modeling study aimed at calculating the impact of mean radiant temperature reduction strategies on health revealed that a combination of thermally friendly designs and tree planting yielded high health co-benefits in cities.
So, an oversimplified action plan for heat mitigation must include - stopping mass deforestation, preserving and protecting biodiversity-rich primary forests, accelerating and incentivizing measures and technology to harness renewable energy sources, decelerating growth of coal-based energy systems, mainstreaming carbon capture technology, incentivizing and fostering green growth as well as protecting the workforce from the heat that will actualize growth and development for the country.
As the country moves towards record-breaking temperatures, it’s imperative and urgent for India to reconcile these two sides of itself and put climate at the heart of its development.
Edited by Christianez Ratna Kiruba
Image by Christianez Ratna Kiruba and Gayatri
