Virtually everyone agrees that the world is going to blow past its Paris Accord commitments regarding Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG). Most accept that world temperatures will rise more than 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, and possibly much worse. More extreme weather will result, more often. Whether it is heat in Paris or New Delhi, or floods in Valencia or Karachi, climate change is hitting everyone.
In this maelstrom, most funding is going towards climate mitigation-that is, preventing the worsening of climate change, primarily through arresting how much carbon we continue to spew into the atmosphere. While the world learns to live within its limited remaining carbon-budget, we also have to invest in climate adaptation, learning to live with the extreme weather that is already here.
An article in The Economist a couple of years ago provided some ballpark numbers. Adaptation is clearly the stepchild of climate change response. The developing world is spending less than 20% of the $140-300 billion it needs to spend annually on adaptation; other estimates say it’s as little as 5%. Rich countries reluctantly committed at COP to fund a Loss & Damages fund for the poorer countries. Even the insufficient annual $100 billion funds agreed to then have not been forthcoming, let alone more recent inflated promises. Nor is the private sector stepping up without line-of-sight to more proximate returns, providing less than 2% of climate adaptation funding. The policy conditions needed to crowd-in the private sector have to be created. Those reluctant to fund adaptation worry that doing so will reduce the urgency to mitigate.
I will illustrate by focussing on adaptation to extreme heat. Catastrophic floods attract more media attention, but heat is omnipresent and probably causes greater excess morbidity and mortality. Since the body cannot cool through perspiration in humid environments, we also have to factor in humidity by examining so-called wet bulb temperature readings. Sustained exposure to wet bulb temperature readings, even quite a bit below ‘normal’ body temperature of 37° C, can cause excess heat retention, and ultimately organ damage. This manifests not just in acute events like heat stroke, but in a chronic and gradual sapping of human possibility with huge economic and social costs. The ILO estimated $2.4 trillion in GDP losses in 2019, and reports that today 70% of the global workforce is exposed to heat at work.
Sadly, large swathes of the Indo-Gangetic plains endure extended periods when such heat stress is likely visited upon millions of Indians. Even with the advent of welcome cooling from the monsoon, often wet bulb temperatures remain high enough that heat stress isn’t easily alleviated even then.
Given the ubiquity and likely increasing severity of the heat problem, and the lack of easily accessed funding, I suggest a three-part approach to understand the progress we’ve made in India, and the distance left to go, in addressing it-awareness, information, and experimentation. Here, I’ll confine myself to illustrating what I mean by each of these elements.
Awareness: Heat has entered the policy lexicon. The National Action Plan on Climate Change of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change will surely address it. Several Indian cities are announcing Heat Action Plans. But societal awareness is as yet work-in-progress. A year ago, the National Foundation for India in Delhi led a team, including some researchers at Harvard’s Mittal Institute, to create a 'musical short video' explaining the consequences of heat stress after sustained heat waves swept the northern Indian plains in the summer of 2023. It’s catchy, almost amusing, and replete with colour and panache. It fires the imagination. This is the kind of thing we need as much as speeches, opinion pieces (including this one!), and bureaucratic meetings.
Since the climate insouciance of my generation will be visited upon our children’s, and theirs, I feel it is imperative to bring in awareness in schools. The government’s Atal Innovation Mission’s Atal Tinkering Labs-10,000 in high schools across the length and breadth of India-provide a hands-on, popular, and fun science-based setting within which kids’ heat awareness can be enhanced.
And if one wants awareness to spread among the less-included segments of society, is it feasible to solicit the assistance of our amazing, albeit overworked, ASHA health workers, and other grass-roots organisations, to spread literacy about taking the damaging effect of heat on the body seriously?
Information: We are, of course, inundated by data. But data isn’t the same as information. We need the latter to be useful and actionable. For example, early warning systems and adaptation plans are much more useful if these can capture, not just aggregates, but also how ambient heat is affecting individuals. As my colleague, Dr Satchit Balsari at Harvard Medical School put it to us, "Saying 1.5° C excess temperature today is like asking a physician on morning rounds: How is the entire hospital feeling today? It’s an unhelpful number that does not communicate the reality of billions of people most at risk."
A large-scale research project that I co-lead at Harvard, with climate scientists and medical doctors, done collaboratively with the redoubtable women’s trade union, SEWA, made the absence of relevant information blindingly clear, so I'll use it as an illustration. In our project, we wanted to understand the effect of heat stress on some of the most vulnerable members of society-informal workers represent as much as 90% of the workforce of most developing countries. SEWA members agreed to a long-term plan to work with us. SEWA women are involved in agriculture, home-based informal work, salt pan tending, bangle making, running kirana stores, you name it, providing variation in setting.
Even with seemingly-ubiquitous data sources, the requisite information is entirely missing. Consider now commonplace satellite data. But satellite imagery has insufficient resolution for our purposes-generally available at 100-1,000 m, but not at individual human scales. In our study, we want conditions under a roof or just above ground, but satellites sense upper-most solid surfaces. And satellite data is usually available once daily, we need 24/7 data streams to understand how heat affects the body.
So, over the past several months, our team has built an infrastructure to measure individual exposure to heat, long-term (over 365 days), 24/7 measurements (that is, in the home and outside it) along with a range of measures of body function.
Our large-scale data collection has now ensued. Pilot studies already show, for example, that despite night-time summer temperatures cooling to say 27° C, indoor temperatures remain high due to various microclimatic determinants (ventilation, construction materials, thermal lag), which means that SEWA women are out in the heat during the day and come back to heat all night. One hopes that, with better information comes better ability to design systems to mitigate effects of always-on heat. This sort of understanding is especially relevant in rapidly growing economies like India; the Ministry of Power estimates that 40% of the building stock that will exist two decades from now is yet to be built.
As another illustration of available data that needs some work to translate into usable information, consider the myriad policies and schemes of the central and state governments. In workshops in which Mittal Institute researchers participated with colleagues at the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, it became clear that particular problems of adaptation to heat could be addressed by pre-existing central and state government schemes, even though the latter were not always thought of in the context of heat. That’s useful information for someone looking for resources to get a heat adaptation plan up and running.
Experimentation: With awareness and information, at least some of the preconditions exist for rampant experimentation to ensue. Why do I focus on experimenting? Because none of us remotely have all the answers. With wet bulb temperatures scaling new and scary heights, and persisting longer, we are in uncharted waters. Here, I’ll confine myself to point to a couple of experiments that I already see running in India or elsewhere that seem to me to be worth enhancing and emulating.
Cities all over the world are appointing so-called Chief Heat Officers (nurtured by the Rockefeller Foundation spurred Chief Resilience Officers). These are individuals who report to a mayor or city council whose sole responsibility is preparing the city to deal not just with acute heat emergencies, but with ambient rise in temperatures. It requires short-term and longer term actions, along with all the diplomacy and politicking that goes with claiming resources to invest in public goods. It’s early days. The CROs had mixed results, but then that’s the nature of an experiment. As the work of Janaagraha in Bengaluru has taught us now, our city level governance frameworks are not the most robust, so crafting appropriate accountability mechanisms onto India’s Heat Action Plans will likely take some work.
Given the somewhat unpredictable nature of all manner of climate disasters, society has to create a capability to respond quickly. In some instances, India has made remarkable strides. Cyclone warnings on the southeastern seaboard for instance have saved thousands of lives relative to a decade ago. But sometimes disasters strike much faster, including heat waves. Crisis Ready is one global non-profit that has worked in India, including helping figure out Covid response times, on many an occasion, as it has with California wildfires, floods in various places, and so on. That very-quick-response capability, digitally harnessing lots of local resources, is one we must nurture. Recently, the next-gen robotics and AI institute ARTPARK, at the Indian Institute of Science, has released software that helps model rapid response capability that will help with predicting heat wave incidence, as well as how disease patterns-for instance, dengue-will change as proximate heat patterns change.
Of course, experiments are easier to conceive on pre-existing platforms and, if successful, easier to scale. Large corporations can use their reach to catalyse such experiments, as can industry representative bodies. IndiaStack is a remarkable piece of digital infrastructure whose mapping to responding to climate change is already starting to be apparent.
India is vulnerable to the enormous challenge of extreme heat and yet unprepared. However, various initiatives and efforts provide a glimpse of what is possible when collaboration and ingenuity come together. We have to internalise that heat is not a disaster of the future-it is a crisis of the present. The year 2024 was the hottest on record, but it was only the hottest year so far.
Views are personal. The author is Tarun Khanna - Professor, Harvard Business School; Faculty Director, Harvard’s Mittal Institute for South Asia.