In an op-ed in The Indian Express, members of the Mittal Institute climate team + partners working on climate change adaptation in South Asia write on heatwaves and the need for a detailed understanding of how different communities are impacted by and react to the heat.
Satchit Balsari, Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Mittal Institute Steering Committee member; Biraj Patnaik, Executive Director of the National Foundation for India; and Manali Shah, National Secretary of the Self Employed Women’s Association, write: “In the past month, heatwaves have been declared across India and around the world, affecting millions of people. In the third week of June, the temperature in Boston was the same as in Delhi and Ahmedabad, crossing 40 degrees Celsius. According to global climate projections, the number of hot days and nights will continue to rise globally. With continued inaction, parts of the world that are currently populated will be too hot to live in. Even more troubling is that we do not actually know how hot it is — and subsequently do not fully understand the impact that prolonged and high heat will have on the health, well-being and livelihoods of millions of Indian workers.”
We do not actually know how hot it is — and subsequently do not fully understand the impact that prolonged and high heat will have on the health, well-being and livelihoods of millions of Indian workers.
“Data from weather stations or data remotely sensed by satellites populate apps and websites that inform our understanding of weather. These data are not available — especially in India and the rest of the developing world — at a spatial scale that can account for the heterogeneity of the lived experiences of millions. In other words, in one square mile in any major Indian city, there can be hundreds of thousands of people experiencing very different temperatures. Discounting the minority that has access to air-conditioned spaces, Indians experience heat very differently, depending on whether they are working on salt pans or construction sites, breaking ships, loading lorries, sowing fields, or pushing fruit carts, working on shaded streets or under the hot sun, or working from indoor spaces that are ill-ventilated or covered by tin roofs. The majority of the global middle and lower classes’ living conditions make the situation worse — permutations of concrete, tin, thatch, and other suboptimal building materials prevent homes from cooling down adequately at night, even when outdoor temperatures remain high.”
Read the whole op-ed “First, understand that this is no ordinary heatwave” below: