Aditya Valliathan Pillai on How to Handle the Heat: Lessons from India

Khushi: Namaste and welcome to Pods by PEI, a policy discussion series brought to you by Policy Entrepreneurs Inc. My name is Khushi Rai. In today's episode, we have PEI colleague Nirjan Rai in conversation with Aditya Valiyathan Pillay on how to handle the heat lessons from India. Nirjan and Aditya discuss the rising temperature in Nepal, India, and around the world.

The two talk about the science behind heat waves and how climate change exacerbates the problems. They also discuss the economic impacts and how they are unevenly distributed across society.  Using Aditya's recent publication that analyzes India's heat action plans, the two look for possible takeaways for Nepal in dealing with its rising incidences of heat waves.

Aditya is a fellow with the Initiative for Climate, Energy and Environment at the Center for Policy Research, where he studies the socio economic consequences of climate impacts in India and South Asia, and the policies and institutions that help adapt to these changes. His current works focus on strengthening policies to combat extreme heat.

We hope you enjoy the conversation

Nirjan: Hi, this is Nirjan Rai.

Aditya: Hi, this is Aditya Valiyathampillai.

Nirjan: Hey Aditya, welcome to Pods by PI. So before we begin, let me just put out a brief context for our conversation today. As I was preparing for this discussion, I was going through some of the official data published for Nepal and saw that the April temperatures in the Terai region have consistently crossed the 40-plus degree mark.

But this pattern of record high temperatures is not confined to just the Terai region. It's also happening in places like Kathmandu, which is known for having much milder weather conditions. As a result, we are witnessing a rising trend of school closures, extending to hilly regions such as Gorkha and Tanahun.

To my surprise, I even came across some news reports that Nepal is experiencing record heat extending as far north as Lukla. And it's only now that we're beginning to understand, or at least trying to understand, what sort of impact this would potentially have on our economy and our society as a whole.

And that, Aditya, is what I hope to discuss with you today. So, to begin, can you tell us about the heat situation in India? You know, I've actually never lived in Delhi, but I know family and friends who have, and almost everyone speaks of how hot things get there, especially during the summer. So what is it like there at the moment?

Aditya: Simply put, it's very, very hot. The temperature is frequently 45 plus in the middle of the day out in the sunshine. I've been carrying a thermometer, trying to measure the temperature of different surfaces. For example, if you're on a motorcycle in direct sunlight in the afternoon, the temperature gauge can go up to 47-48 degrees right now.

The situation this summer has been interesting. Firstly, the summer started very early, so we saw heatwave alerts as early as February, and it was the hottest February on record. Then we saw heat deaths at the end of March and early April in Maharashtra. We saw 13 people die at this large public rally, and that created a bit of a media storm, with an entire political blame game playing out after that.

That was an important moment and I think it'll go down as a moment of reckoning about what heat can do, especially if it's not handled correctly. We've seen sporadic heatwave alerts all across the country in places you would expect, like in the desert areas of Rajasthan or northern Gujarat, and then places that haven't traditionally been at the epicenter of Indian heat, such as along the Konkan coast and along the Arabian Sea.

We saw heatwave alerts in Karnataka and Maharashtra, and that's also where we saw these deaths in Maharashtra. We've seen heatwave alerts pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, like in Meghalaya, a mountain state in the lush, forested northeast, where schools closed because of these heatwave alerts.

One thing I want to point out, which is different from Nepal's understanding of heat, is that India has an incredibly long coastline—7,000 kilometers—and the sea makes it very humid. Because we're closer to the equator, it's very hot. When you mix heat and humidity, you get a sometimes lethal cocktail because the body can't cool down when it's very humid. The sweat doesn't evaporate off the body, and that's only after a certain threshold temperature. We saw that threshold temperature, this wet bulb temperature, reached a couple of times in some parts of eastern India this year. That was also a big warning because that's what everyone's worried about when it comes to heat fatalities: this wet bulb threshold being crossed. So it's been an important summer from a learning perspective.

Nirjan: Yeah, definitely. I mean, despite having all these different environments, it seems like it is spread throughout the country, all over India. Moving on, in May, you wrote an open piece stating, and I quote, "India's recent heat deaths are not outliers. They signal a dismal future unless we start taking the threat of heat seriously." Can you give us a background on this piece and perhaps explain why the heat this time around is different from the heat of the past?

Aditya: I'm glad you bring that up. So that op-ed was written in response to the deaths that I just talked about: 13 people dying in the state of Maharashtra after a public rally. They were exposed to heat from 9 a.m. in the morning to the afternoon, and this continuous heat exposure, some suggested over many days, led to the unnecessary loss of life. Most of them were allegedly women; some reports suggested nine of the 13 that died were women. It was also a case study of how the most vulnerable in society are the ones that are going to be most affected by things like heat and other climate impacts. A few weeks later, there was another tragic incident of a tribal woman who was nine months pregnant. She was trying to get to her local primary health care center but died of heat stroke. She walked many kilometers—supposedly seven or eight kilometers—in the heat and then died of heat stroke. The baby was lost as well. My colleague, Sachit Balsari, an ER doctor at Harvard who thinks about heat and climate impacts, and I were thinking about what lessons we could take away from this.

One of the points Sachit wanted to make was that this is very different from the heat of our childhoods. The heat of our childhoods was at most an inconvenience. You'd have a rash, you'd sweat too often, your clothes would get damp, you'd feel a bit tired and weren't able to play as much as you normally might have in very hot parts of India. But now we've reached a point where exposure to that sort of heat in certain parts of the country, certain extreme parts of the country, can lead to serious illness and in some extreme cases of prolonged exposure, can result in death. It's a public policy problem. It's a public health problem. Lessons need to be learned now before anything really, really, really bad happens. There’s great potential in this country to have heat deaths numbering in the hundreds or thousands. That’s something that has happened before and cannot happen again.

These moments, like the lessons from this summer, reveal so many things that we can fix and get right. I'm reminded of something you said a long time ago, which is in governance and in public policy, there are only lessons learned. That’s really the objective of this op-ed: to start this conversation about what we can tweak and fix, what screws we can tighten, what parts we should get rid of, that sort of thing.

Nirjan: That's quite a depiction of the heat-related issues and some of the ideas we can learn from. By the way, Aditya, before we go any further, can you quickly define "heatwave"? I know you mentioned that and some of it could be technical, just so that all of us are aware.

Aditya: Yeah, sure. That’s an important question. It's actually not the most straightforward thing to answer, but very simply put, a heatwave is multiple days of extreme heat to a point where it crosses the adaptive capacity of that community, and you start seeing detrimental effects on the public health system, on economic productivity, and so on.

Normally, the way a heatwave works is that you have a declaration of a heatwave when a certain threshold temperature is passed. That threshold temperature is usually defined by some historical understanding of the temperature at which more people start dying or economic productivity starts falling. If that threshold exists for a couple of days, then that's a heatwave. Immediately, what's supposed to happen is that all these response actions kick into gear, like making sure rehydration solution is available or making sure your local health care center has enough cooling, enough ice, or has an air conditioner, the electricity system stays stable, and so on.

That’s why the declaration of a heatwave is important, and it is based on some understanding of when heat gets dangerous. You wouldn’t call every hot day a heatwave day. There’s a scientifically determined threshold that has to be followed.

Nirjan: And who declares it? Is it the government? It seems there are some institutional responses.

Aditya: Yeah, it's the government. It varies across the world. The threshold is usually determined in the local heat action plan. Ideally, you’d have some local data that tells you the temperature at which we start seeing hundreds more deaths. At that point, you should have a heatwave declaration. It depends on who's in charge. In many countries, it's the local government that declares a heatwave in a particular area based on their local temperature readings. In India, the Indian Meteorological Department has a national forecasting system, and it also runs thousands of temperature gauges across the country. They detect the levels of heat and try to declare a heatwave. It varies, but it's usually a government—sometimes a national government, sometimes a local government, depending on the situation, context, and history of that place.

Nirjan: Next, let's understand the factors that have contributed to the escalation of heatwaves in recent years. The recent IPCC report generated quite a lot of buzz for some alarming conclusions about the state of our climate. Can you help us understand the science that connects climate change and the increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves around the world?

Aditya: Yeah, there are multiple things driving heat's emergence as a public emergency.

To start with the climate side of it, it’s exacerbating a problem that already existed, right? A lot of the heat is baked into the way our cities and towns are structured. Anyone who’s lived in a South Asian city or traveled through one will know that a lot of it is concrete and glass. That’s the direction the built environment has taken recently. There’s a lot of density, which means the heat is trapped even more effectively. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of tree cover. So, you put all of that together, and you have an environment built to soak in all that heat and keep it trapped.

We also have huge amounts of inequality in cities. We’ll have high-rise, air-conditioned buildings, but right next to them, in many Indian cities, there are large slums with tin-roofed housing or cement roofs that really trap the heat and make the situation quite unbearable. So, there are structural problems and design issues that need to be fixed. What climate change is doing is releasing more carbon emissions, which traps more heat. This is driving the global average temperature up. We’re about 1.1 degrees higher than the pre-industrial average from the mid-19th century, so we’ve gone up quite a way. The predictions are that, at the current level of policy stringency, we might reach about 2.7 degrees by the end of the century. So, it’s going to get hotter. How much depends on how well we reduce carbon emissions.

Because there’s more heat being trapped, it means different parts of the world are warming differently. Parts of the Arctic and Europe are warming extremely fast. South Asia is already warm but is warming to a point where it’s becoming unbearable and could be a serious threat to life. Mountain regions across the Himalayas are warming extremely quickly. So, the rate of warming in different parts of the world varies, and that interacts with the built environment, resulting in some places experiencing a double whammy of an inhospitable built environment and extremely rapid regional rises in temperature. This makes the heat problem a really big issue.

Even in Nepal, in your intro, you mentioned heatwave declarations in the Terai, which has consistently been hot. It also has a lot of water bodies and thousands of rivers coming down from Nepal into India. You could well imagine extreme heat, localized humidity conditions, and the very strong sun in those parts. So, that’s where the worry starts. Those towns are growing quite fast, even the lesser-known towns of Nepal, and they’re becoming very dense.

Nirjan: So, we can expect, given the structural issues exacerbated by climate change, more hot days in the future, right? Yeah. So, let’s move on to the impacts then. I assume these impacts in India would be similar to what’s happening or will potentially happen in Nepal.

In a recent podcast with the India Energy Hour, you described heatwaves as being some sort of invisible problem, or as you put it, death by a thousand cuts. Can you expand on that?

Aditya: Yeah, it’s what makes heat very scary. When you think about climate change and large-scale loss of life and property, you think about cyclones hitting the coast of India or massive flooding in our cities. These are visible, tangible effects. You know where it’s coming from or have a high likelihood of predicting correctly where it will hit. You can see the impact, see the damage, and know exactly who’s been affected. The insurance mechanism kicks in, and the public health system responds. We’ve all gotten much better at handling these visible disasters in South Asia, in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.

The problem with heat is it’s completely invisible. It doesn’t hit one part of a city; it can spread out not only over the city but an entire region or part of a country. When it hits, you don’t see the effects. One of the great problems with heat, especially in places where public health systems are weaker, is that when a person dies, they’re usually listed as dying from some other cause, like organ failure, and it’s never actually attributed to heat. Various jurisdictions are trying to figure out protocols to determine when it’s a heat death and list it as such.

Most of the time, we have an inaccurate picture of how many heat deaths there are just by looking at autopsy reports and medical records. Similarly, when it comes to economic impacts, if you have many hundreds of thousands of people unable to work on an extremely hot day, there’s no way of picking up that they’re not working because of heat. It looks like absenteeism or that people haven’t shown up to work. So, you’re left with this invisible problem of economic productivity draining out on extremely hot days, but you don’t know exactly why that’s happening.

When it comes to policy measures, like instituting labor insurance so that if a person misses a day of work they’re compensated adequately, it’s important to identify who’s taking time off because of heat. Unlike an insurance mechanism where a person’s house is clearly damaged due to a flood, this operates at a level of intangibility and invisibility.

There are other things. Recently, in the case of Nepal, the World Bank mentioned how one of the big macroeconomic risks to Nepal is that a lot of workers in hot countries across West Asia, the Philippines, etc., who are likely to be affected by extreme heat situations could have their remittance outflows affected because they’re not earning as many days of the year, especially if they’re tied to daily wages or have performance benchmark wages. It may not be a problem now, but 30, 40, or 50 years from now, when the heat really gets bad, it becomes a question of macroeconomic stability. This is the thing about death by a thousand cuts. You might ignore all these little things, but cumulatively, you might end up with a serious loss in economic productivity.

There are all sorts of GDP numbers thrown around. The one for South Asia from all climate impacts, not just heat, by 2050 was that every South Asian country would lose about 2 percent of its GDP. India was roughly in that region, about 2 percent in terms of climate-based economic losses. I could well imagine a significant chunk of that is heat-related. It’s important to keep that in mind. All of this adds up.

Nirjan: Definitely. Moving from labor productivity, there are also issues with effects on agriculture and consumer prices. These all add up in many ways. The difficulty is in quantifying them.

Aditya: We have some estimates on the quantifying side of things. On agriculture, for example, there’s an ILO report that talks about how agriculture in India will be affected to the tune of 9 percent of all working hours lost by 2030. Economy-wide, that number is 5.8 percent. In 1991, the percentage of hours lost to extreme heat was 4.3. So, we’re seeing a 1.5 percent increase in hours lost in the span of about 20 years and a huge decrease in agricultural labor productivity.

That’s how it plays out. Farms across South Asia, definitely in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, are slightly less exposed because of the structure of their agricultural production. But there are open questions about what happens to vegetable production, especially with early onset heat or extreme heat spikes in crucial parts of the growing cycle. There are many things we don’t know, and in different economic contexts, heat impacts differently.

Nirjan: My follow up question was going to be around the ecological impacts and, you know, what that means for the larger ecosystem, right?

I mean, there's definitely bound to be a huge domino effect as a result of rising temperatures. There could be impacts on the supply of water that lead to dry conditions and pollution, which are favorable for forest fires. All of these add up, and the impacts are going to be quite huge on the entire economy and society. So, it’s quite out there.

Aditya: Yeah, absolutely. Right. And it's also about the extreme cases. So what happens with glacial lake outbursts, floods? In the context of extreme heat, did they get, is there a chance that they'd be seen more often? Would they become more destructive? They become less predictable because the heat is less predictable?

So these are question marks. I don't think I haven't seen any work on this stuff. But also for a country that now is seriously hinging economic prosperity to hydropower and has been very successful in building hydropower in recent years. What does the heat mean for what you were saying about how it affects the water running through a river?

And then what does that mean for hydropower productivity? And if it's an extremely hot summer. One would assume that a lot of North India is really ramping up its air conditioning usage, and there's more of a balancing need, and there's more of a base load need, and all sorts of things happening to the grid, down in India.

So, there are all of these interesting interactions we haven't fully explored yet.

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Nirjan: How this impact is reflected in society. You started kind of hinting at it. In your earlier responses, you know, and we all know that impact of heat waves and other disasters in general. The impacts are clearly not distributed evenly in the society. Can you paint a picture of who is impacted the most and how?

Aditya: Yeah, this is one of the great tragedies of climate change, right? It's usually the people who have done the least in terms of their carbon emissions who get hit the worst by climate impacts. And it's no different with heat. It's that way with every disaster. It's no different with heat, right? So, the first thing to think about is access to cooling and access to electricity.

If you want to buy an air conditioner, that's out of reach. For most of South Asia over 90 percent of South Asia at the moment and access to stable high quality electricity is out of reach to a significant chunk and especially when it becomes extremely hot and the grid is overloaded. There isn't enough thermal productivity or hydro productivity to keep the grid running.

I don't know how it works exactly on Nepal's grid, but last year in India, we had unseasonal heat in March, and there was this scramble to make sure thermal power productivity was high enough to meet the demand of the early heat. So there was scrambling rail rates filled with coal from various coal mines across the country and rushing them to thermal plants to make sure that, you know, cooling could be accessed.

And so most people don't actually have reliable access, especially in these extremely hot conditions. The second part of this is once you probe a little bit deeper into the structure of our cities, it's usually the people who have the least ability to cope with this in terms of monetary padding, in terms of a monetary buffer.

Right? So the problem is. If you're an agricultural worker who's come in from a small town and just moved to a large bustling town in the Terai, or similarly in any place in UP or Bihar, or as I see around me in Delhi, you're usually going to come into the sort of neighborhood where you don't have a lot of space.

Potentially don't have access to the best cooling. And you're also working a job that is extremely heat exposed. So most of this is informal service work in extremely hot, cramped environment. Some of it might be informal manufacturing work. Like I was mentioning earlier, a lot of people are employed in the gig economy.

So they have delivery guys riding on motorcycles all day. People might end up setting up roadside stalls. which are directly heat exposed. And these are people that can't afford to take a day off, which comes back to that point earlier about, labor protection and insurance mechanisms and make sure that, you know, days off are compensated.

So what one does is you keep going. It's a hot day. You're tired. You haven't had a lot of rest. You keep going and keep going because you can't take the day off and you're living, essentially, it's a hand to mouth existence. And those are the people that end up the worst off, right? And then you step back to a macro level, away from the city, and you think about inequity in a country at large.

Urban areas are much richer than rural areas, generally, almost as a rule. But then the agricultural impacts of heat are so huge, that it has this effect of making already vulnerable farming, Communities and not just the farming community, but also the non-farm work in a village, extremely vulnerable to heat impacts at the economic level, right?

So you could well end up in a situation where we productive these completely wiped out. So last year in India, we lost about 5 percent of wheat productivity and they had to put in place an export ban. And that has, huge impacts on how these communities are structured and able to function, right? There were some districts in India where the loss of wheat productivity was about 30%.

Loss in green gram was about 40%. So we're seeing massive losses. And so what happens to the next cropping season, right? And, and so again, it's farm labor, it's small-scale farmers, they're also affected by this. So if you stitch all of this together, right, all this stuff I've told you about, so 2 percent GDP loss, construction workers, and gig workers, and all these people trying to make a living in the cities.

And farmers who are already precarious and vulnerable and are sort of at the edge of their economic sustainability, like staring down the precipice. All of them are affected by heat. And then you stitch together this macro story of what South Asia is going to look like in the next 20, 30 years. And that's very worrying because it looks like it's going to really see greater inequality in our society.

Because you and I have the ability to cool ourselves and our productivity isn't really going to fall. And that's going to be true of most people who are doing white-collar jobs in cities across, and that's a huge chunk of the population, right? It's many hundreds of millions of people in South Asia. But the problem really becomes That we're going to be doing our jobs 20, 30, 40 years from now, from the comfort of our air-conditioned rooms, just as society outside becomes more starkly unequal and potentially more unstable.

Nirjan: So, let's move on to how we deal with the heat, right? So we've talked about these causes and impacts. Now, can you start by the overall approach? Like how should we be looking at the issue of heat in order to tackle this as a problem?

Aditya: Yeah, that's a good question. So we did the study recently and we tried to figure out what India's heat action plans look like. And maybe I can tell you and our listeners. What the standard heat action plan is so the standard heat action plan is a document that focuses very largely on information dissemination.

So we now are at a point where the meteorological sciences to be able to predict a heat wave a couple of days in advance. which gives people a little bit of time to respond, gives the public machinery time to prepare. So that part of it is quite important and they build out the information dissemination mechanism, right?

So the heat wave allowed to go from the Met department to ex-government department, to ex-local government department, to all of these different NGOs. And so they have a structure through which they embed this information in society. Heat action plans also try to think about what the immediate emergency response measures in a heat wave, in a declared heat wave are, right?

And so this is mainly about preventing the loss of light. So they do things like reduce the number of working hours and make sure that people aren't working when it's really hot out. They'll try and make sure that schools aren't open in extremely, at extremely hot times. Weddings will be conducted at night.

Tours and places will be closed. Tourist attractions will be closed during a heatwave. And of course, the healthcare system is massively beefed up, right? So they'll make sure that there's enough resources to handle heat stroke and heat stress cases, and so that's the response. What heat action plans of late have been doing is they've also been thinking about preparedness measures, right?

So this is actually changing your, the morphology of your towns and your cities, which is Thinking about how do we make these places cooler? Can we have urban shades? Can we have trees in certain parts? Can we have water troughs or small lakes or restore lakes to make sure that there's a little bit more cooling in, in that local, local area?

And this is, you know, as long as humid heat is not a problem. Can we have building codes that make sure that we're not trapping all this heat by having glass fronted buildings, which has become this trend in South Asian small town architecture. So it's a very expansive plan. Clearly, it'll involve multiple departments.

It involves a lot of coordination. It requires investment. But this is what the general Governmental response looks like by and large, and this is true across the world, actually, it's not just, just in India, it's, it's a bit of public health, it's a bit better information dissemination, early warning, it's a bit of changing of the structures.

So it's all quite complex.

Nirjan: You touched on urban planning. And this is something I wanted to visit here. Now, since most of us live in urban areas and the urban population is expected to grow exponentially. Do you have any thoughts on the role of urban planning? I mean, how it's to be done? It seems like a very long term solution, but what is the approach that governments should be taking on?

Aditya: Yeah, I'm always struck by this example of what they did in L.A. So the mayor in L.A., Eric Garcetti, he set up this very interesting target of trying to cool L.A. by three degrees, which at first sounds a little odd because, you know, we're talking about a Paris Agreement that's trying to limit global warming to 1.5 and well below two degrees. And so here we have a city that's talking about three degrees, and that's interesting. And the whole solution mechanism there to try and get to that three degree target is to try and make sure you get every little bit of cooling you can out of how you structure your city, right?

So if you have surfaces that are concentrating and absorbing heat, you get rid of them. So if you have glass, faces, they get glass face buildings and get a lot of sunlight exposure and reflecting that sunlight onto the street surface. And you do something to make sure that they aren't reflecting as much sunlight onto the street. You change the paving of the streets, you start introducing trees along the pavements. You build shade structures, kind of like giant bus stops, for example, and each of these things will have very different levels of viability in different cities, right? I mean, I can fully imagine that it's hard to grow a lot of trees in some Indian cities where the density is really high and houses are right there up against the road because you can't have the roots dig into people's foundations.

These are ultra long term solutions. So for a lot of South Asian cities, the building stock is only coming up now. And, you know, some say that, you know, as much as half, or maybe even more of India's building stock by the mid century is yet to have been built. So that's a huge opportunity, right? So that's, that's something we can try and build heat resilience into right away at a very low cost, rather than having to retrofit cities. And I think the problem is when you have to retrofit huge cities of tens of millions of people, it's a very expensive proposition. Then the question becomes about financing.

The low cost way of doing resilience is thankfully a lot of developing countries, we haven't built it yet. You have to have the state capacity and the foresight to be able to build in regulation right at the outset to make sure that this that these buildings in the zoning and so on is such that it's not extremely hot, right? So if you want to encourage green roofs and and roof gardens or cool roofs, which is the white painting and make sure that the structures isn't a lot of density around a large building or some green space somewhere, that's something that we need to get on now because those buildings are going to come up in the next few years and they're going to exist for the next couple of decades. And so if a building comes up in 2025 and exists to 2065, the temperature is going to be much higher than 2065. So these buildings, ironically, aren't going to be living out the rest of their lives in the conditions they started. But the engineers and the architects are constantly plotting for current conditions and not future conditions. So these are the things that we really need to fix when it comes to the urban environment.

Nirjan: Excellent point. Alright, I wanted to get into, you know, you already mentioned your study on the heat action plans. Now there were some issues on findings and recommendations I wanted to touch on, which I found to be quite interesting and relevant.

So one of the first points you raise is that most action plans are not built for local context and have an oversimplified view of the hazards. Can you expand on this and explain what your recommendations were to overcome the challenge?

Aditya: See, it comes back to the idea that heat is just a very, very tricky policy challenge, right? And it's what we were talking about earlier, Neerajan, that cities are structured in such a way that there's a lot of Inequality baked into the fabric of a city. So there are certain neighborhoods that end up being hotter just because of how they're structured and how they're built. And so there's just a lot more cement and the roofing is not appropriate and so on. Very, very dense places. And that's exactly where the people who have heat stressed jobs tend to work or heat exposed jobs tend to work. And this, you know, I'm only talking about the Indian example because I think it kind of holds true, but I'm sure it's true of many places across the world. The big task then, from a policy perspective, is to be able to locate and identify exactly who those people are, right?

So if you're given a map of a city, And a heat wave is coming. You want to be able to target your information measures and all these urban rejuvenation measures that we just talked about or figuring out where to change school timings and so on. You want to be targeting all of these at the places where You'll get the most value, most effectiveness in terms of reducing loss of life and making sure economic productivity doesn't fall.

And so you can't be, you know, in a city of 25 million people, you can't be targeting all 25 million people. There's probably 1 million people somewhere in there that are actually the most heat exposed. And you're able to tell that if you have this mapping exercise, what they call a vulnerability assessment, of trying to figure out how much money do these people have, how much access to cooling, how much access to electricity, to water. And you put together this composite map, map of these different neighborhoods, and you're able to tell, okay, so this is where the heat is the most, based on your weather data, and the historical heating patterns in the city. And this is where, you know, The people are most vulnerable and least able to deal with the heat and so you put those two bits of data together and that's where you need to be focusing all your public interventions around heat, right?

When you don't have that. The problem is you're flying blind because it's a city of 25 million people. How do you know? Where to direct the radio jingles and where to direct the teacher trainings and training teachers on heat. That is, where to beef up the public health capacity. So it's one of those problems.

And again, that's why it's important to recognize that this is different from other disasters. In the sense that one doesn't have the ability to see it. So you don't actually know where it's going to hit you the worst. And so you have to have a sort of predictive capability, and that's where the localization is important, understanding where exactly the most vulnerable people are.

Nirjan: So, the other, issue that I thought was interesting was that there is funding related issues, right? There's a difficulty of getting funds. The other related point is this is not mandated by law. How do you get the politics right so that Policymakers actually attend to this particular problem?

Aditya: That's a very tough question.

I'll, let me put it this way, right? I'm generally pessimistic about this. And maybe I'll just be upfront about my pessimism, which is the problem with adaptation in this universal climate policy. The problem with adaptation is it's not suited to political incentive structures. Because you're talking about precautionary actions, which require fairly high levels of upfront investment.

Unfortunately, in a case like heat, there is no large, tangible, visible, structural object that you're creating, right? It's about increasing capacities and hundreds of department and thousands of people and creating early warning systems. None of this can be seen. Unlike a dam or a seawall. And these are, you know, quintessential climate adaptation infrastructure investments.

You don't have that. So you're basically asking the political class to make large investments into preventing a problem that is a problem. Generally unpredictable. You have a lot of people saying that this is a problem. You can't really see the deaths because the deaths are popping up in all sorts of weird ways.

It's multi organ failure and so on and so forth. And really the worst of this is only going to come 10 years from now, 15 years from now. It's like three, four election cycles down the line. And that's this, that's just a problem that's baked into climate adaptation. So one way of thinking about it is if there's enough popular understanding of heat being a problem, climate being a problem more generally, then there is potential to get it right.

The funding and so on follows from this, right? If there's enough recognition within the system that this is a problem and that solving it can do many good things. So it's not just that you'll reduce heat resistance. If you have more livable cities, and the stuff that we were talking about, having trees in places so you have more shade, that creates a more livable city, right?

Having less cement and making it easier for people to walk around, even at midday, makes for a more livable city. And similarly, you know, improving the quality of life of the most poor people in your community improves the general standard and quality of living across the city. So there's so many co benefits to heat action.

If there is some understanding of this, and this is, I know it's this improbable thing of saying, may wisdom prevail and, and then everything will be fine. But if wisdom does prevail, it would be great. I'm just, The political part of that I can, I only think can come through, greater awareness. The other side of it, and this is the more depressing side of it, Is that it'll come through large scale heat death events, and that's historically been the case.

So we've seen that with the Chicago 94 heatwaves, we've seen that with a whole bunch of European heatwaves, Paris 2003, and many thereafter, where the public machinery springs into life and plans are created and so on. After the fact, and maybe the only way this works and we get more heat resilient is if we learn our lessons, right?

Even in India, we have many dozens of heat action plans now, but only started after the loss of I think something like 800 people in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in 2010, I think it was. And that's, that's the, that was the benchmark. And then we saw this massive public policy diffusion story of heat action plans in different states and districts and cities and so on.

So that's the darker side of how people end up responding to this. But yeah, funding is a huge problem. I think as a result of this, This is true of climate plans across India, and I suspect it's true of climate plans across the developing world, where there just isn't enough money for these new instruments of public policy.

So India's climate action plans in general, the National Action Plan on Climate Change, State Action Plan on Climate Change, the Heat Action Plans and the Strict Climate Change Disaster management plans. All of these things don't come with tight baskets of funding. There's some funding pools available.

So some parts of funding, but it's an open question as to how a line department in the state government and, you know, I think this is relevant, especially in the context of federalism in Nepal. It's an open question as to how local governments and state, what we call state governments here, provincial governments that don't have a lot of capacity and access to finances are able to implement all of this climate planning, which comes with no special funding.

So this is just a general problem, and I'm not sure how much we can rely on the private sector for adaptation financing. I'm sure in some cases, with some interventions, it's possible. So for example, with air conditioners, I could assume that there'd be some scale effects that let it happen.

But otherwise, it is a big problem.

Nirjan: So, based on your research and your experiences of having worked and traveled in South Asia, do you think there are any takeaways, good or bad, that countries like Nepal can take from India's experience with dealing with the heat?

Aditya: Yeah, I think one big lesson is the default way of dealing with heat is greater air conditioning.

And that is something, as far as I know, it's about 8.5 percent of India's population has air conditioning at the moment and that creates problems in terms of managing the grid in terms of creating maladaptive risk because you're creating more emissions to solve the heat and therefore creating more heat, which then will lead to more emissions.

And that's just sort of an endless cycle. And it's also not possible politically or perhaps even ethically to ask people not to have cooling, especially when it's so hot and we're talking about this in lethal levels of heat. So that's one thing to think about. That's the default direction and how do we make sure that cooling is something that doesn't blow the mission's budget and doesn't make the problem worse for people.

Is it energy efficient cooling? Is it having different types of build structures and having newer technologies like heat pumps and so on, community-level cooling with some centralized cooling repository? I don't really know what the solutions are, but that's an ongoing discussion here.

And I don't think we're very close to solving that problem. The second part of it is what I was suggesting earlier, in our review of these heat action plans. And in view of general climate planning in India, it's quite amazing how many co-benefits these policies can throw up in terms of making life more livable, the air more breathable, in terms of making sure that we actually address inequality in a concentrated mission mode, just so that there isn't large scale loss of life to make sure there's more devolution of powers to local governments.

Heat action plans are one instance of that, but then pretty much everything needs some degree of decentralization, localization. Financing this stuff, more responsibility and authority to local governments, and most importantly, a lot more deliberative democracy, right? Because these are problems that are hyper-local.

And so you can't solve them without having some level of local intelligence, local input, and monitoring. So these are good things from a governance perspective, right? That's the direction you want community, society, and government to go in. And there is a lot of promise here. It isn't all doom and gloom.

Nirjan: As we close out our conversation today, Aditya, is there anything else you'd like to convey to our listeners? You know, maybe give us a few insights into some of your work that you're currently engaged in.

Aditya: Yeah, so, we're doing a couple of pieces of work all sort of related to heat. We're actually very curious about some of the roadblocks to implementing these heat action plans.

So it's something we've been looking at and trying to identify places where we could study the implementation bottlenecks. And I think that's important mainly to give some more color and clarity to how we could get over the financing shortfalls or how we could get around the legal enforceability problem in ways that are locally palatable and sustainable from a policy perspective.

We're also thinking a little bit more about the secondary impacts of heat, right? So things like forest fires, which, you know, places like Uttarakhand and so on have. Have so much trouble with these things. So we've been thinking about the secondary impacts of heat because heat is this macro problem.

But then the deeper you go, you end up with a whole universe of questions that need answering, right? Like I was saying about what architecture should look like in the future, how to change building bylaws or where to plant your trees. And all of these questions aren't answered yet. So it's completely greenfield territory in that sense.

It's a very exciting research area.

Nirjan: Excellent. And with that, we've come to the end of our episode. Thank you, Aditya, for this very insightful conversation and for graciously accepting our invitation to be part of Pods by PEI.

Aditya: Great. Thank you for having me, Nirjan. Really lovely chatting.

Khushi: Thanks for listening to Pods by PEI. I hope you enjoyed Nirjan's conversation with Aditya about the rising number of heat waves around the world, including Nepal and India, the effects on the economy and society, and what we can learn from the Indian experience. Today's episode was produced by Nirjan Rai, with support from Hritesh Sabkota, Sonia Jimmy, and me, Khushi Haan.

The episode was edited by Nirjan Rai. Our theme music is courtesy of Rohit Shakya from Zindabad. If you like today's episode, please subscribe to our podcast. Also, please do us a favor by sharing us on social media and leaving a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.

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