Indian cities that are most vulnerable to extreme heat are failing to prepare for worsening heatwaves and are relying primarily on short-term emergency measures, according to a new report published Wednesday by the independent climate research group Sustainable Futures Collaborative.

The report, Is India Ready for a Warming World? How Heat Resilience Measures Are Being Implemented for 11% of India’s Urban Population in Some of Its Most At-Risk Cities, assesses how nine major cities are responding to rising temperatures.

The cities (Bengaluru, Delhi, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai and Surat) account for over 11% of India’s urban population, according to the 2011 Census. They have been identified as being at a high risk of dangerous increases in heat index levels as the climate warms.

“These findings are a warning about the shape of things to come,” said Aditya Valiathan Pillai, visiting fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative and lead author of the report. “Many of the long-term risk reduction measures we focus on will take several years to mature. They must be implemented now, with urgency, to have a chance of preventing significant increases in mortality and economic damage in the coming decades.”

Based on 88 interviews with government officials across city, district and state levels, the report states that most cities are focused on immediate responses such as providing access to drinking water, changing work schedules and expanding hospital capacity during heatwaves.

The study said that such measures could be read as positive developments “in achieving a minimum baseline of life-saving actions across cities in just over a decade” since India’s first heat action plan was published in 2013. However, if long-term measures are not implemented, the country’s response architecture will be overwhelmed by extreme heat, it added.

The report highlights that several critical long-term measures are either absent or poorly targeted across cities. These include household or occupational cooling for exposed populations, insurance cover for lost work, fire management services, and upgrades to electricity infrastructure to improve transmission reliability and distribution safety.

Other actions, such as expanding urban shade, green cover, open spaces and rooftop solar deployment, were found to be implemented without adequate focus on the most heat-vulnerable areas or populations.

“Exposure to extreme heat and co-occurring humidity threatens lives and livelihoods,” said Alexandra Kassinis of Harvard University. “This will only get worse as global temperatures continue to rise.”

Researchers found that emergency directives from national and state disaster management and health authorities drive most local responses. Heat Action Plans, which are intended to guide long-term risk mitigation, are institutionally weak and play a limited role in driving action on the ground.

Long-term measures were most commonly reported in the health sector, including heat-specific training for health workers and creating systems to monitor heat-related deaths. However, researchers observed that current health system preparedness is geared towards dealing with the consequences of heat, rather than preventing such situations from occurring.

“With increasing global mean temperatures, it's imperative to prepare for extremely dangerous combinations of temperature and humidity that have no historical precedent,” said Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In sectors such as urban planning and labour, long-term heat resilience actions were largely missing. “With the exception of health system preparedness from the list of intentional long-term actions, what emerges is a picture of very weak mainstreaming of long-term heat concerns in other crucially important sectors,” the report says.

The researchers noted that short-term measures are easier to implement because they are relatively cheap and can be funded through existing departmental budgets and state and national schemes.

Over two-thirds of officials interviewed said they had adequate funding for current heat action plans. However, the report warned that “the shift towards long-term climate adaptation will require more finance.”

The authors said that while short-term actions are currently affordable, structural interventions such as redesigning urban infrastructure or improving energy systems will need sustained public investment.

Institutional constraints were identified as another key barrier. Respondents cited coordination failures, personnel shortages, weak technical capacity, competing priorities, and insufficient recognition of extreme heat as serious policy problems.

In many cities, officials also lacked access to climate projections or granular heat data needed for effective planning. Only two of the 42 respondents asked had access to future climate projections. “Most implementers therefore did not know what the most dangerous days in a +1.5°C world would look like in their cities,” the report says.

Tamanna Dalal, research associate at Sustainable Futures Collaborative, said: “The cornerstone to India’s policy response on heat, Heat Action Plans, remain weak in driving action on ground, but now is the time to strengthen and embed them in the Indian state.”

The authors have recommended a range of institutional, technical and financial reforms. These include strengthening Heat Action Plans through local legislation, using disaster mitigation funds for long-term heat risk projects, appointing empowered heat officers in cities, expanding targeted cooling subsidies, and building technical capacity in local governments.

They also call for a national programme to provide city and district officials with access to climate projections, and a multi-year training effort for frontline officials in India’s most heat-vulnerable cities.

The report concluded that without such a shift, India “will likely see heat waves with higher mortality levels more frequently in the coming years, as short-term life-saving responses and communities’ adaptive capacities are overwhelmed by rising temperatures”.

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