Local governments face the difficult task of preparing communities and infrastructure for a warmer world – all while urbanisation accelerates and extreme weather becomes more frequent and intense.
But officials responsible for implementing heat resilience actions face significant challenges, in large part because many of the required solutions take time to implement.
For example, trees planted to provide shade require several years to mature before their benefits are felt.
For India specifically, inadequate long-term heat preparedness could have serious consequences.
Heatwaves are already harming public health and economic productivity in the south-Asian nation and are expected to increase in frequency and duration with global warming.
In a new report, we analyse how prepared India is for the heat extremes projected under 1.5C of warming by assessing the implementation of long-term heat risk-reduction measures in nine cities.
To understand how heat resilience measures were being implemented in these cities, we interviewed 88 government officials working in a range of departments – including health, disaster management, labour, planning and horticulture.
The research finds that solutions being implemented are generally short term and weakly targeted – posing a major threat to the ability of communities to adapt to the future climate.
India’s growing urban population
The cities covered by our study – Bengaluru, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Surat – represent a diversity of institutional and economic contexts. Some cities are large and others are growing, while each belongs to a different state.
Together, they are home to 11% of the nation’s urban population and provide a proxy for India’s overall preparedness for heat extremes under 1.5C of global warming.
We selected these nine cities because they are expected to see some of the largest increases in dangerous heat under 1.5C of warming compared to a 2013-22 baseline, according to projections in the CMIP6 ensemble of climate models.
Specifically, these cities are projected to experience the largest increase in days where temperatures exceed the 98th percentile of the local heat index, a measure which combines temperature and relative humidity to provide an understanding of how hot it feels outside. Heat index values exceeding the 98th historical percentile are typically associated with significant increases in mortality and morbidity.
We use this measure, rather than just the largest number of extreme heat days, because communities and institutions that experience significant climate change are less likely to be equipped to cope than those that have historically faced extreme heat.
The map below shows the location of the nine cities and the projected increase in frequency of exceeding the 98th percentile of the heat index under 1.5C of global warming. The darker shading indicates those areas seeing the largest increases.
A lack of long-term actions
Our research finds that cities in our sample have already begun grappling with extreme heat.
Officials from all nine cities reported taking emergency actions to deal with immediate health consequences. This includes actions such as awareness campaigns, repurposing hospital wards for the treatment of heatstroke patients and changing work times.
However, the study finds that cities are much less likely to implement long-term actions that can be implemented now to reduce future heat risk in these cities, such as large-scale tree planting.
Meanwhile, health system preparedness actions make up a significant proportion of long-term measures specifically being introduced to increase heat resilience – initiatives grouped in the study as “long-term heat intentional actions”.
These actions – which include health staff training and death surveillance measures – are of foundational importance to heat resilience, as they deal with the consequences of heat overwhelming the adaptive capacity of societies.
However, long-term heat intentional actions that sit outside the health system – which are typically designed to prevent society’s adaptive capacity from being overwhelmed in the first place – were less common in cities studied. A picture of very weak mainstreaming of long-term heat actions emerges when health system preparedness is excluded from the analysis.
The study also finds that many actions with potential long-term benefits – which includes the expansion of urban shade and green cover, the creation of open spaces that dissipate heat and the deployment of rooftop solar that can power building cooling systems – were being implemented as a part of routine developmental policy, with few direct links to heat concerns.
These actions – which are grouped in the study as “long-term heat incidental actions” – are not specifically targeted at the most heat-vulnerable areas of the cities studied. As a result, they could have weak and inconsistent effects on heat resilience.
The execution of these long-term incidental actions undoubtedly contributes to adaptive capacity for dealing with heat. However, the fact they are not explicitly designed to also address extreme heat is a missed opportunity.
In eight of the nine cities, for example, trees planted were not aligned with heat vulnerability assessments. Officials in multiple cities reported challenges to planting trees in dense, hot slums and informal settlements, where land is scarce and politically fraught.
Meanwhile, some key long-term measures are entirely missing, including: insurance for lost working hours lost, which is crucial as heat chips away at productivity; electricity grid retrofits that can meet the rising electricity demand from cooling; and cooling access for the most vulnerable.
The figure below shows cities’ skew towards short-term heat actions. The boxes illustrate the range of reported short, long-intentional and long-incidental heat solutions implemented in the nine cities, with the size of each box indicating the number of cities that reported implementing each solution.
Barriers to heat policy
The distribution of inconsistent and weakly targeted long-term heat actions in our sample suggests that India will likely see more frequent heatwaves with higher mortality levels in the coming years.
In other words, the lack of these actions could see communities’ adaptive capacities overwhelmed by rising temperatures.
When looking into the reasons why cities are falling short, many of our findings are consistent with barriers to adaptation and heat governance reported in other countries.
Officials reported limited public pressure for long-term heat resilience. The focus – from both the public and elected politicians – was on short-term measures to alleviate the immediate suffering wrought by heat, including preventing drinking water shortages and shifting work hours.
A notable exception was high levels of support for more trees. However, in some cases, popular pressure pushed in the wrong direction, with challenges to access to public land and groundwater undermining the provision of heat solutions.
These weak and conflicting signals are compounded by scant financial and legal backing for heat-related policy. India’s heat plans have proliferated rapidly at multiple levels of government, but are generally neither backed by law or finance, giving them little purchase in already-stretched local governments.
Sixteen of the 25 respondents in our study who discussed weak heat governance reported not seeing their jurisdiction’s heat plan, which meant they would be unlikely to implement their sectors’ resilience actions this year.
(For more detailed analysis of the gaps in heat action plans in India, see an earlier Carbon Brief guest post.)
Instead, the study finds that actions – particularly emergency health measures put in place just before and during a heatwave – are largely driven by directives from higher levels of government. Moreover, these directives from national and state disaster management and health authorities – rather than local heat planning efforts – are less likely to capture local context and challenges.
Our research shows that limitations in the structure of the state – from faltering coordination between departments, to competing priorities in short-staffed bureaucracies with weak technical capacity – limit the prospects of long-term planning.
The figure below shows a breakdown of institutional barriers holding back heat actions in the nine cities studied, as reported by government officials.
It demonstrates that – across all government departments – coordination problems (dark blue bars) are seen as the single largest constraint on implementation, followed by competing priorities (light blue) and the view that heat is not a policy problem (red).
Practical solutions
Practical measures could help tackle a number of the barriers to building heat resilience in Indian cities.
Embedding long-term resilience for extreme heat and other climate hazards in legal structures, alongside appropriate financial backing, could improve accountability and the monitoring of solutions. This could involve updating climate and disaster management legislation to make implementation of extreme heat actions mandatory.
Meanwhile, many of the most commonly reported problems set out in the figure above could be tackled with sustained capacity building in local government. This could include a combination of new positions dedicated to extreme heat and staff training on appropriate resilience measures.
Adequately staffed, financed and trained local government officials are more likely to coordinate with each other, deal with simultaneous and competing priorities and understand the urgency of implementing long-term actions.
In addition, making crucial climate information available to government officials tasked with designing and implementing heat measures could result in a more targeted response.
This could include regional climate model output that provides projections on what the most dangerous days of heat will look like in the hottest parts of cities – and vulnerability assessments and urban heat island maps showing spatial variation in impacts.
While our research focuses on India, many of the challenges it highlights are likely to be similar in other rapidly developing global south countries.
Adapting to increasing extreme heat will be central to urban living for decades to come. A late start to these efforts will increase pressure on the state in the future and risks exposing citizens to harms from warming that could be avoided.
Our peer-reviewed report is published by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, an independent research organisation analysing issues in climate change, energy and the environment. A version of the paper is due to be published in an academic journal later this year.
The post Guest post: Why action on extreme heat in Indian cities is falling short appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why action on extreme heat in Indian cities is falling short
June Rubis is a steering group committee member for the Cali Fund, from Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo.
At COP16 in Cali, governments made a significant commitment: at least half of the funding from the new Cali Fund should support the self-identified needs of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including women and youth. It was a watershed moment for multilateral benefit-sharing.
The challenge now is to translate that commitment into access arrangements that recognise the different institutions, priorities and decision-making processes of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
For generations, biodiversity and traditional Indigenous knowledge have provided significant value to companies who depend on nature’s genetic diversity to discover new drugs that fight diseases, create products that improve health, and grow crops resilient to extreme heat and flooding events. While some compounds are sampled directly from the source country, increasingly the digital blueprints are held in online public databases which are freely accessible to use for innovation and research.
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The Cali Fund was established at COP16 to encourage commercial users of Digital Sequence Information, or DSI, to share benefits arising from its use. Estimates suggest it could generate over $3.5 billion a year – a stark contrast to the modest $10,656 currently committed to the fund from just five SMEs, underlining how much progress must be made at COP17 over the next two weeks.
The COP16 decision that set up the fund offers two routes for money to reach Indigenous Peoples and local communities: through government authorities, and through direct payments to institutions identified by Indigenous Peoples and local communities themselves.
Varied ways of organising
Indigenous Peoples and local communities organise through a wide range of institutions. Some have national or regional organisations experienced in managing international grants. Others work through territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations, cooperatives or networks. Some have professional finance teams and audited accounts; others have extensive experience governing territories, collective resources or conservation work without having been organised around international funding requirements.
For direct access, some questions are already apparent. Which institutions should be able to receive funds? How should they be identified? What fiduciary standards should apply? How should safeguards and accountability work where institutional capacities differ? What support may be needed where institutions have strong community mandates but less experience with international finance?
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If access is designed mainly around institutions that already meet the expectations of large international finance mechanisms, early funding will tend to favour those already familiar to funders. They will gain further experience and become better positioned for future funding, while institutions with less administrative capacity may remain outside the system despite strong community mandates and long histories of stewardship.
These first decisions matter most, because they set the terms for everyone who follows.
The role of intermediaries requires care. Some Indigenous organisations may want a fiscal host to hold and manage funds on their behalf. Communities may choose to work through an NGO they trust. Government-facilitated arrangements may work well in particular national contexts.
What matters is the function an intermediary performs and the authority that comes with it. Providing administrative support is different from deciding which Indigenous organisations qualify, which priorities can receive support, or how success will be assessed. Direct access means communities keep that decision-making authority.
Decision-making power
The COP16 decision refers to institutions that Indigenous Peoples and local communities identify. But authority among Indigenous Peoples does not sit in one kind of body. It may sit with territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations or combinations of these. Legal recognition and customary authority do not always align neatly.
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An important feature of the Cali Fund’s governance is that Indigenous Peoples and local communities participate as full members of the Steering Committee, rather than as observers. Seven Indigenous Peoples and local community representatives, one from each of the seven socio-cultural regions, participate in consensus-based decision-making alongside representatives of governments and UN entities. Six additional representatives from civil society, scientific institutions and the private sector participate as observers.
That representation carries responsibility. Institutional legitimacy, access and representation take different forms across the seven socio-cultural regions. Indigenous Peoples and local communities members therefore have an important role in bringing those differences into the Fund’s governance and in ensuring that arrangements developed for one context do not become the assumed model for everyone else.
Safeguards and clear responsibilities
COP17 can establish the core principles and direction, while allowing operational pathways to develop in ways that respond to different regional contexts. The decisions countries take in Yerevan will shape how that flexibility is realised in practice.
The choices made around access will influence which institutions are able to participate, which routes become established and which forms of authority are recognised within the funding architecture. The aim should be an architecture with enough structure to maintain confidence while allowing for different forms of Indigenous and community governance.
A credible direct-access pathway will need safeguards, financial oversight and clear responsibilities. This would give the 50% commitment a stronger institutional foundation.
The Cali Fund’s importance will ultimately depend not only on how much funding reaches Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but on whether they are able to determine how the money is accessed, governed and used. This requires access pathways that recognise their institutions, priorities and decision-making processes, rather than requiring them to conform to a single predetermined model.
The post COP17 must settle who decides how Cali Fund money is disbursed appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 must settle who decides how Cali Fund money is disbursed
The UK government has approved extraction at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, despite acknowledging that this decision could make it harder for Britain to convince other countries to move away from fossil fuel production.
UK energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh approved the drilling on Wednesday after months of high-profile debate, fuelled in part by interventions from US President Donald Trump. She argued that the project would boost energy security in the wake of the Middle East fossil fuel crisis, protect hundreds of jobs and add £2.9 billion ($3.88bn) to the UK economy.
She said Jackdaw’s gas would be cleaner than imported gas and would not prevent the UK from meeting its legally-binding carbon targets and its goal of net zero by 2050. As the field is already licensed, she said extraction was consistent with the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto promise not to issue any new oil and gas licenses.
The same morning, the government announced a new Energy Wealth Fund to reinvest oil and gas revenues in the climate transition. It will start with £2 billion ($2.67bn) from the government and be topped up over time with tax revenues from offshore oil and gas production.
Climate campaigners in the UK and abroad were quick to condemn the decision, while a leading legal expert told Climate Home News it goes against the advice of the International Court of Justice. Meanwhile, the government’s own documents reveal that it recognises the drilling could damage the UK’s reputation and its ability to push forward the global transition away from fossil fuels.
“Climate leadership” blow
The 92-page decision document says Fahnbulleh “acknowledges that international standing on climate is important and accepts that a decision to grant consent may not further the UK’s international climate leadership.”
It adds: “She acknowledges concerns about the potential implications for the UK’s credibility and influence – including the difficulty inherent in encouraging other states to move away from fossil fuel production while the UK continues, in a limited and transitional way, to draw on its own domestic resources.”
While noting that Jackdaw has not been issued with a new license – just permission to extract gas – the document says Fahnbulleh “accepts this does not fully resolve the underlying tension in the UK’s position” but “considers this alongside the substance of the UK’s wider record [on emissions reduction], which remains significant”.
It continues that she accepts these concerns are “legitimate” and weigh against approving gas extraction, but only gives this argument a “moderate negative weight” set against the benefits of gas production.
“Huge” wrong signal
In international climate talks, the UK has long supported the transition away from fossil fuels and is one of very few major oil and gas producers to ban new licenses. Across the North Sea, the Norwegian government continues to make offshore areas available for oil and gas exploration through annual licensing rounds.
Climate experts and campaigners shared the concern, acknowledged in the decision document, that approving Jackdaw could set a precedent for fossil fuel production elsewhere. Sam Fankhauser, professor of climate change economics at Oxford University, said the direct climate impact of Jackdaw is “much smaller than the debate around it would suggest” but the “wrong signal it sends, however, is huge”.
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Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said that while Jackdaw’s output will be very small, “it will signal to other fossil fuel producers that they too should carry on with business as usual, less than a month before the COP31”.
Kenyan campaigner Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, called the decision “a serious blow to Britain’s international climate credibility” as “the UK cannot expect developing countries to move away from fossil fuels while giving the green light to new drilling in its own backyard”.
International Court of Justice
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advised that government failure to take appropriate climate action “including through fossil fuel production” may amount to an internationally wrongful act.
The UK voted in favour of a United Nations resolution welcoming the advisory opinion. Yet, in its Jackdaw decision document, it notes that the ICJ opinion is not legally binding and says the UK does not accept the court’s opinion that the customary international law duty to prevent significant harm to the environment applies to climate change.
Fahnbulleh concludes that, although it will have “signifi