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
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, accor