Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a significant acceleration in the rate of warming globally, from about 0.18 degrees Celsius (°C) per decade during 1970–2010, to about 0.36°C per decade since then.
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| Construction industry workers at a union meeting. Photo from the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sanghan union’s social media |
As James Hansen, among the world’s most regarded climate scientists, and his colleagues emphasised in a research communication in late April, the rate of warming has speeded up because the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, has been declining.
There are varied, complex reasons for this:
🔥 One, ironically, is cleaner air. Tiny aerosol pollutants in the atmosphere tend to block and scatter sunlight and hence reduce the energy absorbed by the Earth. However, this masking effect has decreased of late, partly because of stricter sulphur emission norms on marine shipping in recent years, and because China has fairly successfully addressed its air pollution over the last 15 years.
🔥 Two, both reduced aerosols and global warming affect cloud formation, reducing their masking effect.
🔥 Three, there’s less Arctic sea ice as that region warms, which has resulted in more solar radiation being absorbed by the much darker water.
This acceleration is occurring against the backdrop of continued emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause global warming in the first place. Because of this, the Indian landmass has warmed by 0.9°C between 1901 and 2024.
It has been particularly intense in recent years: 2023 was the second-warmest in 122 years of recorded temperatures, after 2016, which was soon overtaken by 2024 as India’s hottest year.
After a slight dip in 2025, this year too has begun ominously, with heatwaves searing much of India quite early, in April, making it for a while the hottest country in the world.
These are not merely statistical records. Accelerating warming has a bearing on the lives, livelihoods, and the health of literally hundreds of millions of working people across the country. To say nothing of agriculture, productivity, energy demand, infrastructural resilience, governance, and public health.
Given this context, a recent report – Critical Perspectives on Extreme Heat in India, by Harvard University’s Salala Institute for Climate and Sustainability – is timely. It is a compilation of short essays about facets of extreme heat, and adaptation to it, in the Indian context.
It covers providing forecasts for farmers, and its challenges; why heat thresholds that trigger adaptation measures ought to be context-specific; the need to prioritise design and materials used in buildings over merely applying reflective paint on “cool roofs”; how heat action plans that have fared unevenly in different states could be strengthened; insurance payments that are triggered automatically when certain heat thresholds are reached, rather than after the damage is done; why workers bear both the highest risks of heat and the costs of adapting to it; what a health agenda for climate adaptation might be; and finally, revamping local and global adaptation finance. For reasons of brevity, this article will dwell only on some of these themes.
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Dealing with a warmer and more humid world
The first essay, by Peter Huybers, asks why India’s average temperature rise between 1901 and 2024 has been significantly less than the global land average temperature rise over the same period.
This is usually attributed to India’s location in the tropics, where warming is less than at higher latitudes; surface cooling that has occurred with the spread of irrigation; and the persistence of air pollution in India, in contrast to its reduction that has contributed to faster warming elsewhere.
Huybers correctly points out that warming will accelerate in India as well, once the masking effects of air pollution diminish with improved environmental regulation, and as irrigation intensity declines. However, the essay only discusses the winter months, January mostly.
Given that heatwaves and their most harmful effects on people occur largely in the summer and pre-monsoon months, one wishes warming trends had been analysed for those periods as well.
It is impossible to overstate how harmful, even lethal, more frequent, longer, and more intense heatwaves could be in vast regions in which tens of millions work outdoors, particularly in a socioeconomic context of widespread informality of labour and sub-optimal nutritional levels.
A warmer world is also a more humid world. This is largely because warmer oceans experience greater evaporation and because a warmer air can hold more moisture. This combination of greater heat and humidity is more hazardous than heat alone.
As Robert Meade, Aditya Pillai, and Satchit Balsari point out in their essay, “How hot is too hot?”, there are physiological limits to human capacity to regulate body temperature.
It is widely understood that these limits are reached at around 35°C wet bulb temperature (a measure of heat and humidity combined). Beyond that, even someone as fit as Virat Kohli [the great Indian international cricketer] would die, if he or she sat outdoors for a few hours in the shade doing nothing, because the body would unavoidably lose its capacity to expel heat.
But such a threshold is an abstract one. Physiologies differ, and the elderly, infants, or those with certain ailments would have far lower thresholds. The authors put it well – the questions we first need to ask, they say, are, “Too hot for what?” and “Too hot for whom?”
The answers to these questions depend a lot on how long one needs to work, and what one does while working. Other than deaths, there are challenges of morbidity and physiological stresses at far lower levels of heat and humidity, but academic research on what these thresholds are is just beginning in India.
The significance of scale
The most significant adaptive response by Indian state governments to extreme heat has been the introduction of heat action plans (HAPs). Under these HAPs, a range of measures including prior heat warnings, wider water distribution, public health interventions, etc. are triggered when the maximum temperature in a place crosses predetermined thresholds.
It is widely acknowledged that mortality from extreme heat has fallen in India after these plans were first operationalised 13 years ago.
While this is commendably true, we may be underestimating the number of deaths from relentless heat.
This is partly because, on average in India, 30 per cent of all deaths are not recorded at all. When they are, other reasons, most commonly heart attack, are registered as the cause of death – rather than the underlying, sustained exposure to extreme heat.
In Europe, where such estimations are done differently using comparisons with baseline mortality data, it was found that an additional 61,672 people died from extreme heat in a 3-month period in 2022, that too in a region with a population less than half that of India’s.
Even though we have a younger population than Europe’s, it is likely that more people are dying here from heat than we realise – and they certainly will in future, as India warms faster. We urgently need more robust baseline data and methods, improved health systems, and better targeted interventions.
As Aditya Pillai points out in his essay on HAPs, they suffer from poor targeting, whereby the most vulnerable are sketchily covered or get left out of adaptation measures.
One problem is that HAPs have inadequate legislative or financial backing. Greater emphasis on incentivising politicians and bureaucrats to act, more comprehensive implementation across all relevant sectors, along with sanctions for poor implementation, would, he states, be more effective.
I would add that greater democratisation in the conception and implementation of HAPs would also help, via regular consultations with organisations representing those most affected. Very few states have followed this in practice.
A widely discussed heat adaptation measure is “cool roofs”, the application of white chemical paints on rooftops so more sunlight is reflected, thereby cooling interiors – similar in essence to what is done by Arctic ice, which the world is fast melting.
All examples of cool roof applications I have heard of have been through small, NGO-led efforts – which, however well-intentioned, are carried out for want of resources in a handful of homes in a few slum clusters. As with all adaptation measures necessary to tackle so massive and complex a problem as global warming, what is needed is scale.
For example, Delhi’s Kashmere Gate bus terminus now has “cool roofs” across 2664 square metres (28,674 square feet). Such an approach should be taken where the poor live, in slum clusters in Delhi and elsewhere, where feasible. The onus for this lies with governments, who can provide subsidies and ensure quality, so that a roof once painted stays that way for a while.
However, as Rawal and Radhika Khosla point out in their essay on the built environment, focusing on “cool roofs” alone is inadequate. Other surfaces like walls and windows influence felt temperatures greatly, and even having “cool roofs” does not adequately address dangerous humidity, as mentioned above.
It is necessary, they say, to “prioritise other passive design strategies … that address building materials, construction techniques, and spatial configuration”. This is important, because deaths from extreme heat happen not just outdoors, but indoors even more so, of the elderly or the ill in cramped homes.
To once again emphasise scale, I would strongly urge the introduction of urban National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) schemes across towns in India. So far, the Act operates only in Rajasthan, and there too patchily.
An urban NREGA could potentially be used to build climate-resilient homes for the poor and thereby help them cope better with both extreme heat and flooding, two of the biggest impacts of climate change in urban India.
At a meeting in April, an office bearer of the MGNREGA Mazdoor Union proposed it be used to enhance green cover, to provide shade. Expanding the NREGA could help tackle both climate change and provide jobs, India’s twin crises.
Pressurising the state to carry out effective adaptation measures at scale needs strong working class and other social movements.
Sadly, climate change is becoming a political issue in India just when workers’ movements, and the left in general, are much weaker than in their heyday.
In their essay, Rajesh Nayak and Sharon Block correctly point out that workers end up bearing both the highest risks of climate change, through impacts on health and wages, and the costs of adaptation. But it was disappointing that they provided only a few examples of workers’ or union responses, and most are from Canada and the US, where the social and political dynamics are very different from our own.
The first essay, by Peter Huybers, asks why India’s average temperature rise between 1901 and 2024 has been significantly less than the global land average temperature rise over the same period.
This is usually attributed to India’s location in the tropics, where warming is less than at higher latitudes; surface cooling that has occurred with the spread of irrigation; and the persistence of air pollution in India, in contrast to its reduction that has contributed to faster warming elsewhere.
Huybers correctly points out that warming will accelerate in India as well, once the masking effects of air pollution diminish with improved environmental regulation, and as irrigation intensity declines. However, the essay only discusses the winter months, January mostly.
Given that heatwaves and their most harmful effects on people occur largely in the summer and pre-monsoon months, one wishes warming trends had been analysed for those periods as well.
It is impossible to overstate how harmful, even lethal, more frequent, longer, and more intense heatwaves could be in vast regions in which tens of millions work outdoors, particularly in a socioeconomic context of widespread informality of labour and sub-optimal nutritional levels.
A warmer world is also a more humid world. This is largely because warmer oceans experience greater evaporation and because a warmer air can hold more moisture. This combination of greater heat and humidity is more hazardous than heat alone.
As Robert Meade, Aditya Pillai, and Satchit Balsari point out in their essay, “How hot is too hot?”, there are physiological limits to human capacity to regulate body temperature.
It is widely understood that these limits are reached at around 35°C wet bulb temperature (a measure of heat and humidity combined). Beyond that, even someone as fit as Virat Kohli [the great Indian international cricketer] would die, if he or she sat outdoors for a few hours in the shade doing nothing, because the body would unavoidably lose its capacity to expel heat.
But such a threshold is an abstract one. Physiologies differ, and the elderly, infants, or those with certain ailments would have far lower thresholds. The authors put it well – the questions we first need to ask, they say, are, “Too hot for what?” and “Too hot for whom?”
The answers to these questions depend a lot on how long one needs to work, and what one does while working. Other than deaths, there are challenges of morbidity and physiological stresses at far lower levels of heat and humidity, but academic research on what these thresholds are is just beginning in India.
🔥🔥🔥
The significance of scale
The most significant adaptive response by Indian state governments to extreme heat has been the introduction of heat action plans (HAPs). Under these HAPs, a range of measures including prior heat warnings, wider water distribution, public health interventions, etc. are triggered when the maximum temperature in a place crosses predetermined thresholds.
It is widely acknowledged that mortality from extreme heat has fallen in India after these plans were first operationalised 13 years ago.
While this is commendably true, we may be underestimating the number of deaths from relentless heat.
This is partly because, on average in India, 30 per cent of all deaths are not recorded at all. When they are, other reasons, most commonly heart attack, are registered as the cause of death – rather than the underlying, sustained exposure to extreme heat.
In Europe, where such estimations are done differently using comparisons with baseline mortality data, it was found that an additional 61,672 people died from extreme heat in a 3-month period in 2022, that too in a region with a population less than half that of India’s.
Even though we have a younger population than Europe’s, it is likely that more people are dying here from heat than we realise – and they certainly will in future, as India warms faster. We urgently need more robust baseline data and methods, improved health systems, and better targeted interventions.
As Aditya Pillai points out in his essay on HAPs, they suffer from poor targeting, whereby the most vulnerable are sketchily covered or get left out of adaptation measures.
One problem is that HAPs have inadequate legislative or financial backing. Greater emphasis on incentivising politicians and bureaucrats to act, more comprehensive implementation across all relevant sectors, along with sanctions for poor implementation, would, he states, be more effective.
I would add that greater democratisation in the conception and implementation of HAPs would also help, via regular consultations with organisations representing those most affected. Very few states have followed this in practice.
A widely discussed heat adaptation measure is “cool roofs”, the application of white chemical paints on rooftops so more sunlight is reflected, thereby cooling interiors – similar in essence to what is done by Arctic ice, which the world is fast melting.
All examples of cool roof applications I have heard of have been through small, NGO-led efforts – which, however well-intentioned, are carried out for want of resources in a handful of homes in a few slum clusters. As with all adaptation measures necessary to tackle so massive and complex a problem as global warming, what is needed is scale.
For example, Delhi’s Kashmere Gate bus terminus now has “cool roofs” across 2664 square metres (28,674 square feet). Such an approach should be taken where the poor live, in slum clusters in Delhi and elsewhere, where feasible. The onus for this lies with governments, who can provide subsidies and ensure quality, so that a roof once painted stays that way for a while.
However, as Rawal and Radhika Khosla point out in their essay on the built environment, focusing on “cool roofs” alone is inadequate. Other surfaces like walls and windows influence felt temperatures greatly, and even having “cool roofs” does not adequately address dangerous humidity, as mentioned above.
It is necessary, they say, to “prioritise other passive design strategies … that address building materials, construction techniques, and spatial configuration”. This is important, because deaths from extreme heat happen not just outdoors, but indoors even more so, of the elderly or the ill in cramped homes.
To once again emphasise scale, I would strongly urge the introduction of urban National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) schemes across towns in India. So far, the Act operates only in Rajasthan, and there too patchily.
An urban NREGA could potentially be used to build climate-resilient homes for the poor and thereby help them cope better with both extreme heat and flooding, two of the biggest impacts of climate change in urban India.
At a meeting in April, an office bearer of the MGNREGA Mazdoor Union proposed it be used to enhance green cover, to provide shade. Expanding the NREGA could help tackle both climate change and provide jobs, India’s twin crises.
Pressurising the state to carry out effective adaptation measures at scale needs strong working class and other social movements.
Sadly, climate change is becoming a political issue in India just when workers’ movements, and the left in general, are much weaker than in their heyday.
In their essay, Rajesh Nayak and Sharon Block correctly point out that workers end up bearing both the highest risks of climate change, through impacts on health and wages, and the costs of adaptation. But it was disappointing that they provided only a few examples of workers’ or union responses, and most are from Canada and the US, where the social and political dynamics are very different from our own.
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| One of India’s millions of farm workers, who are vulnerable to heat exposure. Photo by Max Pixel/ Business and Human Rights Centre |
Over the last three years, catalysed by intense heatwaves, a range of unions, NGOs, and other collectives that organise or work with workers – construction workers, street vendors, home-based workers, waste workers, gig workers, etc – have intensified their engagement with climate change in India.
They have been demanding that governments or municipal authorities provide protective shade, more water, cooling spaces, and toilets (which particularly matter to women working outdoors who drink less water as a consequence, potentially damaging their health).
Construction work ought to stop between 11.0 am and 3.0 pm, because most accidents occur on scaffolding during the hottest hours, an office bearer of the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam construction workers’ union said in a meeting last year.
The Amazon workers’ union has demanded that intense production or work targets be lowered during periods of extreme heat.
Some organisations have also made the broader demand that heatwaves be defined as national disasters, so that adaptation funds to cope get released promptly and in much greater amounts than they are presently.
A connected, crucial area of adaptation to extreme heat is public health. In their essay, Nitya Khemka and Bhargav Krishna suggest a three-pronged approach:
🔥Augmenting human capacities, including adding climate change and health to existing curricula for nurses and doctors, and in-service training to recognise and treat symptoms of heat stress;
🔥 Embedding heat resilience within existing health programmes; and
🔥 Strengthening health infrastructure itself to cope with climate extremes.
I would add that we need to fill our health personnel vacancies, and expand health infrastructure and access to be able to quickly treat victims of extreme heat.
Other than in some states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the health infrastructural reality across much of India, in the Indo-Gangetic Plain in particular – an epicentre of extreme heat and humidity – is lagging decades behind a rapidly warming world.
Many hospitals and health centres even still lack the continuous electricity supply required to provide the ice and air conditioning needed to quickly treat a person suffering from heatstroke.
Clearly, we urgently need multisectoral interventions to respond adequately to a growing climate crisis.
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Why mitigation also matters
A few points in conclusion. One, greater financial support for adaptation – the subject of this essay – is indeed much needed. But needed first is the political will: people’s lives and their quality of life need to matter more to political elites. At the core of how we develop our climate adaptation capacities going forward ought to lie notions of justice, to address the fact that extreme heat and other manifestations of global warming affect those least responsible the most.
Two, given the acceleration in warming mentioned at the outset, governments need to plan not just for the present but for at least a decade ahead.
Three, because scale is essential for adaptation, the state becomes a key actor. This has organisational implications for the climate movement: in order to exert greater pressure on the state to act swiftly, it needs to come together organisationally, to be able to exert that pressure with more frequent success.
Four, any just adaptation to, or transition from, climate change needs the climate movement, working class movement, and other social movements to ally and strengthen one another in a Red–Green framing of 21st century politics.
Finally, climate mitigation, primarily the rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is essential, because the Earth system does not negotiate. Its physics suggests that the planet will warm for as long as emissions continue.
Global emissions need to reach zero, or “net zero”, for temperatures to stabilise and warming to stop. Instead, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising even faster and reached 431 parts per million last month, the highest in at least 3 million years.
The urgency to slow down and reverse direction has never been greater. Climate adaptation has its limits, and it would be monumentally foolhardy to assume that we can adapt to everything that a warmer planet will throw at us in the years to come.
🔥 Nagraj Adve is an Indian writer and activist, member of Teachers Against the Climate Crisis and the author of Global Warming in India: Climate, Impacts, and Politics. His previous contributions on People & Nature include his pamphlet, Global Warming in the Indian Context. He can be reached at nagraj.adve[at]gmail.com.
🔥 This article was originally published in Frontline, India, on 22 May 2026, with the title, A Scorching Earth Needs Serious Action.
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