Annual heatwaves on the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain are a horrific consequence of climate change
. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week.
The temperature record provides a horrifying account of the changes afoot. According to the definition of a heatwave used by India’s weather agency, which takes into account average annual local temperatures and the duration of the anomaly, India saw, on average, 23.5 heatwaves every year in the two decades to 2019, more than double the annual average of 9.9 it saw between 1980 and 1999.
The costs of crippling heat are already vast. Even working in the shade on an average summer day in Delhi results in labour losses of 15-20 minutes per hour at the hottest times, reckons Luke Parsons of Duke University in North Carolina. Mr Parsons and colleagues have estimated that India loses 101bn man hours per year to extreme heat, and Pakistan 13bn. During last year’s withering hot season, the wheat harvest was down by around 15% in both countries—and in some regions by as much as 30%.
Today there are estimated to be more than 100 such plans in India’s cities, districts and states. Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, developed a similar plan after a heatwave in the city in 2015 killed 1,300 people. These steps probably contributed to a surprisingly low death toll during last year’s extended heatwave. Early estimates identified only 90 deaths in India attributable to it.
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