About two-thirds of India’s population was exposed to high temperatures (surface measurement) of over 40 deg C in May and June, 2019, up from 52.94% in 2018, according to satellite data. Data: GFS Temperature Estimates, GPWv4, MODIS (LPDAAC – NASA); Processed by Raj Bhagat Palanichamy using Google Earth Engine.

It was only in 2016 that satellite data improved enough to yield such a detailed analysis, according to Palanichamy. But 2015 saw the worst heatwave in India since 1992, striking areas from Delhi to Telangana and killing 2,081 people. It was the fifth deadliest in world history.

On June 25, 2019, temperatures were as much as 5.1 deg C above normal in parts of Jharkhand, Assam and Meghalaya, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) which classified this as “markedly above normal”. Temperatures were 3.1 deg C above normal in the sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim or, as IMD put it, “appreciably above normal”.

Global temperature records were broken during the summer of 2019, with the July temperature 1.2 deg C above the pre-industrial era, according to the latest data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Copernicus Climate Change Programme, the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme.

As global CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions continue to rise, heatwaves are likely to become more frequent, and more intense, according to the October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body set up to assess science related to climate change. The consequences will be deadly.

India will see a four-fold rise in heatwaves if global temperature rise is restricted to 1.5 deg C by the turn of this century, according to a November 2018 study by Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar researchers. If the world fails to contain global temperature rise, India could see an eight-fold rise in heatwaves. 

This can lead to a rise in both morbidity and mortality. Heatwaves can cause the body’s core temperature to increase. Limited exposure can lead to dehydration and dizziness but high exposure to heatwaves could lead multiple organs to dysfunction causing death within hours, studies suggest.

Between 2010 and 2018, 6,167 heat-related deaths were reported in India, as IndiaSpend reported in April 2019. The year 2015 reported the most fatalities: 2,081 or 34% of all heat-related deaths in that time period.

In 2019, 94 deaths were reported till June 16, according to a government statement to the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house. This number rose to 210 by the end of June, with the most (118) deaths being reported from Bihar.

“A vast majority of deaths during a heatwave period are registered as normal deaths (from cardiorespiratory arrest etc) or might never be medically declared/certified heatwave deaths,” said Gulrez Azhar, an epidemiologist and researcher who studied heatwave deaths in Gujarat for four years while at the Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH), Gandhinagar. “But those deaths would not have happened had it not been so hot.”

Along with day-time temperatures, night-time heat is rising as well.

“Most of the time we are focussed on looking at day-time heatwaves,” said Vimal Mishra, associate professor at IIT-Gandhinagar, who co-authored the study and focuses on climate change research. “Cooler nights give some relief. But think about a scenario where both days and nights are hot.” 

These relentlessly hot days and nights are what his study predicts will become commonplace in coming years.

But India is not an exception.

Record temperatures across the globe and human influence

Global average temperatures for the month of July were close to 1.2 deg C above the pre-industrial level as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Geneva, the capital of Switzerland, surrounded by the snow-clad Alps, reported an unusually warm summer this July. Temperatures reached up to 36 deg C, well above the average day-time temperature of 24 deg C for the month, and the Swiss government had to issue a rare level-4 heat alert indicating ‘severe danger’ from the heat.

France’s capital Paris hit 42.6 deg C on July 25, an all-time high compared to the July average of 24 deg C. United Kingdom’s capital London too recorded a temperature of 34 deg C against its July average of 22 deg C. Officials in Belgium issued a warning after the death of a 66-year-old woman was attributed to the heatwave.

The US too is bracing for record high temperatures across the country.

Greenland, a country where ice glaciers cover 82% of surface area, lost over 10 billion tonnes of ice on July 31, 2019. To put it in perspective, 1 billion tonne is equivalent to 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This also means that global sea levels will go further up.

The average global temperature for the previous month–June 2019–was the highest in recorded history as well. It was 0.1 deg C higher than in June 2016, which had held the record of being the warmest so far.

Human activity to be blamed
The science on the rising frequency and intensity of heatwaves is clear: human activity is to be blamed. Since the first such study in 2004, advances in attribution science have confirmed that human influence has made heatwaves more likely.

But linking a particular extreme weather event to climate change is tricky, said Freja Vamborg, senior scientist, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). “To do such studies you need very good observational data for a long time back,” she said. “In some parts of the world such studies could be difficult as the observational data might not be homogenous.”

What is a given, according to Vamborg, is that such heatwaves are likely to be the norm in the coming years.

A heatwave, as we mentioned, is not about crossing a particular temperature level but how much it exceeds the average temperature of a particular place. In northern India, for example, a heatwave would warrant temperatures above 40 deg C but in Switzerland this would be 29 deg C and above.  

However, in places that routinely deal with high temperatures, people develop different kinds of coping mechanism. But in regions used to temperate summers, people are unprepared for heatwaves. France alone has reported five heatwave deaths so far.

But even in India, used to hot summers, some areas could well become unlivable with a further rise in temperature, according to experts.

If CO2 emissions are not contained, then India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would be swept by deadly heatwaves in the next few decades, said a 2017 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The impact would be especially severe in the Indo-Gangetic plain, the study said.

Upto 37% of Indians were exposed to high temperatures (air temperature) of over 40 deg C for 10 hours or more in a day in 2019, up from 27.42% in 2018, according to satellite data.

Data: GFS Temperature Estimates, GPWv4, MODIS (LPDAAC – NASA); Processed by Raj Bhagat Palanichamy using Google Earth Engine.

The heatwave-climate change link
Globally, CO2 emissions continue to rise and, of this, in 2017 nearly 7% came from India, up from 6% in 2016, according to a December 2018 report from the Global Carbon Project, a collaborative effort between several research institutes to quantify global greenhouse-gas emissions.
Being a greenhouse gas, CO2 traps the sun’s heat, pushing up land surface temperatures. Higher than normal temperatures lead to heatwaves. So, the connection between climate change and heatwave is a direct one.

“We know that all the land surface areas–there are hardly any exceptions–have seen an increase in temperatures over the past 150 years,” said Vamborg. “Some areas warm faster and some areas warm slower.” 

This relationship between rising temperatures and heatwaves is also non-linear. “What it means is this: If without a (global) increase in temperature you have five heatwaves in 10 years then, with a temperature rise of half a deg C you will have seven heatwaves in 10 years,” explained Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar. “And if the temperature rises by 1 deg C then all of a sudden there could be 20 heatwaves in five years.” 

But the impact of global temperature changes will vary across the globe. And rising humidity levels will be a factor in this.

“Air can hold up to 7% more moisture for every degree celsius rise in temperature,” said Krishna AchutaRao of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Delhi. Thus in coastal cities, where the air tends to be moist, humidity levels will rise with a rise in temperature. “When humidity is high the sweat stays on the body and there is no cooling effect,” said AchutaRao. “That is why the heat during monsoon feels more oppressive.”

While IMD takes into account only temperature rise when declaring a heatwave, scientists suggested a heat index that takes into account both temperature rise and humidity.

Damage from heatwaves
Depending on how much the temperature has risen, for how long and over how much land, a heatwave can impact human life in different ways.

“You may have intense heatwave in one year but it may be very localised as we witnessed in 2015 (in India),” said Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar. “But this year’s heatwave covered almost two-thirds of the country. So, if the intensity of the heatwave is the same but the area covered is two to three times more, we can expect more damage.” 

If no effort is made to adapt to these heatwaves, they could cause more deaths; but the fatalities would vary across areas, according to a 2018 study of 20 regions across the world published in the health journal PLOS. The highest increase in deaths could be in Colombia, followed by the Philippines and Brazil, the study said. Tropical and subtropical regions, including India, would see a rise in deaths.

Heatwaves have been linked to pre-term births, reduced fertility, increase in mental health issues, increase in farmer suicide rates in India and chronic kidney diseases.

India is among the top 20 countries in the world to have seen the most number of extreme weather events between 1998 and 2017, according to a 2019 report by a German non-profit that tracks climate risk.

While pregnant women, the elderly, and children are particularly vulnerable, those affected will disproportionately be the ones without the means to escape the heat.

“The exposure to heat is related to economic class,” said Shoibal Chakravarty, a fellow at the Centre for Environment and Development, Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment or ATREE. “It essentially has to do with who is so poor that you have to continue working in the heat.”
Those working in the informal sector, especially vulnerable daily wagers, are most likely to be affected by heatwaves, according to Chakravarty, who studies equity in the context of climate change. In India, of around 61 million jobs created over 22 years since the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, 92% were informal jobs, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data for 2011-12, the latest available, released in 2014.

This year 37% of the population was exposed to air temperature of over 40 deg C for 10 hours or more a day, according to the analysis by Palanichamy of WRI for IndiaSpend, highest in the past four years. In 2016, this number stood at 31.79%, rising to 34.19% in 2017 and falling to 27.42% in 2018.

Heatwaves also bring down productivity, according to initial results from an ongoing India-centric study at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago. Productivity declines by 2-4% with every deg C rise in temperature.

Parts of Greenland has seen temperatures 10 to 15 deg C above normal causing glaciers to melt, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Is air pollution masking impact of heatwaves?
India is experiencing fewer heatwaves than projected by climate models, said a study co-authored by AchutaRao.

As climate change takes hold, the expectation is that extreme temperatures–the maximum temperature on the hottest day of each year in a region–would keep rising.

“In all the studies in the US, Russia and Europe that has happened, but not in India,” said AchutaRao of IIT-Delhi. “But that hasn’t happened in India. They’ve been flat and, in some places, even declined.”

Scientists suspect that this can be traced to two factors: air pollution and irrigation. If India were to clean up its air, thus erasing the elements that block sunlight, heat levels are likely to go up, said AchutaRao. What is unclear is exactly how much the heatwaves will go up once pollution is taken out of the picture.

Air pollution is caused not just by the presence of gases but also aerosols (solid or liquid particles in the air). Some aerosols have a warming effect while others have a cooling one, as explained in an IndiaSpend story in May 2019. This means that depending on the nature of local pollution, humidity levels and surface water bodies, different areas will experience either a rise or fall in heat levels when that pollution clears.

Irrigation tends to have a cooling effect on the land. But this effect is small and localised. “Heatwaves occur in summer and most of the crops are gone by that time,” said Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar.

The way forward
Preparing for the future will involve two steps: mitigation and adaptation. “In terms of mitigating future heatwaves, the only way that the future heatwaves can be controlled is by controlling CO2 emissions,” said AchutaRao. This would involve a global effort.

Focus on renewables to reduce CO2 emissions and protecting existing forests are other crucial mitigation measures. Adaptation would involve better urban planning with a focus on more tree cover and increasing surface water bodies that tend to have a localised cooling effect.

“An integrated approach to climate change and at least the management of heat and cooling in the country is required,” said Chakravarty from ATREE. Even after all these measures, “heatwaves would still happen but their impact would be reduced”.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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A heatwave exposure event refers to one heatwave, being experienced by one person.

The frequency, intensity and duration of heatwave events in India have also increased over the past half-century and the country will likely be among the worst affected by climate change given its “weaker health systems and poorer infrastructure”, the study said.

These are the findings of a study called Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change–a global, interdisciplinary research collaboration between 27 academic institutions and inter-governmental organizations, including The Public Health Foundation of
India (PHFI) and The Centre for Environmental Health.

Tracking 41 indicators across finance and economics, public and political engagement, mitigation actions, vulnerability and more, the study uses data compiled by the Lancet Countdown, which documents the human impacts of climate change and provides public health recommendations in response.

Since 1990, every region of the globe has become steadily more vulnerable to extreme increases of heat, the study found.

In 2017, 157 million more people globally were exposed to heatwave events compared to in 2000, with the average person “experiencing an additional 1.4 days of heatwaves per year over the same period”.

Increased exposure to heat can cause a decrease in labour output, exacerbate urban air pollution, burden health systems ill-equipped to cope with the effects of heat stress and promote the spread of diseases like cholera and dengue fever across endemic areas.

“Climate change threatens to undermine the public health gains of previous decades and is one of the great existential threats of this century”, said Nick Watts, Executive Director, Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change.

“In the past we have seen the health profession and medical profession come together and move mountains in response to the health risks from tobacco, HIV and polio,” said Watts. “We need a similar response to climate change”.

India already bears significant “social and economic costs” from climate change, with each additional tonne of carbon dioxide emitted costing India $86 — almost double the expense borne by the USA ($48) and Saudi Arabia ($47), according to this 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change, a scientific journal.

This year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that if the global community are not able to limit a temperature rise to 1.5 degrees as forecast, climate-related risks to livelihoods, food security, health, water supply and human security will further intensify, IndiaSpend reported in October 2018.

It is therefore “of prime importance” for India to reduce its carbon emissions and air pollution levels, specifically targeting the use of coal, oil and natural gas.

While a number of sectors have begun “a low-carbon transmission”, overall slow progress and lack of preparation for the effects of climate changes across the past two to three decades is threatening “both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on”, the report warned.

Heatwaves and heat stress
Over the last two decades, there has been a “marked increase” in the the duration of heatwaves in India, as well as the numbers of Indians exposed to heatwaves the report said.

The average duration of a heatwave has increased by 150%, from 2 days in 2012 to almost 5 days in 2016.

Change In Average Duration of Heatwave

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

The number of people across the country exposed to extreme heat events has also been increasing.

In 2012, just under 20 million people were exposed to heatwaves, compared to 60 million in 2016 — a 200% increase.

Change In Exposure To Heatwaves (millions)

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Heat exposure can increase the risk of multiple diseases and lead to heat stress — illnesses which occur as a result of the body’s inability to prevent its temperature rising from beyond a normal range.

Severe heat stroke, occuring when the core body temperature rises above 40 degrees celsius, can lead to multiple organ failure, seizures and death, the study said.

Advance implementation of local Heat Action Plans, plus effective inter-agency coordination is a vital response tactic which the government can deploy in order to protect vulnerable groups, the study suggested. This will require identification of “heat hot spots”, analysis of meteorological data and allocation of resources to crisis prone areas.  

Labour loss
India lost nearly 75 billion hours of labour in 2017 as a result of rising temperatures “making sustained work increasingly difficult or possible” and negatively affecting workers’ output.  

This is an increase of over 30 billion hours since 2000 and represents under 50% of the total hours of labour lost globally (153 billion hours) in 2017.

The agriculture sector experienced the largest increase in labour loss, with 60 billion hours lost in 2017, up from 40 billion in 2000 — a 50% increase.

Hours of Labour Lost In India, By Sector

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

While the industrial and service sectors also saw a similar trend in the reduction of labour hours between 2000 and 2017, the indoor and less strenuous nature of these types of jobs meant losses were not as significant as the agricultural sector.

The substantial “climate-related impacts” on the workforce and economy could be significant for India, with 18% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) tied to the agricultural sector, the report said.

Equally, a fall in living standards, due to reduced precipitation and temperature changes, could therefore affect just over half of the population who are employed in agriculture related jobs.  

An urgent review of occupational health standards and labour laws that regulate maximum working hours and safe working conditions must be carried out, the study said.

Carbon emissions exacerbating premature deaths
India’s dependency on fossil fuels is contributing to high levels of ambient air pollution containing PM 2.5 — fine particulate matter 30 times finer than a human hair, which are known to pose the greatest risk to humans– and which in turn is translating into premature deaths.
Pollution effects from coal alone are responsible for 107,000 deaths annually in India — just under three quarters (73,000) of which are due to use in power plants, 24,000 related to use in industry and 10,000 from household coal consumption.

Premature Deaths in India, By Source

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Land-based transport is “responsible for a substantial number” of PM2.5 related deaths, comprising 12.5% of the annual total. However these emissions can be addressed through improvements to travel infrastructure.

India’s urban population is growing rapidly, expected to increase by 416 million between 2018 and 2050, with a large proportion of the growth taking place in small non-Tier 1 cities. These cities should tackle the population’s transport needs through public infrastructure, limiting the rise in of car-users and keeping vehicular pollution at bay, the study suggested.

Types of Transport Use in Smaller Indian Cities

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Ahmedabad and Pune, both cities “with a remarkable growth rate”, have high proportions of motorized transport users (vehicle users), representing 42% and 48% of all transport modes used.

Raising awareness of such pollution-related issues, their associated health risks and climate change overall is a key way to mobilize preventative actions, the study said.

Media coverage of climate change and health issues has increased by 40% globally over the last decade, buoyed by large increases in South-East Asia. The Times of India and Hindustan Times have shown a 458% and 415% increase in climate-related coverage between 2007-2017 respectively.

Increasing regional, non-english media coverage of climate change and health issues across states can further help to stimulate a “state-by-state policy response”.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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