Climate Forward
India is adapting to a new era of dangerous heat, even as climbing temperatures are making its transition to a cleaner economy more difficult.
Since April, heat waves, most likely fueled by climate change, have reached dangerous levels across India and other Asian countries. This week, many Indian cities, including New Delhi, the capital, recorded temperatures above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Local governments sent out heat alerts warning people to avoid staying outside and schools in several states were ordered to close.
It’s all happening as hundreds of millions of Indians head to the polls and are expected to re-elect Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The grueling heat crisis, one of several in India over the last few years, made me wonder if the nation’s leaders had made climate change more central in their campaigns.
Not really, my colleague Suhasini Raj, who covers India, told me.
“In their election manifestoes, India’s top political parties, including the governing Bharatiya Janata Party and the main opposition, the Congress party, have made multiple promises to act on climate damage and reduce emissions,” she said. “But climate pledges on paper are absent from speeches and rallies in the campaign trails.”
Still, as Raj pointed out, Indians are suffering the effects of climate change more acutely than most. “Climate change and pollution lead to loss of livelihoods, forced migrations and kill over two million Indians annually,” she said. “It is projected that 148.3 million people in India will be living in severe climate hot spots by 2050.”
Measuring the impact of heat can be difficult: Estimates of how many deaths can be attributed to heat in India vary from a few hundred to tens of thousands a year. Official tolls often fail to capture the full lethality of extreme temperatures.
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