India Needs a 'Right to Cooling' to Continue Growing
Opinion | "Combating heat will require large-scale interventions across industry, government, and civil society," writes Surbhi Bharadwaj.
By: SURBHI BHARADWAJ
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Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction book, Ministry for the Future, opens with a devastating heat wave in India. He writes,
“In the morning the sun again rose like the blazing furnace of heat that it was, blasting the rooftop and its sad cargo of wrapped bodies…The town was a morgue, and it was as hot as ever, maybe hotter. The thermometer now said 42 degrees, humidity 60 percent… People were dying faster than ever. There was no coolness to be had.”
In the book, a disastrous combination of heat and humidity yields wet-bulb temperatures beyond what the human body can handle, even in the shade. In the world’s most densely populated region, the heat wave kills over 20M people.
Ministry for the Future uses the heat wave to segue into a world besieged by apocalyptic climate change. For 619 million Indians who were exposed to climate change-induced extreme heat this month, this scene is not science fiction. We’ve been living a version of it for the past month, waiting for the monsoons for respite.
Like air pollution, extreme heat grabs media headlines on a schedule every year. While these reports note all record-breaking firsts, they fail to contextualise the overall trends in our warming planet. In northwestern India, the number of days exceeding 40°C has increased from 25 per year in the 1970s to 45 per year in the 2010s.
As the effects of climate change continue to accelerate, most parts of the world will experience severe heat waves. But South Asia will be uniquely devastated by deadly combinations of dense populations, high poverty, scarce cooling infrastructure, and compounding effects of air pollution and water scarcity. Estimates suggest extreme heat will cost India five percent of its GDP.
Combating heat will require large-scale interventions across industry, government, disaster management, and civil society. It’s impossible for any one actor to ‘fix’ the problem. Instead, a values-based movement founded on a “right to cooling” can help corral these forces for real impact.
Read the full opinion piece HERE.
(The author is a joint masters student at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This piece was adapted from a research paper by the author on the impacts of heat exposure in South Asia. The views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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