Heat Action Plan

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Context

The India Meteorological Department has forecast rising temperatures in the coming weeks after India experienced its hottest February since 1901. India is about to experience more intense and frequent heat waves.
Also, the CPR released its report titled - How is India adapting to heatwaves?
A review of 37 heat action plans in India by the Centre For Policy Research (CPR), shows most of them do not explicitly carry out vulnerability assessments.

Read all about Heat Waves: https://www.iasgyan.in/daily-current-affairs/heat-waves-36

Heat action plans (HAPs)

Heat action plans (HAPs) are the primary policy response to economically damaging and life-threatening heat waves.
They prescribe a number of activities, disaster responses and post-heatwave response measures to reduce the impact of heat waves.
The basic objective of a HAP is to save lives and reduce morbidity.

Status OF Heat Action Plans: CPR Findings

No clarity on implementation

The Centre For Policy Research (CPR), which conducted the "first critical review" of heat action plans at the city (nine), district (13) and state (15) levels across 18 states, said it was unclear to what extent actions prescribed in the HAPs were being implemented.

Poor targeting

Nearly all HAPs are poor at identifying and targeting vulnerable groups.

Inadequate Vulnerability Assessments

Only two of the 37 HAPs explicitly carry out and present vulnerability assessments. This leaves the implementer with little data on where to direct their scarce resources and could lead to poor targeting.

Not taking risk multipliers into account

Only 10 out of the 37 HAPs reviewed seem to establish locally-defined temperature thresholds though it is unclear whether they take local risk multipliers (such as humidity, hot nights, duration of continuous heat among others) into account to declare a heat wave.

Uneven consideration of factors

Hot nights, heat waves coming earlier, and cascading impacts are unevenly considered across HAPs.

Climate Projections not integrated with HAPs

Climate projections, which could help identify future planning needs, are not integrated into current HAPs.

Funding Constraint

According to the analysis, only 11 HAPs discuss funding sources. Of these, eight asked implementing departments to self-allocate resources, indicating a serious funding constraint.

No indication of legal sources of authority

None of the HAPs reviewed indicated the legal sources of their authority. This reduces bureaucratic incentives to prioritise and comply with HAPs instructions.

No National Repository of HAPs

The analysis also pointed out that there was no national repository of HAPs and very few HAPs were listed online.

HAPs not updated periodically

It is also unclear whether these HAPs are being updated periodically and whether this is based on evaluation data.

Heat Action Plans: Addressing the gaps

Part of City Development Plan

The plan should become a part of the larger development plan of the city.

Design and incorporate long term measures

Despite some things working well such as bringing down heat-related deaths, long-term measures are yet to be designed or incorporated into the HAPs.

Regular Evaluation and Revision

One of the most important components of a HAP is its adaptability because the measures that were adopted would have to be evaluated and their impact assessed before a revision can be made.
Whatever measures were taken the previous year should be evaluated for their efficacy, and then the HAP appropriately revised.

Prepare HAP at the intersection of multiple domains

The basic objective of a HAP is to save lives and reduce morbidity, but it is not the only one. Information and warning systems have played an important role since the NDMA guidelines in 2016 in reducing the number of heat-related deaths. Beyond mortality, on a long-term basis, there is the economic impact.
The impact of heat waves on the informal sector or construction sites is yet to be studied properly. When people cannot work for a few hours every day, or the high heat brings down productivity, or people fall ill and spend money to recover while losing their wages, there is an economic impact.
The HAPs have largely been viewed as a public health issue but there are other domains too. The HAP should be ideally prepared at the intersection of public health, urban planning, economics, meteorology and so on. Heat is not a single-domain issue.
So, the framework should take into account multiple domains as well as the short, medium and long-term perspectives.

Include Agriculture in HAPs for Rural areas

The HAPs for rural areas must also include agriculture because in the long-term heat waves may affect food security too.

Multiple Aspects

Work should be done on all aspects – from educating people and issuing warnings to providing relief measures in the short-term and seeing the link between heat waves and urban planning, transport options, energy management in the long-term.

Heat resilient City planning

The purpose should be to build cities which become more heat-resilient and have the capacity to adapt. So, while mitigation measures are important, thought should be given to the way we plan our cities.
Large construction and use of building material which necessitates air conditioning means higher energy consumption which creates more anthropogenic heat and makes the city hotter. The more vehicles on a city’s roads, the more anthropogenic heat.
Cities that are public transport-oriented and are bicycle and pedestrian-friendly, where urban planning measures are centred around existing ecology with importance given to green and blue infrastructure will see lower levels of heat.

Vulnerability Mapping

In an HAP, the short-term mandate is about the vulnerable people affected by heat waves – the socio-economically marginalised, the young, the elderly, and the outdoor workers. Local agencies are best placed to identify them in cities. But a plan should go beyond this.
A ward-wise heat vulnerability mapping can be best done by municipal agencies. Once this map is available, it can decide what to do to mitigate in the short-term and how to eventually reduce vulnerability.

Local climate Zone mapping

The local climate zone mapping is a classification system developed in Canada in 2012 to study the urban heat island patterns and has been used around the world to study heat stress.
The basis is that a city does not have a single temperature; though the meteorological department says the temperature is 42 degrees Celsius, some areas in the city might record higher and experience a heat wave.
This variation and detail are important for any city to formulate a good HAP.

Built environment and heat

The built environment in our cities contributes to the high heat. There are several approaches to tackling the heat stress.
One is to improve the green cover and conserve the blue infrastructure. Then, the cool roof strategy used in Ahmedabad or roof gardens can be used in slums and low-rise buildings, though cool roofs wither and their impact reduces with time.
Another is to shift to cities where some areas are made conducive for walking or bicycles, and public transport is given primacy.

Vegetation Density ratio

The Vegetation Density Ratio, or the ratio of green to the total area, is an important factor. In areas with low VDR, municipal agencies can focus on planting trees.

There are no quick fixes. We need both structural and non-structural approaches to tackle high heat. Cool roofs are a non-structural change, they do not impact anything fundamental. Structural change is when the way cities are planned and built moves away from the present paradigm. Our HAPs need to be a combination of both.

Heat Wave Projection

March 2022 was the warmest ever and the third driest in 121 years. The year also saw the country's third-warmest April, eleventh warmest August and eighth warmest September since 1901.
Studies show India is one of the most exposed and vulnerable countries to heat.
Between 1951 and 2016, three-day concurrent hot day and hot night events have increased significantly, and are projected to increase between two and four-fold by 2050 under the intermediate and high emission pathways of RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5.

[Note: Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) capture assumptions about the economic, social and physical changes to the environment that will influence climate change within a set of scenarios. The conditions of each scenario are used to model possible future climate evolution.]

Heat waves are also projected to come earlier, stay longer, and become more frequent with urban heat island effects exacerbating heat impacts.
A Report by the World Bank cautioned that India could become one of the first places in the world where wet-bulb temperatures could soar past the survivability threshold of 35°C.

Wet Bulb Reading

Heat stress for humans is a combination of temperature and humidity. India is typically more humid than equivalently hot places, like the Sahara. This means sweating is less efficient, or not efficient at all.

This is why in India a measurement known as the wet-bulb reading — which combines air temperature and relative humidity — provides a better gauge of heat stress on the human body.

Heat Wave Implications

Increased heat is already leading to more heat-related deaths, heat stress, unbearable working conditions and the wider spread of vector-borne diseases.
By 2050, as many as 24 urban centres are projected to breach average summertime highs of at least 35 degrees Celsius, disproportionately impacting economically weaker sections.
The International Labour Organisation estimates that working hours lost due to heat stress would increase to 5.8 per cent of working hours by 2030, or an equivalent of 34 million jobs.
There will be a repeat of last year’s record heat wave, which caused widespread crop damage and triggered hours-long blackouts. While temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) are unbearable in any condition, the damage is made worse for those of India’s 1.4 billion population who are stuck in tightly packed cities and don’t have access to well-ventilated housing or air-conditioning.

What’s the climate science behind India’s more intense heat waves?

Heat wave temperatures can be separated into two parts —

1. the Background, or the monthly average temperature, and
2. the Anomaly, or the bit added or subtracted by the specific weather occurring at the time.

Over India, since the pre-industrial period, the background has increased by about 1.5°C. Therefore, everything else being equal, the heat wave weather patterns today would be associated with temperatures about 1.5°C warmer than had they occurred a hundred years ago.
There are other compounding factors: over some cities, the urban heat island effect has added roughly an additional 2°C to the background. Deforestation also contributes.

Why are they happening more frequently?

This can also be split into two parts.

1. Firstly, the Indian government’s definition of a heat wave is fixed, so as background temperatures increase, less and less strong anomalies are required to surpass the heat wave definition threshold.
2. Secondly, it does appear that the weather patterns — high pressure over north India, leading to dry, sunny, clear conditions with weak wind — associated with these anomalies are also increasing in frequency

And what makes them more dangerous?

Hotter heat waves, where the temperatures stay higher for longer, tend to result in more fatalities. In India, this is exacerbated by the rapid population increase over the last few decades.
The danger lies with India’s background temperature already being so high.
In May, for example, the only places on the planet comparable in temperature to north India are the Sahara and parts of the inland Arabian peninsula, both of which are very sparsely populated.
With the background temperatures already being so high, over 40°C, even small increases are likely to push close to human survival limits.

How do the heat waves affect people in India?

There are wide-ranging effects on Indian society.
Extended periods of heat waves lead to significant drying of soil over large regions.
Aside from the obvious agricultural implications, this can impact the monsoon onset a month later… and can negatively affect agriculture, water security, and even lead to localized flooding, where heavy rain hits dry soil that is unable to absorb it.
Unusually hot pre-monsoon periods are also associated with:
- decreased labor productivity, particularly in outdoor sectors such as agriculture and construction;
- increased demand for cooling, which can strain the power grid and lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions; and
- general health risks, such as heatstroke, which disproportionately affect children, the elderly, and low-income communities.

What does the future look like for India as the planet keeps warming?

At the moment, India very occasionally slightly surpasses [a wet-bulb temperature of] 32°C, so we need quite a lot more warming to get to the survivability limit.
That said, with increased urbanization, and so urban heat island effect, and more warming, the risks of fatal heatwaves are always growing

What can be done to mitigate the damage?

Policy Level

On the policy level, implementing urban planning guidelines that prioritize green spaces, shade, and ventilation in building design. These are becoming increasingly popular in many Mediterranean cities.

Corporate Level

At the corporate level: invest in research and development of low-energy cooling solutions, such as passive cooling systems, and promote energy-efficient building design.

Community Level

For communities, encourage the use of cool roofs, green roofs, and tree planting to reduce the urban heat island effect.

MAINS PRACTICE QUESTION

Q. The Heat Action Plan is viewed as a public health issue but should be ideally prepared at the intersection of public health, urban planning, economics, and meteorology because heat is not a single-domain issue. Also, it is important to recognize the link between heat waves and urban planning, transport options, and energy management in the long-term. Analyse.

https://zeenews.india.com/india/heat-waves-in-india-to-come-earlier-stay-longer-be-more-frequent-new-report-2588477.html