Editorial: The solutions to summer

We are halfway into the cruellest month and the horror facts of summer are stacking up. We have already had the hottest February on record and Delhi has experienced its first heatwave of the season.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast double the normal number of heatwave days this summer and raised yellow alerts in several states already. In 2024, we had 77 heatwave events cumulatively across India and 700 heatstroke deaths between March and June. So, summer is not going to be child’s play.

Despite their annual occurrence—or because of it—heat waves fall short of being treated as disasters by the Union government. Summer distress is largely left to the states to handle as local exigencies. There is no explicit recognition that they are a direct product of climate change, requiring a systemic response by planning agencies. Some states such as Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh have done better, thankfully. They have officially notified heatwaves as "state-specific disasters," meaning that when a temperature event meets certain criteria, it is formally recognized as a disaster requiring urgent relief action.

But a relief response is not enough. Summer heat events are a major climate change consequence that cannot be managed by altering office timings or school vacations here and there and setting up drinking water dispensers in the streets. Sure, the response has to perforce be implemented locally but it has to be informed by a 360-degree view of the causative factors and preventive measures, taking in zoning design, building laws, water and green cover governance, to name just a few.

To start with, we need to acknowledge that the way we cope with summer is itself making things worse. Take for instance the rise of the air-conditioner (AC), the great middle-class summer coping mechanism in India. AC use has spread dramatically across India and down the income hierarchy in recent years. Some40 percent of urban households now own at least one air-conditioner or cooler. More than nine million ACs were sold in 2024, with sales in summer spurting by 30 percent over the non-peak normal. While the spread of ACs is not nearly comparable to the West or China, it is significantly adding to domestic consumption of electricity, accounting for 6.6 percent of total electricity demand.

The problem with ACs as a summer coping mechanism is that it is coal-powered, releases greenhouse gases and adds to the urban heat island effect, making it a triple whammy that adds 200,000 tonnes of carbon annually. Were we to take a more mature view of summer heat events, we would see the merit of investing in simpler solutions that do not make matters worse, do not cost the earth, are easier to scale, have multiple spinoff benefits and make summers more tolerable or even fun.

Like the friendly neighbourhood park for instance. We now have a rich body of evidence that local patches of green cover with tall trees significantly reduce temperatures in their vicinity. In Bengaluru, a study by IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Gandhinagar researchers found that localities around green spaces were on average 2.23°C cooler. Studies from other metros reported a temperature difference up to 6°C. A study from Kolkata reported park attributes like vegetation density, water bodies and tree height significantly enhanced the cooling effect.

The solutions to summer are there. We only need the policy eyes to see them and the will to rope in local actors to implement them.