The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines a heatwave as a period where “local excess heat accumulates over a sequence of unusually hot days and nights”. According to The New York Times, the planet experienced its hottest-ever start to the year in 2024. In fact, every month from June 2023 to June 2024 has been the warmest on record for that month. In India, 2023 was the second warmest year after 2016, and the duration of its heatwaves has increased by about three days in the last 30 years. In 2022, a heatwave in China lasted over 70 days while in the UK the highest temperature recorded that year was 40.3°C.
What do any of these numbers mean to an average person? Why should governments care and why should we devote a cover story to something one can shrug off with an extra blast of air conditioning?
Perhaps we will sit up and take notice when we are told that in 2022, affluent Europe saw more than 60,000 heat-related deaths. In 2023, WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said, “Extreme heat is increasingly becoming the big silent killer.” This might seem like an exaggeration until you realise that a heatwave is not an isolated event: it often runs parallel to or precedes droughts, forest fires, and floods and thus packs a lethal multiplier punch, even if it is not always recognised as such.
The impact of a heatwave on an intermediate economy like India intensifies because the economic loss it wreaks is as devastating as the loss of life, and because it affects the poorest the most. Extreme heat means lowered productivity and therefore lowered income, loss of crops and livestock, even lesser access to drinking water, sanitation, and medical care than normal times, besides severe psychological consequences like stress and anxiety.
The build-up of extreme heat that leads to a heatwave is generated by global warming. Scientists have found that the earth has steadily grown warmer by about 1◦C since 1900, and since 2010 the rate of increase has risen to 0.32◦C per decade. With excessive greenhouse gases creating a heat trap, the earth is fast becoming a deadly oven. Or, as Nagraj Adve writes in this issue, the heat trapped on earth is “equal to the energy of roughly nine Hiroshima bombs going off per second”.
That is a frightening analogy, and one that ought to move governments globally to take climate change more seriously. The heat action plans undertaken in India have significantly reduced deaths, but much more needs to be done and on an industrial scale. This year, we heard stories from New Delhi of air-conditioner units bursting into flames because of continuous usage, but what about the energy required to power hundreds of thousands of air conditioners? Fossil fuel continues to be the major source of power, which in turn is the main cause of global warming, which in turn causes heatwaves. It is a vicious cycle.
Which brings us to emissions reduction, that big bugbear of global climate talks. Coal still accounts for 75 per cent of the energy generated in India, with renewable energy production continuing to lag. As much as India is right to insist that developed nations pay the price for their historically unscrupulous and extractive policies, it is in India’s own interests to move to cleaner energy more quickly and more robustly than it is currently doing. Adve shares an important statistic in his article that should be of particular interest to our policymakers who love to compare India and China. “It is telling,” he writes, “that clean energy investment in China in 2023 alone totalled $890 billion, larger than the entire GDP of Switzerland.” Does India have the smarts to follow suit?
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