From risk maps to real action: The story of India’s heat action

India is no stranger to heat. But what we are experiencing today is not just a hot summer. It is a structural shift in risk – to public health, lives and the economy. A recent analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) reveals that nearly 57 per cent of Indian districts, which account for approximately 76 per cent of the population, face a high to very high heat risk. This is a new reality of our day-to-day lives and, more importantly, a pressing development challenge.

Yet, despite growing awareness, our response to extreme heat remains uneven. The real gap today is not in recognising heat as an administrative, health and productivity problem. It is in translating risk into targeted, localised action.

What the data tells us, and what we are missing

One of the biggest misconceptions about heat is that it is uniform. Our district-level heat risk assessment shows the opposite. Heat risk is shaped by three interacting factors: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.

Hazard is rising across the country. In the last 10 years, most districts in India have seen an increase in very hot days. More tellingly, over 70 per cent of districts have witnessed a rise in warm nights over the past decade. Warm nights reduce the ability of humans to recover from daytime heat stress, compounding the health risks over time. Humidity is further compounding this problem. Traditionally drier regions such as northern India–especially cities like Jaipur and Bikaner from Rajasthan and Hisar and Rohtak from Haryana, are now seeing a significant rise in relative humidity during summer, which further impairs the body's ability to cool down through sweating.

Figure 1: Changing patterns of heat extremes in India over the last 40 years (1982-2022)

Source: Prabhu, Shravan, Keerthana Anthikat Sukesh, Srishti Mandal, Divyanshu Sharma, and Vishwas Chitale. 2025. How Extreme Heat is Impacting India: Assessing District-level Heat Risk. New Delhi: Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

Exposure is widespread. A large share of India's workforce, particularly in agriculture, construction, and informal services, works outdoors or in environments with little protection from the heat.

Vulnerability is deeply uneven. Districts with limited healthcare access, high population density, poor housing, and low adaptive capacity bear disproportionately higher impacts. When we layer hazard, exposure, and vulnerability together, a clearer picture emerges: heat risk is not always highest where temperatures are highest. Some districts with moderate temperatures but high vulnerability face risks that are just as severe, or worse. For example, districts along the western coast of India such as in Goa and Maharashtra, although do not see high temperatures as much as Rajasthan or Vidarbha, the compounding effect of humid heat and high vulnerability makes them high heat risk districts.

This has real implications for planning. Current approaches often rely solely on temperature thresholds, resulting in mis-targeting where interventions may not reach the communities that need them most.

Figure 1: More than 57 per cent of Indian districts, home to nearly 76 per cent of the population, are at high to very high heat risk

Source: Prabhu, Shravan, Keerthana Anthikat Sukesh, Srishti Mandal, Divyanshu Sharma, and Vishwas Chitale. 2025. How Extreme Heat is Impacting India: Assessing District-level Heat Risk. New Delhi: Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

The gap between plans and preparedness: how do we take plans to implementation?

Over the past decade, India has made significant progress in developing Heat Action Plans. From Ahmedabad's pioneering effort in 2013 to plans across states and cities, there is growing institutional recognition of heat as a serious risk. Today, there are 250+ HAPs across the country.

But the effectiveness of HAPs varies widely.

A 2023 review of 38 Heat Action Plans by Pillai and Dalal in 2023, found that more than 95 per cent of them lacked heat risk or vulnerability assessments, leaving their recommendations generic and reactive, focused largely on awareness campaigns and emergency response. Key gaps persist: limited use of granular data to identify hotspots within cities and districts; insufficient focus on vulnerable groups such as outdoor workers, residents of informal settlements, and the elderly; weak integration with urban planning, water supply, health systems, and labour policy; and no clear financing pathways for implementation. In many cases, plans exist on paper but are not embedded in everyday governance.

Moving from awareness to coordinated action

Three shifts are critical if India is to move from an awareness and response-centric approach to preparedness and long-term risk mitigation.

The first is embedding risk data into decision-making. Heat Action Plans must go beyond city-wide averages and temperature assessments only to draw on ward-level or neighbourhood-level assessments. Knowing where risk is highest and who is most exposed is the foundation of effective action. Plans being developed by CEEW for 300 cities, alongside work by peer organisations including NRDC India, Mahila Housing Trust, and IIPH, under the guidance of NDMA, have begun to address this. The next step is to go further. CEEW is currently conducting a pan-India household survey on heat risks and coping mechanisms to build a replicable model that cities can use to strengthen their plans going forward.

The second is prioritising solutions that protect both lives and livelihoods, in the near term and over time. Heat directly affects income and productivity. Adjusting working hours, ensuring shaded rest areas, expanding access to cooling, and extending social protection must be central to planning in the short term. So too must longer-term investments in nature-based solutions and innovative cooling approaches. Pilots across the country, from parametric insurance and cool roofs to shaded bus stops, are encouraging steps.

The third is strengthening coordination across sectors and institutions. Heat cuts across health, labour, urban development, water, and disaster management. Effective response requires clear roles, shared data systems, and coordinated triggers for action, especially during extreme heat events.

There are encouraging signs of progress. Some cities are beginning to integrate heat risk into urban planning. On the financing front, the Sixteenth Finance Commission's recommendation to recognise heatwaves within India's mainstream disaster management framework is a significant step, one that can enable more structured access to funding and institutional support. With nearly Rs 40,000 crore recommended by the Sixteenth Finance Commission for 2026 to 2031 in the mitigation fund, cities now have a real opportunity to demonstrate scalable solutions on the ground.

The road ahead

Extreme heat is a slow-onset, compounding risk that interacts with water stress, air pollution, and urban flooding, especially in cities where the seasonality of these risks requires a fundamental shift in how we think about resilience: from reactive responses to anticipatory, localised planning.

India has the data, the institutional experience, and growing policy momentum. The next step is to connect these pieces, because in a warming world, the question is no longer whether heatwaves will occur. It is whether we are prepared for them where it matters most.