The Giving Gap on Extreme Heat

India has some of the world's most sophisticated philanthropists. It also has some of the world's most heat-exposed workers, farmers, and families. These two facts have not yet fully met each other. According to the Lancet Countdown, heat exposure in 2024 alone wiped out 247 billion labour hours and an estimated $194 billion in income across India. Heatwave events and associated deaths have risen 138 percent in the two decades to 2019 compared to the previous twenty years, yet heat attracts a fraction of the philanthropic attention directed at floods or cyclones. Indian funders are beginning to respond, and the early models are proof that the right interventions work. But the gaps are as striking as the gains. The giving gap is structural: heat is too chronic for crisis response cycles, too cross-sectoral for any single programme bucket, and too locally specific for solutions designed abroad. The instruments to close it already exist. What is missing is the decision, by many more Indian philanthropists, to deploy them.

In this piece, I explore the structural reasons behind that gap and the instruments already available to close it.

The India Philanthropy Report 2025 projects 10 to 12 percent annual growth in philanthropic spending over the next five years, with family foundations increasingly drawn to climate. But that capital has so far concentrated on renewable energy and forest conservation. Heat sits in the gap: too chronic to fit neatly into crisis response cycles, too cross-sectoral to sit in any single programme bucket covering health, livelihoods, gender, or urban infrastructure alone. The gap is also one of origin. Much of the heat funding flowing into India today comes from international philanthropies. Rockefeller Foundation and Wellcome recently committed USD 11.5 million to climate-health systems across South Asia, focused on early warning and health system readiness. Heat Action Plans calibrated to Chicago or Nairobi, however, do not transfer to Nagpur or Varanasi. Closing the giving gap on heat is, in large part, a task for Indian philanthropy itself.

Indian funders are already building the proof points. The HT Parekh Foundation's ReVIVE initiative is building urban heat research as a public good, explicitly to draw other domestic funders into the space. In Thane, philanthropy-funded research by CEEW catalysed a city Heat Action Plan that led the Thane Municipal Corporation to commit INR 1 crore of its own FY 2025-26 budget to cool roofs, cooling shelters, and cool pavements. A collaboration between Arsht-Rock, SEWA, and Blue Marble delivered USD 340,000 in income support to 46,000 informal women workers during the May 2024 heatwave, covering wages lost on days too dangerous to work. Each model addresses a distinct bottleneck: knowledge generation, government leverage, direct income protection. But they also reveal how much of the terrain has no funder at all.

Heat mortality data outside Ahmedabad and a handful of other cities is unreliable or non-existent, leaving NDMA, state governments, and municipal bodies making resource allocation decisions without knowing the true burden. Occupational heat exposure standards for agricultural and construction workers, who together account for the majority of India's 450 million informal workers, exist under the Factories Act and building codes but have no funded civil society infrastructure to track compliance or support workers who lose wages when sites shut down. The cool public infrastructure that dense urban neighbourhoods need most, bus shelters with shade and drinking water, redesigned footpaths, and community cooling centres, sits outside the remit of both disaster relief budgets and standard urban development grants. School systems in low-income areas across India lose three to five weeks of effective classroom time every April and May, with almost no philanthropic attention directed at the problem.

Philanthropic grants in India typically run one to two years. Heat resilience, whether building a city's early warning system, changing how outdoor worksites operate, or redesigning urban microclimates, operates on timelines of five to ten years. Much current funding is mobilised after a severe heatwave and tapers before the next. India Development Review has noted that income insurance instruments, innovative as they are, face real sustainability limits as payouts scale without integration into government social protection systems like PM-SBY or state-level welfare schemes. Grassroots organisations absorb the cost of this mismatch most acutely: they are used as last-mile delivery infrastructure during heatwaves but rarely funded for the community mobilisation, health worker training, and household-level preparedness work that must happen between October and February to be ready by April. The infrastructure that endures requires funders who commit before the next heatwave, not because of it.

Scale without local specificity compounds the problem. A Centre for Policy Research study found that many existing Heat Action Plans lack the granularity to reach the most exposed populations, partly because they are written at state level rather than city or ward level. The urban heat island effect in Mumbai's Dharavi is not the same problem as daytime field temperatures in Bundelkhand. Replicating the Thane model, where CEEW built the evidence base and the municipality owned the implementation, demands pre-policy investment that most two-year grant cycles simply cannot hold. India has over 4,000 towns with populations above 20,000. The number with a funded, locally grounded Heat Action Plan can be counted on two hands.

The instruments to close this gap already exist. Catalytic grants for pre-policy research, of the kind that unlocked Thane's municipal commitment, are replicable in any Indian city with a willing research partner and a receptive municipal commissioner. Pooled philanthropic funds can aggregate smaller donors around a shared city-level Heat Action Plan, lowering the ticket size for entry and spreading risk. Blended finance structures can link philanthropic first-loss capital to municipal budgets, stretching every rupee of grant funding further. Income protection instruments like the SEWA micro-insurance model need philanthropic subsidy to survive the transition from pilot to integration with state-level social protection. And multi-year core grants to grassroots organisations, covering salaries and operations rather than just programme costs, would allow the organisations closest to the problem to build year-round capacity rather than sprint through summer and go dormant by July. None of these require new invention. They require funders willing to deploy existing tools with heat as the lens.

India's heat resilience architecture is being built right now, city by city, sector by sector, funder by funder. The models will shape what gets institutionalised at scale over the next decade. Indian philanthropy is already at the table. The question is whether Indian philanthropy moves early enough to shape what gets built, or late enough only to fund what already exists.

Written by Swapnil Saxena, Program Manager - Heat Resilience, India Climate Collaborative