90% Indians face heatwave risk: Study

LONDON: Almost 90 per cent of Indians are more vulnerable to public health issues, food shortages and increased risks to deaths due to the deadly heat waves fuelled by climate change in 2022, research by the University of Cambridge revealed on Thursday.

The study, published in the ‘PLOS Climate’ journal at a time when several parts of India are already in the throes of rising temperatures, points out that India currently uses a national Climate Vulnerability Indicator (CVI) to measure climate vulnerability and make plans for the adaptation.

The CVI includes different socioeconomic, biophysical, institutional, and infrastructural factors but it doesn’t have a physical risk indicator for heat waves, which it warns is a key missing factor that would help policymakers consider how extreme heat actually impacts the Indian population.

“A heat stress measure which identifies the impacts and the parts of India where the population is most vulnerable to recurring heat waves would help to make state Heat Action Plans being created across India more effective,” said the report’s first author Dr Ramit Debnath, Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

“So, we could figure out how extreme heat really affects people and in which parts of the country,” he said.

The study is the first to include a “heat index” to measure the recurring impacts of Indian heat waves on the country’s population.

The index measures how hot our body feels relative to the surrounding conditions when humidity and air temp-erature are added together.