Extreme Heat In India And Beyond What The Earth Episode 14

TITLE: Extreme Heat in India and Beyond | What the Earth, Episode 14 CHANNEL: NRDC DATE: 2026-04-15 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n82J01SxgE ---TRANSCRIPT--- What differentiates heat as a disaster from other disasters other disaster is that it’s not as dramatic as a cyclone, as a as a earthquake, as as floods. It’s a slow-brewing disaster.

Hi, welcome to What the Earth featuring smart and personal conversations with experts and thinkers working to solve today’s biggest environmental challenges. I’m Alexander Nickolas, senior international communication strategist at NRDC, and I’m here with our director of cooling and climate resilience, Preema Madan. And we are talking about building resilience to extreme heat in India and the world.

Hi, Preema. It’s so good to be with you.

Oh, it’s wonderful to be here, Alexander. Thank you for having me. It’s been a little bit of a hot sec since we last saw each other. There’s a little bit of a not so accidental pun in there, but you’re coming from Toronto. We’re in Washington, D.C. right now having this conversation. And we were catching up and we were chatting about the weather as as people do, and I was sharing how we’ve been having some abnormally warm weather for the past few weeks. And you were telling me that where you grew up in Delhi that sometimes that is actually quite the norm, and I I want to hear more about that.

Every time I go back to India, I feel there is a huge difference. Difference from the way I saw heat and growing up.

I mean, I can relate to that. I I grew up overseas. I’m Lebanese. I grew up in Lebanon in a warmer climate. How much more extreme does it get?

What if I was to say that being outdoors really felt like a punishment? A punishment? Yeah. In what way? The sight that I experienced with me in being in India in April, which is typically a very not a very warm not a very hot month, but I I step outside and I and I feel this heat. The kind of heat that just wraps around you and feels like a pressure. And you you feel suffocated at that very moment.

And and then I look around myself. I see construction workers working on a site um next to next to our home who have no option but to continue working in that heat because for them it means daily wages. I go back inside in my home just to get some respite from an air conditioner, which I’m lucky enough to own, and my heart goes out to the people that I just saw outside who don’t have an option to avoid it or to beat it in any way, but just to learn to cope with it.

And you were saying a lot of this can happen in April, which is not a usual summer month. It’s springtime. What are summers then like?

Far more intense and far more longer and frequency of heat waves have gone up. And now there are two things that are happening in parallel. One is that the minimum average temperatures in summers have gone up in Delhi. And second is there is larger amount of humidity. So when when when you are very warm, you sweat naturally, and then with a dry heat you’re able to cool off. The sweat dries up and you feel cooler. Now, when the air is already having so much of moisture in it, you won’t be able to cool yourself or dry that wet. So it gets and it gets harder and therefore you get a heat stroke.

So there’s a piece in your story that you start out with that I want to go back to how you feel bad for a lot of people out there. Is what what is that why why what did you feel bad? And is it because there’s this accessibility issue when it comes to just access to cooling?

Absolutely. So with rising temperatures, what is also happening is there’s a huge heat divide. People who can who can avoid it and the people who cannot. And that’s because of the access to cooling is extremely limited. There are about 300 million of us in India who are prone to uh the risks of extreme heat cooling because of their lack access to cooling. So not everybody has an air conditioner. Only 10% of Indian households have an air conditioner. Affordability is a is a huge challenge when it comes to uh air conditioners. Globally, nearly 5.6 billion air conditioners would be needed by 2050. That is 10 air conditioners every second. And a third of those are going to be in India.

Wow. And I why I say these numbers is is just to talk about the criticality of getting this equipment right. There’s going to be huge demand on on on energy and electricity. And I think you were getting to this a bit too is that India is considered the world’s fastest growing major economy. It is home to 1/6 of the global human population. Just the scale is massive and the opportunity as you’re saying is massive. But even on the the the environment itself and the heat itself is India more uniquely impacted than say other countries when it comes to the scale of this sort of heat?

Yes, it is uniquely impacted. And I I just to give you some of the numbers, March of 2022 was recorded as the hottest March in 122 years, 122 years. 2024 was recorded as the hottest year since record keeping began in 1901. Talking about this year, uh the first week of March was recorded as the hottest week of March uh since the past 50 years. And when I talk about it being hottest, it’s between 40 to 45° C of temperatures. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?

About about 100 104 to 120.

104 to 120°? Yes, yes, that’s right. And that’s through the summer.

What part of India is experiencing this? Is this nationwide or are there certain pockets?

So large part of the country is facing this, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but across the states we we see temperatures rising.

Wait, Preema. I want to go back cuz I remember you saying that around 300 million people or so don’t have access to any sort of cooling devices in India?

Yeah, that’s right, Alexander. So about 309 million people in India lack access to different kinds of forms of cooling like a refrigerator, fans, cooler, or an air conditioner. Not just an air conditioner. And air condition as it is, only about less than 10% of households own an air conditioner. And so that’s 300 million people out of how many people in India? 1.45 billion people.

Wow, I think 300 million is close to the size of the US alone. That is staggering.

So, Preema, this is a lot of people dealing with some pretty extreme temperatures. How how are they dealing with that?

So heat is not just about feeling hot. It’s also about your productivity, it’s about livelihood, and it’s also about gender. A daily wage construction worker, for him a loss of days work because of heat is a loss of food on the table that day. For women, now women in India, they they are caregivers. I mean, women everywhere are caregivers. Plus also many of many of these women are working from home where indoors is more hot than even the outside. Beyond that, the other vulnerable groups of the elderly where, you know, heat you are more suspect you know, you are more prone to health-related risks. So we are also talking about infant mortality and morbidity due to heat.

We came across a particular episode in one of the city’s leading hospitals. There were particularly high number of cases of of infant mortality. What was realized later on that the neonatal ward of that hospital was on the top floor, uh which was therefore prone to extreme heat absorption and therefore rising numbers of infant mortality. A small step of moving that neonatal ward to a lower floor and painting the roof of that building with a cool roof saw the difference in the rate of of infant mortality and and decline in deaths due to heat.

That’s incredible, Preema. And you were talking about the cool roofs. Can you explain for our audience a little bit more what’s involved with that?

Sure. When we talk about a cool roof, it’s about um installing a solar reflective material on the roof that absorbs less heat, which helps to keep indoor temperatures lower. Now, there are different kinds of materials that enable you to do that. It’s not it’s not just a white paint. It’s of course uh solar high solar reflective paints. They could be white and the technology has evolved to other colors as well now. Um as well as coatings, membranes, as well as uh cool roof cooling tiles.

And we’re not just talking about the impacts to people. There’s other impacts. It’s also impacting the supply side of things. How I say this is because because of extreme heat, there are grid gets impacted. There are energy shortages. There are power cuts. Uh therefore, you know, the whole system is at risk.

So, Preema, we’re seeing extreme heat. It’s a universal problem. We’re seeing it pop up in a lot of other places in a lot of places we maybe wouldn’t normally see these kind of temperatures. So, for example, in the US in I think it was 2021, there was a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. Um and temperatures close to what you were saying, around 120. I think a little under that, um but close to that. Looking at what is working in India and work that you’ve been involved in, what are some things that you we could learn here in the US or in other other countries?

India is basically living the future that US is just beginning to experience. And I feel there are important uh lessons that one can draw from the lived experience of countries like India. First is just everyday heat adaptation. And by that I mean the kind the times that you wake up, taking afternoon breaks, drinking a lot of water. The kind of clothing you wear, cotton cotton clothing, natural fibers that that are more breathable. Now, second is Indian architecture has lots of important lessons. And these are like passive cooling techniques in terms of building envelope that could be adopted. Open verandahs, shaded areas within the buildings. The third way is low energy intensive technologies. Looking on passive cooling combined with active mechanical cooling ways. That’s that could be an air conditioner, that could be evaporative coolers. That could be more energy efficient ceiling fans that one can work with. And cross ventilations and cool roofs. And the fourth one is about how do we prepare better to be able to cope with cope with upcoming heat events. These are preparedness plans based on early warning systems. A lot of vulnerability assessments to identify which are the neighborhoods which are will be experiencing more heat than others. So, these are some important examples that have been piloted, are being scaled in India, which are really important lessons to take forward to the rest of the world.

I have to ask Prima, I would love to know how you first got involved with this work.

So, climate change happened to me. I never planned it. My degree is in economics. I was looking to be a banker you know, I was very clear. I wanted to deal with numbers. It just so happened one of the leading climate scientist back home in India was intending to write a book on Indian economy. That book never happened. But what happened was that I was introduced to the world of climate change by working on the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change back then in 2007.

And Prima, just for our audiences, can you please just describe the significance of that IPCC report?

So, the IPCC is the leading voice when it comes to science of climate change. I used my degree thereafter to work on interface of environment and and and environment and climate and economics of it. And one thing led to the other and that’s when I got introduced to the world of sustainable cooling. And the world of Montreal Protocol.

And Prima, and also for our audiences, can you please explain the significance of the Montreal Protocol?

Montreal Protocol is an environmental treaty that works on protection of the ozone layer. It came into the 1980s and since then has been working on stopping the depletion of the ozone layer and protecting all of us really. So, I got myself working on the protocol which once again introduced me to the power of collective action. And the ability and power of successful collective action.

I want to go back to the beginning a little bit when um you know, you’re talking a little bit about how heat has can dramatically change your life and the way you live. And it it can change the way we work, when we work, how we work, what we work. And it really can be this driving force to change our lifestyles and and the ways we live.

I would like to just say that what differentiates heat as a disaster from other disasters other disaster is that it’s not as dramatic as a cyclone, as a as a earthquake, as as floods. It’s a slow brewing disaster which grows and compounds over time and therefore impacts your life and the way you lead your life. So, that’s why it’s the invisibility of it that makes heat particularly very very interesting disaster so to say. And therefore it impacts the way you live life. So, we have to be more intentional or think through how we are able to cope cope with it.

So, Prima, you’re talking about the invisibility of heat as an issue in many ways. Is this where numbers come into place to add that visibility?

Oh, yeah. I think numbers are so important to understand how people are getting impacted, how many are getting impacted, and what solutions have worked. How do we track track the vulnerabilities which compound the impact of heat. So, I think numbers are extremely important. As you rightly said that because it’s invisible, it’s important to put them in front of the right audiences to drive action.

When you talk about the future, Prima, what are some of your visions and hopes and desires of what more resilient future looks like?

For me, the future is is looking at the different vulnerabilities, coming up with tailored solutions which address those vulnerabilities. And providing that access to sustainable cooling in its different forms. I don’t mean just an air conditioner. I’m very I’m very clear in my mind that we cannot just air condition our way out of out of extreme heat. We have to do it in a way that it’s that does it without harming the planet further. So, it’s about cooling with less warming is what we have to look at look look at. And that’s the future I want to be a part of to build.

Cooling is very much the the flip, right? It’s the other side of the coin. And how do we do like you were saying, how do we blend the sort of clean energy path with that? Is how do we reduce the warming as we increase

Yeah. So, when when we are talking about sustainable cooling, we have to we have to cool ourselves in a way which which does it without harming the planet. That is by using less and less energy. And a lot of the cooling that is based on refrigerants and that’s what the Montreal Protocol does really to to move to alternate gases which are which are not harming the planet.

What is the future you hope to see?

I see future as an opportunity. India is a fast growing country, but a lot of that growth a lot of what needs to be built is yet to come. So, there is this opportunity to start right from the start when these new cities are being built.

So, Prima, given everything that we’ve been talking about, all of the different impacts, I mean heat really being the sort of great equalizer in a way, revealing our vulnerabilities and our deepest vulnerabilities. You’ve also talked about a lot of solutions that there are at play. So, given that, what what are those things that give you the greatest hope?

I’m extremely hopeful about our future when it comes to talking about heat and and cooling to some that extent because I believe in the collective power of people. I’ve experienced it through our through my work in this space over the years. And and I know that people have us as human race, we have this ability to find solutions and to make it work. That gives me a lot of hope. And by we, I mean government. I mean academicians. I mean environmental organizations like NRDC. I mean schools, students or or students who are getting into this field. They all are thinking about it. They there are solutions that are evolving. And I just believe that us all of us collectively will be able to get to where we want to be. So, it gives me a lot of hope in just believing in the power of the collective.

I have to say that’s very resonant and I relate a lot to that. Prima, you know, I think heat does reveal these fragilities that we have in many ways, but I think resilience can come in many forms. I think it’s a testament to the power of the human spirit. Like you’re talking about. I think it’s through these tougher times when a lot of our creativity comes out, our solutions come out. And the power of community and people coming together to overcome this challenge.

I cannot agree more with you, Alexander. Think I’ve enjoyed this so much. Thank you so much, Prima.

Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful.