Cities like Ahmedabad have always had hot summers, but they are now approaching the threshold where being in the sun for more than a few hours can be deadly.
The city recorded about 1,300 excess telegram number list deaths in the summer of 2010 – that’s more people than expected.
Experts say the high temperatures are likely to blame. An increasingly hot planet, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas, which releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, means that already hot regions are getting hotter.
A 2023 study found
That if the average global temperature continues to rise to just under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), heat-related deaths reading blogs or social media worldwide would increase by 370%, with most of them occurring in South and Southeast Asia and Africa.
“That’s very concerning, and it also shows the heat gap” between rich and poor, said Abhiyant Tiwari, a climate expert at NRDC India and a member of the team conducting the Ahmedabad study.
After the 2010 disaster Killer heat is
City officials, with the help of public health and heat experts, developed an action plan to warn citizens when heat reached dangerous levels and to prepare city hospitals to respond quickly to heat-related illnesses.
The plan has been replicated across India and other parts of South Asia.
The past two years have been the hottest trust review on record, and the researchers hope
their work can provide an extra line of defense for those bearing the brunt of the rising heat.
Finding solutions to beat the heat
The Ahmedabad study is part of a global research project examining how heat waves affect poor, vulnerable communities in four cities around the world.
The researchers are also measuring heat exposure using smartwatches and other devices in Burkina Faso, Africa, the Pacific island of Niue near New Zealand, and Mexico’s Sonora desert region.
More than 1.1 billion people — about an eighth of the world’s population — live in informal settlements and poor neighbourhoods that are particularly vulnerable, said Aditi Banker, an environmental researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, who is leading the global project.