Extreme heat poses great risks in India

A new independent study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India warns that Extreme heat now poses a risk to 57 per cent of Indian districts ~ home to 76 per cent of the population.

- Meena Janardhan

A new independent study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India warns that Extreme heat now poses a risk to 57 per cent of Indian districts ~ home to 76 per cent of the population.

The CEEW's study, ‘How Extreme Heats Impacting India: Assessing District-level Heat Risk’, presents a first-of-its-kind composite heat risk assessment of 734 districts in India using 35 indicators, offering a granular picture of how climate change has reshaped heat hazard trends from 1982 to 2022.

The CEEW analysis points out that in 2024, India experienced its longest recorded heatwave since 2010, At this juncture, India must rapidly scale up its heat resilience. To achieve this, a granular, data-driven understanding of the heat risk faced by every district in the country is one of the first and most crucial step.