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As the midday sun beats down on his 2.4 hectares of rice fields in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Ali Sher shrugs and continues sorting through the cucumbers he’s planted, telling his wife and seven children to keep going.
“We work here all day,” the 53-year-old farmer told CBC News. “Despite the heat, we still have to work. We have no other choice.”
The heat also scorches the crops – forcing the family to spend more time outside, watering and tending to cucumbers, which they cart into large oil barrels, fastening to sell later in the local market.
“If you don’t work [in the heat]then what are you going to do?” said Sher.
He and other outdoor workers are among the most vulnerable as India, a country affected by increasing heat, grapples with the new reality. The number of hot days is increasing, and experts predict that India’s heat waves will start earlier, last longer and more frequently, as the effects of climate change are felt across the subcontinent.
India’s Meteorological Department released a report in April that said the length of heatwaves has increased by three days over the past 30 years, but is forecast to increase by 12 to 18 days over the next 30 or 40 years.
Last year was the fifth hottest on record, according to India’s weather monitoring agency, which officially attributed 30 deaths to the declared heatwave – although experts believe this is an underestimation, with many weather-related deaths not recorded.
As the temperature hovers around 40°C in Modinagar, Uttar Pradesh, vendors in a busy local market struggle to find shade under tattered umbrellas, some opting for damp scarves over their heads.
“What can we do to save ourselves from the heat?” said Dinesh, 30, who, like many Indians, has only one name, as he sells okra and cucumbers. “There are no facilities around.”
‘Killer’ combination of heat and humidity
These risks are not only health-based.
India – where most of the population works outside with little protection from the elements – is experiencing more heat-related job losses than any other country in the world, and it will get worse later this decade.
The International Labor Organization projects India will lose six percent of working hours due to extreme heat, equivalent to 34 million full-time jobs.
“It has an impact on agricultural productivity, it has an impact on manual labor, it has an impact on our economy in general,” said Chandra Bhushan, CEO of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability & Technology (iFOREST), a non-profit focused on climate research based in New Delhi.
“People think heat waves are just about temperature. But I think the killer is the combination of heat and humidity,” Bhushan said.
“This is what the rain bulb temperature is. And in India, the temperature of the rain bulb is increasing, which means outdoor activity is going to decrease.”
The threat, which can be deadly, comes when the outdoor wet-bulb temperature — which is the lowest temperature in which air can be cooled by evaporation — inches higher. When it is very hot, human sweat evaporates and cools the body down, but when the humidity level is very high and the air is filled with a lot of moisture, the sweat cannot evaporate to cool the body temperature.
There is a push to adapt to extreme heat in India as heatwaves become more frequent, and scientists expect them to worsen over the next few decades.
And the threshold when reading the temperature of the rain bulb is dangerously lower than the traditional temperature. When intense heat and humidity combine to push the wet bulb temperature above 32 C, it becomes very difficult to do physical activity outside.
“The problem is that climate change is simultaneously increasing temperature and humidity,” Bhushan said, adding that the increase in the intensity of heat waves is not unique to India.
Deadly event ‘wake up call’
The deadly combination of heat and humidity that fueled the April heatwave that swept through South Asia left 13 dead at a large outdoor event outside Mumbai, where thousands of participants sat in the sun for hours.
Hundreds of others were hospitalized after suffering symptoms of heat stroke, and outdoor events in the state of Maharashtra were quickly cancelled.
Heatwaves have been created at least 30 times because of climate change, an international group of climate scientists concluded in a study conducted by the World Weather Attribution initiative.
“I think we’ve really woken up to the kind of publicity we’ve been getting,” said Debi Goenka, an environmentalist and executive trustee of the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust, referring to the number of outdoor deaths. event.
“Although the incident is very unfortunate, it has actually awakened a lot of people to take care of the heat.”
This has also led India’s weather authorities to try to change the way they describe heat waves, not only considering heat, but humidity as well. The new heat index code is expected to be ready in the coming months.
A push to adapt
The country is trying to adapt, with a heat action plan that has been in place since 2013. But with many regions experiencing different effects of hot weather, it’s up to local governments to take responsibility, Bhushan said.
“Most of the action has to happen at the city level, the local level.”
There are companies working at the grassroots level on initiatives that focus on small steps with the goal of making a big difference.
At a government-run daycare center in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Chennai, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Savitha Narayanamurthy held a temperature gun in her hand, taking multiple readings as she surrounded dozens of children playing loudly in the middle of the room.
Above him, the roof of the small building now had a growing garden, planted just two weeks before.
“We remember the difference of one degree, between one and 1.5 [degrees cooler]”he told CBC News, just a few days after he started taking his temperature.
Narayanamurthy works here for cBalance, a Mumbai-based sustainability consultancy that focuses on low-cost, low-tech solutions – especially for India’s poor, who often live in cramped urban settlements that cannot escape crippling heat waves.
Another project involves installing aluminum foil cooling slabs on the roofs of individual houses in Mumbai’s slums, which reflect the sun back and keep heat out of the buildings. The company is also trying to set PET recyclable plastic bottles filled with water in the roof box, to try to trap the heat from entering and affecting the indoor temperature.
Meanwhile, the company is eager to get the rooftop garden at the Chennai orphanage to grow rapidly over the next few months.
“When the green patch rises, we expect the temperature difference to be somewhere around three degrees as usual,” said Narayanamurthy, as he took a cloth to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
“So the kids can feel cooler sitting on the playground,” he said, adding he was excited to see even the smallest effect.
“We feel hopeful about this.”
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