New Delhi: The year 2023 was the hottest on record and 2022 was the fifth-hottest. The Centre for Science and Environment’s (CSE) State of India’s Environment Report 2024, released Wednesday, revealed a total of 329 heatwave days documented across India over the past two years. Meanwhile, another report concerning heatwaves released on the same day, by Climate Trends, highlighted that despite warnings from climate experts about a warming planet, media coverage remains sluggish. According to the report, a mere 14 percent of news articles concerning heatwaves in India in 2022 made any reference to climate change.
In its annual report, the CSE has catalogued the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, such as heatwaves. It shows that India’s weather was off to a rocky start at the beginning of 2023, with higher-than-average temperatures in January and February. In fact, the year saw the hottest February since 1901. In April, 27 out of 30 days saw hailstorms in the country, while about seven days saw heatwaves in nine states. The report attributed these weather fluctuations to disrupted western disturbances, which are extratropical storms responsible for rainfall in North India. In June, 12 states experienced heatwaves, and the high temperatures continued into August and September, making them the warmest ever in 122 years.
“2023-24 is a year of poly-crisis: when we are losing our many, multiple conflicts, among them our war with nature,” said CSE Director Sunita Narain at the Anil Agrawal Dialogue, organised by CSE annually, on 29 February.
The CSE report also quotes alarming trends that say heatwaves will increase both in frequency and duration over the next three decades — a direct result of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. While a heatwave lasts two to four days now, the number is expected to go up to 18 to 20 days by 2060, it added.
The phenomenon of marine heatwaves was also studied, and the report said that at least 27 percent of the world’s oceans in 2023 experienced heatwaves, with the number constantly increasing. Marine heatwaves are disastrous for marine ecosystems, as well as human fishing services.
Meanwhile, the report by Climate Trends, an environment research and consulting organisation, looked at English and regional media coverage of heatwaves and climate change in India. Led by Dr. Jagdish Thakkar, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his co-author James Painter from the University of Oxford, UK, the study aimed to emphasise how public awareness about heatwaves and climate change is necessary to influence policy making.
The report — which looked at print articles published in English, Hindi, Marathi and Telugu languages — found that just 14 percent of the 1,930 English-language articles they surveyed mentioned climate change when reporting on heatwaves in 2022. This, however, was the highest compared to other languages. For Hindi, it was about 7 percent of the 179 articles surveyed; for Marathi 6 percent of 77 articles; and for Telugu, 3 percent of 66 articles.
They did find though, that within the articles that did mention climate change and heatwaves, almost 70 percent stated facts accurately and said that heatwaves become more intense and frequent due to climate change and global warming.
However, the authors pointed out the importance of studying how climate change events are portrayed in the media, and that in Indian media, currently, the link to climate change “is not made as forcefully as it can be”.
“Currently, Indian media is falling short of its potential to educate Indians about climate change. Through accurate and consistent coverage of climate change-related extreme weather events, they can help Indians understand how to respond to climate change,” said Dr Thakkar, during an online press conference Wednesday.
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Impact of heatwave
A heatwave is declared when the temperature is above 40 degrees Celsius in the plains and above 30 degrees Celsius in hilly regions, according to the India Meteorological Department.
Heatwaves are not just restricted to land, but have been observed in oceans too. A World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report in 2023 had made a connection between marine heatwaves and melting glaciers, leading to increased risks of floods and other tropical cyclones. Libya’s devastating floods in September 2023, which killed over 4,000 people was cited as an example of events associated with the warming of the oceans. The present high temperatures of the world’s oceans are supposed to continue into early 2024, according to the WMO.
On land, the impact of heatwaves on human health has been well established. A paper published in Nature Medicine found that in Europe, over 60,000 deaths were attributed to heatwaves in 2022. It found that women and older citizens were more susceptible to heat-related mortality and that high temperatures exacerbated existing cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In India, discrepancies have arisen in the reporting of heatwave-related deaths by various government agencies. In 2023, state governments, the health ministry, and the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) each provided differing figures for heatwave mortality, according to a DownToEarth report.
The CSE report shows that heatwave doesn’t just impact mortality and health, but also leads to a significant loss in productivity of the labour force. India lost an equivalent of 6.3 percent of its GDP in 2022 due to heatwaves and the resulting loss in working hours. Most of this productivity loss was experienced by agricultural workers and construction workers — those who mainly work in the sun for long hours.
How to combat rising heatwaves?
To answer this, the CSE report chose to look at the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) launched by the central government in 2019, which prescribes building codes and energy efficiency and conservation techniques, specifically in urban areas to protect against heatwaves. The report quotes World Bank’s ‘Thriving: Making Cities Green, Resilient, and Inclusive in a Changing Climate’ report from 2023 to show that cities are responsible for 70 percent of total global emissions as compared to rural areas.
This also puts them at risk of urban heat island effect, where cities are warmer than their nearby rural regions.
The main reason for the urban heat island effect is also the infrastructure in cities — cement roads, concrete buildings, glass windows — that are designed to trap heat, thus making cities susceptible to higher temperatures.
In 2022, observations by NASA’s ECOSTRESS instrument aboard the International Space Station showed that cities in North India, like Delhi, were clearly defined as urban heat islands, with temperatures around 15 degrees Celsius higher on average as compared to surrounding villages.
To combat this, the Centre’s ICAP and the CSE report mention several measures — increase of blue-green infrastructure, at least 10 sq m of green spaces per capita, and replacing sidewalks and paved surfaces with hollow grass pavers so that heat doesn’t get trapped.
However, the report also emphasised the need to localise heat action plans for each city by involving urban local bodies.
“Heat is, as yet, a weather-related news update and not a climate-related one in Indian media,” says the Climate Trends report. It also points out the lack of focus on government officials when it comes to climate change action, saying that there is a “virtual absence of articles in our sample holding local, regional or national authorities to account for their emergency responses or the effectiveness of their Heat Action Plans.”
For future climate change reporting, the authors recommend that Indian journalists move beyond the ‘sensationalist’ topics of record-breaking high temperatures and report on heatwaves, the people it affects as well as their mitigation efforts by the government.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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