This summer made the question ‘How hot is too hot?’ impossible to ignore. Temperatures climbed early and stayed high, and our research kept returning to the same theme: heat is no longer just a seasonal inconvenience but a symbol of how governance needs to radically transform to promote health and livelihoods.
Our 2025 study of Heat Action Plans (HAPs) across nine cities – Bengaluru, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Surat – found one pattern repeating everywhere: HAPs, so far, have been built for short-term relief, rather than long-term resilience. Drinking water kiosks, cooling centres, awareness campaigns, and ORS distribution consistently appear as immediate solutions being implemented, while urban heat island mapping, vulnerability assessments, and early warning systems that could help shift the risk curve are the exception, not the rule.
Coordination failures emerged as the single largest barrier to closing this gap. Many officials do not register heat as a genuine crisis on par with other emergencies, or are so overburdened that they cannot dedicate the time or resources needed to manage its fallout effectively.
On top of that, India’s data systems aren’t built to fully capture the toll of heat, including its effects on chronic health conditions such as heart and kidney disease. Warm nights also hinder rest and recovery, worsening the well-being of communities least able to cope. So the damage stays under-counted and under-resourced.
The power grid tells the same story through a different lens. Faced with heat-driven cooling demand, the reflex is the same short-term logic we found in HAPs: emergency power purchases, load shedding, appeals to conserve, and not the structural investment in grid capacity and renewables integration that would seek to close the gap. Heat resilience and grid resilience are converging on the same failure mode: institutions built to react to heat, not to plan for a hotter baseline.
Our recommendations, drawn from this research, focus on stronger institutional ownership of heat risk, dedicated financing mechanisms for heat action, meaningful integration of heat into urban planning and public service delivery, and better use of data and technology in decision-making.
None of this is work any one organisation can do alone. That’s part of why we launched the Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN) South Asia Hub with our partners this quarter, bringing together experts across the region to put the best available evidence on heat-health, cooling, governance, and the future of work in front of the people making these decisions.
Details of our work are here. We look forward to your feedback.