A report by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a public policy think tank, released on Monday has found holes in the Heat Action Plans (HAPs), stating that most of them are not only underfunded but also do not target the ‘actual’ risks faced by local populations. It has asked the Government to re-look these plans and work on their improvements in keeping with requirements at the ground level.
This is the first critical assessment, by the CPR, of the HAPs formulated by the Government over the last ten years as a primary policy response to economically damaging and life threatening heatwaves. They prescribe a variety of preparatory activities, disaster responses, and post-heatwave response measures across state, district, and city government departments to decrease the impact of heatwaves.
The CPR’s report ‘"How is India adapting to heatwaves?," a review of 37 heat action plans in the city (nine), district (13) and state (15) levels across 18 states showed that most of them do not explicitly carry out vulnerability assessments, leaving the authorities with little data on where to direct their scarce resources.
Though the exact number of HAPs in India is unknown, some estimates claim the existence of well over 100 HAPs nationwide.
"India has made considerable progress by creating several dozen heat action plans in the last decade. But our assessment reveals several gaps that must be filled in future plans.
"If we don't, India will suffer damaging economic losses due to decreasing labour productivity, sudden and frequent disruptions to agriculture (like we saw last year), and unbearably hot cities as heat waves become more frequent and intense,” said Aditya Valiathan Pillai, associate fellow at CPR and co-author of the report.
It cited studies which indicate that India is one of the most exposed and vulnerable countries to heat. Between 1951 and 2016, three-day concurrent hot day and hot night events have increased significantly, and are projected to increase between two and four-fold by 2050 under the intermediate and high emission pathways of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and RCP 8.5.
RCPs capture assumptions about the economic, social and physical changes to the environment that will influence climate change within a set of scenarios. The conditions of each scenario are used to model possible future climate evolution.
However, "nearly all HAPs are poor at identifying and targeting vulnerable groups. Only two of the 37 HAPs explicitly carry out and present vulnerability assessments. This leaves the implementer with little data on where to direct their scarce resources and could lead to poor targeting," the CPR said in its report titled
While most HAPs identify broad categories of vulnerable groups, the solutions they propose do not necessarily focus on these groups. HAP designers must incorporate vulnerability assessments and shift to more holistic risk assessments where feasible, it said adding that most of the HAPs reviewed were not built for local context and had an oversimplified view of the hazard.
"Only 10 out of the 37 HAPs reviewed seem to establish locally-defined temperature thresholds though it is unclear whether they take local risk multipliers (such as humidity, hot nights, duration of continuous heat among others) into account to declare a heat wave.
"Hot nights, heat waves coming earlier, and cascading impacts are unevenly considered across HAPs. Climate projections, which could help identify future planning needs, are not integrated into current HAPs," the report said citing various examples.
According to the analysis, only 11 HAPs discuss funding sources with eight of them asking implementing departments to self-allocate resources, indicating a serious funding constraint.
The CPR further said none of the HAPs reviewed indicated the legal sources of their authority. This reduces bureaucratic incentives to prioritise and comply with HAPs instructions.
The analysis also pointed out that there was no national repository of HAPs and very few HAPs were listed online. It is also unclear whether these HAPs are being updated periodically and whether this is based on evaluation data.