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By Shruti Mahajan and Laura Millan
In the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, unbearable heat keeps arriving earlier and earlier in the year, making it more difficult for many women who work outdoors to provide for their families.
Local labor union, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), has been pitching a solution that could protect their incomes and health. As part of a special program, women can buy insurance against peak daily temperatures and receive payouts whenever heat makes it impossible to work outdoors. The industry calls this “parametric insurance,” with protection triggered by a particular metric.
Kunwar ben Chauhan is one of the women who has decided to sign up. She’s all too familiar with the dangers of extreme heat. The raw meat she sells from a street cart tends to spoil when temperatures breach 40C (104F), meaning she has to return home without any earnings. She and her children have suffered from dizziness and dehydration after spending time in the sun. With the insurance, she says, “even if we can’t go to work during heat waves, we will hopefully get money deposited in our bank accounts.”
Kunwar ben Chauhan, a street seller in Ahmedabad, is no stranger to extreme heat. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
Ahmedabad is an example of the patchwork coping mechanisms that cities around the world are taking to save lives in a hotter world. Thermometers have in recent days approached 45C (113F) in India’s northeastern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, raising concerns about potentially heat-related deaths and driving home the need for proper preparation before the annual heat begins.
In addition to parametric insurance programs for outdoor workers, there are efforts in Ahmedabad to cover roofs with heat-reflective paint, implement early-warning systems and establish hospital heat wards in the city of more than 8.5 million people. The proactive approach has become a blueprint for other cities in developing countries who have accepted that record temperatures aren’t just freak weather: they’re the new reality as the planet continues to warm.
Greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other human activities have already made the planet 1.2C hotter than during pre-industrial times. The resulting extreme heat can exacerbate heart and lung conditions, especially when pollution levels are high, and make it harder for people to focus and work. The effect is particularly acute in packed cities, where the heat island effect makes things worse.
In India, high temperatures can easily become fatal when combined with humid conditions because it becomes harder for the human body to cool down by sweating. Last year, temperatures in the country hit a new record of 49C and days well above 40C have become common in almost every major Indian city during May and June.
Global warming of 2C, a threshold that the world is currently on track to blow past, would result in a sixfold increase in the number of heat waves in India, according to a 2018 scientific paper. A separate study earlier this year found over 600 million people in India — more than any other country — will be exposed to unprecedented heat by the end of this century if carbon pollution isn’t reigned in.
Chauhan still gets anxious when she thinks about the heat wave that engulfed Ahmedabad in 2010. As temperatures soared past 46C, she realized there was nowhere for her family to shelter. Even staying home was painful; poor ventilation, cement walls and a tin roof made it hotter indoors than it was outside.
That May, a slow-moving cyclone made pre-monsoon conditions in Ahmedabad even hotter than usual. More than 1,300 people died, hospitals were overwhelmed and, in a dystopian twist, 400 bats dropped dead from the heat. So much greenery had been lost as the city expanded that there were fewer trees to provide shade or cool the air.
“It was a wake-up call,” says Abhiyant Tiwari, a public health and climate expert who advised Ahmedabad’s municipality at the time. “We decided we would work on the issue of extreme heat so in the future, if it ever happened again, we could be prepared.”
More than a decade on, climate change has made the seasonal heat more intense and more persistent, but Ahmedabad has learned how to better deal with it. People like Chauhan now understand what a heat wave is, and the risks it entails. Most importantly, they have ways to mitigate the impact.
Following advice from SEWA, Chauhan daubed her home’s tin roof with cooling paint. Now, temperatures inside are bearable during the day, so her children can comfortably spend time there and her meat supplies aren’t in danger of spoiling. But when the mercury rises, women like her still face a dilemma: stay home and lose a day’s income, or brave dangerous conditions to earn a living?
Heat reflecting paint on Ahmedabad’s tin roofs helps make temperatures inside bearable during the day. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
“They get blisters on their hands from handling burning tools, miscarriages, urinary tract infections and headaches,” says Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which financially supports SEWA and subsidizes the parametric insurance program. “The key is to protect their health so they can protect their income.”
The center currently covers premiums for women so they only have to contribute a symbolic $1 to the program in order to be eligible for up to $85 payouts when temperatures over three days add up to a certain number, such as 134C. (For example, if the city saw 43C, 42C and 49C days in a row.) These workers make on average $3 a day. Baughman Mcleod says her organization developed an algorithm that accounts for more metrics such night-time temperatures, cloud cover and air pollution levels.
Other organizations are looking at even more sophisticated approaches. London-based Global Parametrics is working with local nonprofit Mahila Housing Trust to design a layered program where different levels of heat would trigger corresponding payments. Mahila is currently conducting training and information sessions and expects to roll out the product in three Indian cities including Ahmedabad next year.
The best way to make the product sustainable is to spread it over a wide geographic area so that risk is more distributed, says Wendy Smith, impact and ESG manager at Global Parametrics. “The aim is to have something that won’t end just after it’s piloted for a year or two.”
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