India’s heat strategy must move from response to mitigation

Delhi, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Jaipur face different combinations of heat, humidity, urban form, water availability and energy demand

Metro India News | Hyderabad

India’s decision on 4 August 2026 to recognise heatwaves as natural disasters marks an important policy transition. It can unlock disaster financing for heat management, but the larger opportunity is to redefine heat management. India now needs to move beyond responding to heat towards reducing urban conditions that produce heat. Heat response protects people after danger emerges through forecasts, warnings, cooling centres, health preparedness and emergency action. Heat mitigation is different. It changes the physical and operational structure of cities so that less heat is absorbed, stored, generated and trapped.

The next generation of policy must measure how cities respond to heat and how effectively they prevent avoidable heat. Urban heat should be treated as a thermal energy management problem. Every city receives solar energy. Its surfaces reflect, absorb and store part of that energy, while buildings, vehicles, industry and cooling systems add anthropogenic heat. Wind and evaporation redistribute energy. The resulting thermal environment is shaped by four dimensions: Form, Function, Fabric and Flow.

Form is urban geometry. Building height, density, street width, orientation, shade and sky exposure determine how radiation and air move through neighbourhoods. Function is urban activity. Transport, industry, commerce and buildings generate heat. Air conditioning reduces indoor exposure but increases electricity demand and releases waste heat outdoors. Fabric is the material surface of the city. Super cool roofs, reflective pavements, insulation and photovoltaic systems can reduce solar absorption while improving energy performance.

Flow determines where heat goes. Humidity, water availability, canopy structure, radiation and urban geometry determine the outcome. A city is not thermally uniform. Delhi, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Jaipur face different combinations of heat, humidity, urban form, water availability and energy demand. Even within one city, adjacent wards experience different exposure. Heat policy should operate at ward, neighborhood and street scale. India should require a ‘Thermal Impact Assessment’ for major urban projects.

Flyovers, expressways, parking complexes, commercial districts and large redevelopment schemes can alter radiation, airflow and heat storage. Projects that increase thermal stress should provide compensatory cooling measures. A financing architecture could reinforce this approach. Heat mitigation credits could reward verified reductions in thermal exposure, cooling demand or heat storage. This would shift policy from counting expenditure to measuring outcomes.

Cities should establish urban heat and energy observatories integrating satellite observations with ground measurements, meteorology and energy data. Their purpose should be diagnostic: identifying where heat originates, who is exposed, and which intervention produces the greatest cooling. The framework should be an urban thermal budget: an accounting system for the energy a city receives, reflects, absorbs, stores, transfers and generates.

India has opened the door by recognising heatwaves as disasters. The next step is ambitious: build an urban heat policy that does not merely manage overheating, but governs the thermal design of the city.

- Rupali Khatun