Heat & Health

As heat waves intensify and urban temperatures rise, India’s health system is confronting an urgent question: How do we protect people before they reach a hospital? This conversation explores a necessary shift, from treating heat illness in tertiary care facilities to preventing it through primary care, community systems, and climate-responsive cities.

Heat Action Plans (HAPs) have rapidly expanded across the country, marking a major step forward. Yet the next frontier lies in understanding how heat affects people differently, across neighbourhoods, income groups, work patterns, and housing conditions, and aligning health responses with that lived complexity. The speakers examine how science-based risk assessment, decentralised planning, and community-level interventions can make heat resilience accessible to those most exposed: informal workers, low-income households, and residents of dense urban settlements.

Beyond medicine, the conversation brings together policy, design, and public health: scaling climate-aligned cooling technologies, integrating nature into city fabric, and strengthening governance systems capable of cross-sector action.

This conversation calls for a new paradigm in public health, one that sees cooling as care, prevention as infrastructure, and heat resilience as foundational to a livable future for every Indian city.