Hundreds of millions of poor menaced by ‘silent killer’: Heat

On a hot, humid afternoon on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar in eastern India, construction worker Sabitri Mahanand frets about increasingly “dangerous” summers. Carrying over a dozen bricks on her head, she fears getting sunstroke while at work, but home offers no respite either. “When the day’s work is over, I’m so exhausted that I often don’t want to cook food but I have no choice,” said Mahanand, 35, wiping the sweat from her face with a cloth wrapped around her waist. “I have to feed myself, my husband and my son.”

The ancient city of Bhubaneswar is the capital of Odisha state - one of the few parts of South Asia that has a heat emergency plan. Odisha’s government departments have been asked to put in place measures in anticipation of heat waves this summer. The world has already experienced three record-breaking hot years in a row, and the rising global temperature could have profound effects for health, work and staple food supplies for hundreds of millions of people, climate scientists said. The poor in urban slums in developing nations are particularly at risk, they said, while solutions to cool homes and bodies that do not hike climate-changing emissions remain elusive. Even if the world is able to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels - a goal set by governments in Paris in 2015 - by 2050, around 350 million people in megacities such as Lagos in Nigeria and Shanghai in China could still be exposed to deadly heat each year, according to a recent study by British researchers.

Estimates from the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-International (ISETInternational) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), both based in Colorado, are even higher. By mid-century, some 300 million Indians and Bangladeshis in the lower Ganges Valley alone will lack sufficient power to run electric fans or air conditioning to combat rising temperatures, they predict. —Reuters