Blitz Bureau
FIFTY-seven per cent of the districts in India are now facing extreme heat risks, according a new study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water. These districts are home to 76 per cent of the country’s population.
The study found that the 10 states and Union Territories most prone to heat risk were Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
It assessed heat conditions in 734 districts using 35 indicators to track how climate change reshaped heat risks between 1982 and 2022.
Four hundred and seventeen of these districts were in the “high to very high risk” extreme heat categories. These included some rural districts in Bihar, Kerala, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, which have a large number of outdoor agricultural workers, according to the study. Two hundred and one districts faced moderate risk, the study showed. Even though the remaining 116 districts were in the low-risk category, they were only relatively less exposed and were not immune to the problem, the study found.
The study found three trends. There was an alarming rise in very warm nights, increasing relative humidity in northern India – particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plain – and more intense heat exposure in dense, urban and economically-critical areas such as Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Bhubaneswar.
