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What's the article about?
- It talks about the recent incidence of harsh heatwaves in Maharashtra.
Relevance:
- GS3: Disaster and Disaster Management;
- Essay;
- Prelims
Context:
- Eleven people died due to heatstroke after they attended a large public gathering in the open in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, on Sunday (April 16).
- Twenty people have been admitted to hospital, three of whom are critically ill. Dozens of others suffered from dehydration while standing in the heat.
- This incidence is a reflection of climate change, as such incidences of heat waves and heat strokes are now becoming more frequent in various parts of India.
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What are heat waves?
What is criterion for declaring heat wave?
a) Based on Departure from Normal:
b) Based on Actual Maximum Temperature:
If above criteria met at least in 2 stations in a Meteorological sub-division for at least two consecutive days and it declared on the second day.
What is a heat stroke?
Impact of rising average temperature and heat waves:
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Analysis:
- The state of the ongoing global climate crisis is such that India is going to have hotter hot days and more of them every year.
- While some of the blame for the effects — heat-related morbidity and mortality — may lie at the feet of meteorological caprice, the bulk of it will lie at the door of the government, whose responsibility it is to deal with and manage foreseeable inevitabilities.
- After the event, experts also said that the area lacked a local India Meteorological Department station to issue heat alerts. This misses the point. Many places in India are likely to have a large political event before an official weather station.
- This, together with the rapid onset of India’s heat crisis, puts the spotlight on the fundamental yet elusive cause of climate-related injustice: the persistence of conditions in which some people are at the mercy of their employers or their leaders, in order to survive a hot day, or, as at the April 16 event, even a few hot hours.
- As long as this imbalance in relationship is allowed to exist, heat action plans and heat alerts can only be of limited benefit.
- Instead, India must work towards becoming a country in which every individual is equipped with climate-literacy sufficient to know why higher temperature plus higher relative humidity and/or dehydration equals high risk of injury and death, and the ability to access cool and clean drinking water, ventilated shelter and lodging, and affordable emergency medical care wherever, whenever.
Way Forward:
- The interplay between local weather and climate is complex and while it is tempting to blame rising heatwave intensity as ‘climate change,’ the science continues to be uncertain.
- This, however, should be a wake-up call to buttress public health systems and make them more responsive to the challenges from rising temperatures.
