Latest news with #IndiaHeatSummit2025
Time of India
2 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
Eastern Himalayas show highest black carbon levels; snow loss tied to biomass burning
New Delhi: Snow surface temperatures in the Himalayan region have risen by more than 4°C over the last two decades due to increasing levels of black carbon emissions , a new study by Delhi-based research consultancy Climate Trends has found. The analysis, based on 23 years of NASA satellite data (2000–2023), reports accelerated melting in areas with higher black carbon deposits, particularly in the Eastern and Central Himalayas. According to the study titled Impact of Black Carbon on Himalayan Glaciers: A 23-Year Trends Analysis, the average snow surface temperature rose from -11.27°C (2000–2009) to -7.13°C (2020–2023). The study found that regions with higher black carbon concentrations showed greater snow melt and reduced snow depth. The research attributes the presence of black carbon to emissions from biomass combustion, fossil fuel use, and open burning in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. 'Glacier melt is accelerating, threatening freshwater resources to nearly two billion people downstream,' said Dr Palak Baliyan, lead author of the study. Black carbon reduces the reflectivity (albedo) of snow, causing it to absorb more solar radiation and melt faster. Although concentrations plateaued somewhat between 2019 and 2023, the long-term warming trend is clear. 'Black carbon acts like a heat lamp on snow,' the report stated. Speaking at the India Heat Summit 2025, Dr Farooq Azam, Senior Cryosphere Specialist, ICIMOD, cited 2022 as the worst year for glacier mass balance, with Himalayan glaciers such as Chhota Shigri in Himachal Pradesh losing up to two metres of ice. 'Since 2022, glacial mass loss is four times higher than normal. With more temperature, glaciers shrink and more heavy metals melt into river water,' he said. Dr Azam also said that black carbon from the Indo-Gangetic Plain is carried by winds and deposited on glaciers. 'This darkens the snow surface, reducing albedo, and accelerates heat absorption,' he added. Some studies estimate that the additional radiation absorbed due to darkened snow is equivalent to 14–15 volts per square kilometre. The study found a strong positive correlation between black carbon and snow surface temperature and a negative correlation with snow depth, even when controlling for temperature, indicating a direct impact of black carbon on snowpack. 'Reducing black carbon, especially from cookstoves, crop burning, and transport, can offer quick wins for climate and water security,' said Aarti Khosla, Director, Climate Trends. The report advocates targeted policy interventions in the Indo-Gangetic region to mitigate black carbon emissions. Dr Azam added that signs of climatic impact are evident in increased avalanches, shifting agricultural zones, and glacier loss, including the near disappearance of Yala Glacier in Nepal. 'In 2022 alone, glaciers experienced up to four times the normal mass loss, equivalent to 2 metres of ice from Chhota Shigri Glacier,' he said. The report concludes that cutting black carbon emissions can yield short-term regional cooling and help slow glacial retreat.
NDTV
4 days ago
- Climate
- NDTV
Scientists Warn Heat Waves To Last Longer, Affect More Areas In India
New Delhi: Heat waves in India are expected to last longer and affect larger regions, scientists have warned, as climate change continues to intensify extreme weather events. Climate models show that the area and duration of heat waves in India would increase, said Krishna Achuta Rao, Head, Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Speaking at the India Heat Summit 2025, organised by research group Climate Trends, Rao said "this means the northern plains and several states across the southern peninsula will experience heat waves that last longer and cover larger areas". "What might have been a week-long event could turn into a month-and-a-half or two-month-long event. Our future looks very stark," he added. The scientist said the models also suggest that heat waves may occur during the monsoon months which could be more dangerous. "This is especially worrying because it will be hot and humid, with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius," added Rao. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) sixth assessment report and recent scientific papers have warned of more frequent and intense heat waves in South Asia even during monsoon months. Farooq Azam, senior cryosphere specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), said the rising temperatures are melting glaciers faster, affecting water availability in India's rivers. Azam said the country depends heavily on water from glaciers for agriculture and electricity generation. At present, there is more water because of warming-driven glacier melt, but there is a threshold beyond which glaciers will start contributing less water, called peak water. Some models project that peak water could occur around 2050 in the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins, while some studies suggest it may have already been reached in the Brahmaputra system, he added. Azam warned that this could mean "more floods until 2050" and water shortages afterwards. He said that 2022 saw the most negative glacier mass balance -- more ice was lost than gained -- although annual temperatures were higher in 2023 and 2024. "This is because early heat waves in March 2022 led to early melting of glaciers, resulting in high river flows when water was not needed. The early heat waves and early monsoon contributed to the devastating floods in Pakistan that year," added Azam. ICIMOD's Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment and studies by the World Weather Attribution have linked glacier melt and climate change to increased flood risk in the region. The senior cryosphere specialist also said that glacier melt in the Himalayas has more immediate impacts than glacier loss in Iceland or the Arctic, as the Himalayan glaciers supply water to more than a billion people in the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
No reliable data on heat stroke and heat deaths in India: Experts
New Delhi: There is no reliable data on heatstroke and heat deaths as data-reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country, experts said on Tuesday. Talking about the impact of extreme heat at the India Heat Summit 2025, organised by research group Climate Trends, Health Ministry Advisor Soumya Swaminathan said deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. "We do not fully count all the deaths attributable to climate hazards or to heat as reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country," she said. There is a need to strengthen death-reporting systems "because that is the best source for the government, for the policymakers to know ... what people die of is what should inform your policy and that keeps changing from time to time", Swaminathan said. She had earlier told PTI in an interview that India is "most likely" undercounting heat-related deaths due to a lack of robust data. The former chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said data has been sitting in silos and called for the establishment of an environmental health hub , where the ministries of health, environment and earth sciences come together, share data and translate information into action. Swaminathan, however, warned against focusing only on deaths. "It is not just the mortality we need to be fixated on.... (We need to ascertain) the impact on health and productivity. Ultimately, health determines your productivity and impact on the GDP," she said. Chandni Singh, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, said there are challenges in how India records heat deaths and there is no good dataset to refer to. "Currently, there is no nationally representative data on heatstroke and heat-related deaths. One can, however, draw inferences from the existing datasets," she said. The health ministry's National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been collecting and reporting heatstroke and heat-death data under the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) since 2015. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) also maintains data related to heat deaths, sourced from media reports. Apart from this, Union Earth Sciences Minister Jitendra Singh has cited the National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) data on heat deaths in parliamentary replies. All three datasets report different figures for heat-related deaths. For example, according to the NCDC, a total of 3,775 heat-related deaths were reported between 2015 and 2019. During the same period, the NCRB recorded 6,537 heat-related deaths. Swaminathan also said that though the number of heat action plans is increasing, these are developed by a group of experts sitting together, there is very little community consultation that has gone into these and there is very little ground truthing and very little feedback collected. Krishna Vatsa, member, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said the country lacks a "very well established academic or technical centre.... A group of people who could help districts prepare heat action plans". "We do not have one designated, proper centre of excellence for dissemination of all the knowledge and expertise," he said. Vatsa said if it were left just to officers to write heat action plans, it would not be very successful and more handholding and technical training were needed.
NDTV
6 days ago
- Health
- NDTV
No Reliable Data On Heatstroke And Heat Deaths In India: Experts
New Delhi: There is no reliable data on heatstroke and heat deaths as data-reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country, experts said on Tuesday. Talking about the impact of extreme heat at the India Heat Summit 2025, organised by research group Climate Trends, Health Ministry Advisor Soumya Swaminathan said deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. "We do not fully count all the deaths attributable to climate hazards or to heat as reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country," she said. There is a need to strengthen death-reporting systems "because that is the best source for the government, for the policymakers to know ... what people die of is what should inform your policy and that keeps changing from time to time", Swaminathan said. She had earlier told PTI in an interview that India is "most likely" undercounting heat-related deaths due to a lack of robust data. The former chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said data has been sitting in silos and called for the establishment of an environmental health hub, where the ministries of health, environment and earth sciences come together, share data and translate information into action. Swaminathan, however, warned against focusing only on deaths. "It is not just the mortality we need to be fixated on.... (We need to ascertain) the impact on health and productivity. Ultimately, health determines your productivity and impact on the GDP," she said. Chandni Singh, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, said there are challenges in how India records heat deaths and there is no good dataset to refer to. "Currently, there is no nationally representative data on heatstroke and heat-related deaths. One can, however, draw inferences from the existing datasets," she said. The health ministry's National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been collecting and reporting heatstroke and heat-death data under the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) since 2015. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) also maintains data related to heat deaths, sourced from media reports. Apart from this, Union Earth Sciences Minister Jitendra Singh has cited the National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) data on heat deaths in parliamentary replies. All three datasets report different figures for heat-related deaths. For example, according to the NCDC, a total of 3,775 heat-related deaths were reported between 2015 and 2019. During the same period, the NCRB recorded 6,537 heat-related deaths. Swaminathan also said that though the number of heat action plans is increasing, these are developed by a group of experts sitting together, there is very little community consultation that has gone into these and there is very little ground truthing and very little feedback collected. Krishna Vatsa, member, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said the country lacks a "very well established academic or technical centre.... A group of people who could help districts prepare heat action plans". "We do not have one designated, proper centre of excellence for dissemination of all the knowledge and expertise," he said. Vatsa said if it were left just to officers to write heat action plans, it would not be very successful and more handholding and technical training were needed.
India Today
6 days ago
- Climate
- India Today
Shift in rain patterns, weather big concern as climate change hits India
India is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to projected climate change impacts, with heat stress emerging as the single largest concern. The prospect of extreme heat and heat stress arises from the widespread, rapid changes in ocean temperatures combined with steadily rising atmospheric heat India Heat Summit 2025 is deliberating on the issue of rising temperatures and shared solutions. The summit will also advise the government on long-term measures to deal with its deliberation is also focusing on issues related to unseasonal rainfall and the very frequent heavy rainfall occurring in the western parts of India, including the record-breaking rains in Mumbai on Monday—breaching a hundred-year record. Environmentalists are concerned about such frequent incidents of high-intensity rain occurring in a short Swaminathan, environmentalist and Chairperson of MSSRF, told India Today that Urban flooding is rising due to multiple factors—partly climate change, and partly poor planning. While total rainfall hasn't changed much over the decade, it's now falling in fewer hours, making it harder for cities to cope. "Yes, climate change has intensified rainfall — but it's also a planning failure. We need to rethink urban design. We can't keep building the same way in Delhi, the Himalayas, and coastal areas. That approach must change," she Chitale, environmentalist at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, points out that erratic rainfall and early monsoons aren't entirely new phenomena—they've been observed over many years. However, what has changed is the intensity and concentration of rainfall in short show that regions like Rajasthan, Gujarat, central Maharashtra, and Karnataka have seen rainfall increase by up to 30% over the last decade compared to the previous 30-year average. This rise isn't spread evenly across the season; instead, it is marked by short, intense downpours, such as those seen recently in Mumbai—an outcome of increasingly erratic monsoon stresses the need for proactive prevention through robust early warning systems. He highlights India's ongoing efforts, such as the Monsoon Mission weather forecast model, as important steps forward. But he adds that what's crucial now is scaling these systems across urban India with detailed observation networks to provide timely alerts and minimize damage from such extreme agree that these extreme weather patterns are a direct result of climate change, but also point to significant governance gaps. Aarti Khosla from Climate Trends noted that warming oceans are carrying more moisture, leading to more intense and erratic rainfall. She emphasised that cities are ill-prepared for such events, lacking resilient infrastructure for transport, public health, and emergency response. According to her, the early onset of the southwest monsoon, as seen in Mumbai, is a warning sign—and India must urgently integrate weather data with urban planning to protect vulnerable to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN's climate science body, India is projected to be one of the most vulnerable regions to escalating heatwaves, humid heat stress, and other extreme weather events in a 1.5C warmer world—threats that could bring irreversible over 90% of its workforce employed in the informal sector, in the world's most densely populated country, India faces heightened exposure to both the physical dangers and economic risks of rising heat recent years, the country has experienced record-breaking temperatures year after year, with early summer arriving as soon as February or March. Heatwaves have become more frequent, prolonged, and many areas, temperatures have soared close to 50C in recent years—leading to increased illness and loss of life, especially among vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children, and outdoor spans five distinct climatic zones—tropical, arid, semi-arid, temperate, and alpine—all of which are now experiencing severe disruptions due to rising the north, accelerated glacial melt and glacial lake formation are intensifying flood risks. Forest fires and water scarcity are putting pressure on hill ecosystems in states like arid and semi-arid regions are seeing erratic rainfall patterns, upending agricultural cycles. Traditional climate zones are flipping: flood-prone areas now face droughts, and vice India's 7,500-km coastline, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea are witnessing increased cyclogenesis—leading to stronger, more frequent storms, saltwater intrusion, humid heatwaves, affected fisheries, and rising sea level studies show a clear spatial-temporal shift in heatwave occurrences across India, with rising trends in three major regions: north-western, central, and south-central to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the most affected states and union territories include Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and economic and social toll of these extreme conditions is enormous. The Reserve Bank of India estimates that extreme heat and humidity could lead to a 4.5% loss in GDP by 2030 due to reduced labour in monsoon patterns and rising temperatures could further reduce GDP by 2.8% by 2030, potentially lowering living standards for nearly half the population by effective mitigation policies, India could face annual GDP losses of 3-10% by climate-induced extremes intensify, it's critical to assess temperature-related risks across key sectors like energy, industry, agriculture, and urban May 2024, India's power consumption surged by 15%, reaching a record peak demand of 250.07 GW, driven by extreme heat and surpassing all previous temperatures have increased the demand for residential cooling, industrial operations, and irrigation, making India more reliant on thermal power to meet its growing energy project a 9-10% increase in energy demand in 2025, driven in part by a sharp rise in air conditioner sales—highlighting both the rising energy demand and the growing disparity in generation to transmission to distribution, high temperatures strain energy systems. Experts note that as a conductor heats up, its molecules vibrate more, increasing resistance and reducing became evident in 2022, when India experienced its worst electricity shortage in over six years, leading to power cuts in homes and industries. For the manufacturing sector, such supply disruptions can severely impact production timelines and raise impact of heat stress extends far beyond the power grid. According to the World Bank, over 34 million jobs in India could be at risk due to heat exposure. Between 2001 and 2020, India lost around 259 billion hours of labour—worth US$ 624 billion (INR 46 lakh crore) annually—due to extreme heat and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs)—the backbone of the economy—are especially vulnerable to productivity declines, infrastructure damage, supply chain disruptions, and job 2022, heatwaves forced India to ban wheat exports after extreme temperatures slashed yields—highlighting the vulnerability of both the agriculture sector and global food supply scientists say heat stress has reduced rice yields by 15–20% across different to NDMA, broader impacts of heat stress on agriculture include declining soil moisture, water insecurity, increasing pest varieties, crop wilting, reduced food quality and nutrition, lower milk production, and impacts on animal growing threat of heat stress calls for urgent mid- and long-term strategies—both structural and non-structural—to limit economic and social fallout. Heat Action Plans remain India's main policy tool but require stronger coordination, greater investment, and cross-sector build resilience, India will need investment in cooling infrastructure, better urban design, early warning systems, and adaptive social protection. The real challenge lies in not just recognising heat as an economic threat, but also in mobilising targeted finance to tackle it and protect challenge is unique: it must build heat resilience while sustaining economic growth to create jobs and lift millions out of poverty. This calls for coordinated solutions from national, state, and local governments, industries, and Heat Conference being organised by Climate Trends aims to bring together these stakeholders to address what may be India's single greatest climate Watch
