New Delhi/Guwahati:

India recorded more than 40,000 suspected heatstroke cases this summer as a prolonged heatwave killed more than 100 people across the country, while parts of its northeast grappled with floods from heavy rain, authorities said.

Billions across Asia are grappling with extreme heat this summer in a trend scientists say has been worsened by human-driven climate change, with temperatures in north India soaring to almost 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in one of the longest heatwave spells recorded.

Birds fell from the skies due to extreme heat and hospitals reported an inflow of heat-affected patients as both day and night time temperatures peaked in recent weeks since the start of summer in March.

The health ministry ordered federal and state institutions to ensure “immediate attention” to patients, while hospitals in the capital Delhi, which is also facing a water shortage, were directed make more beds available.

A health ministry official said there were more than 40,000 suspected heatstroke cases and at least 110 confirmed deaths between March 1 and June 18, when northwest and eastern India recorded twice the usual number of heatwave days.

The weather office has forecast above normal temperatures for this month too, as authorities say Indian cities have become “heat traps” due to unbalanced growth.

“During the ongoing heatwave, most bird rescue calls that we receive are due to birds falling from the skies,” said Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder and CEO of non-profit Wildlife SOS.

“In the past two weeks, Wildlife SOS has been receiving more than 35-40 rescue calls daily, in and around Delhi-National Capital Region. Most of the calls include bird rescue requests.”

Separately, floods and landslides triggered by incessant rain in the northeastern state of Assam killed at least six people on Tuesday night, officials said.

“A landslide buried a woman and her three daughters alive,” a state disaster management official, Siju Das, said by telephone.

“Their house was on a slope, and they died on the spot around midnight,” he said, adding that the bodies were retrieved after a three-hour search operation by rescuers.

“A three-year-old was killed too.”

In Assam, more than 160,000 people were affected, with waters surpassing the danger level in the Kopili, one of the largest tributaries of the Brahmaputra, which ranks among India’s biggest rivers.

More than 30 people in the state have died since the end of May in floods and landslides brought by heavy rain, officials said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A woman walks under an umbrella as heat wave grips the city of Guwahati, India, Saturday, May 25, 2024. Most parts of the north India are sweltering under scorching temperatures with the capital New Delhi under a severe weather alert as extreme temperatures strike parts of the country.
| Photo Credit: AP

Indian cities have become “heat traps” due to their unbalanced growth devouring water bodies and increasing greenhouse emissions, a senior government official said on Monday, as a scorching summer killed dozens in some parts of the country.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast above-normal temperatures for June in the northwest and central parts of the country including Delhi, making it one of the longest heatwave spells.

The highest daily temperatures in the capital have stayed above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) since May 12 and are forecast to fall below that mark only on June 26. The IMD’s heatwave criteria start with 40 degrees in the plains and 30 degrees for hills where it is generally cooler because of elevation.

Delhi, which is also facing a water shortage, recorded about 44 degrees late Monday afternoon but the IMD said it felt like 49.2 degrees.

“Climate change plays an important role,” Krishna S. Vatsa, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority, told Reuters.

Unbalanced urban growth, which has reduced wetlands and water bodies, was another factor, Vatsa said. “The emission of greenhouse gases has gone up. The permeable spaces have gone down considerably. The cities actually have become heat traps.”

As a result, he said, nights are nearly as uncomfortable as days.

According to a study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published last month, land surface temperatures in the summers of 2001 to 2010 in cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai used to drop by up to 13.2 degrees during the night from their day-time peak. Between 2014 and 2023 they were only cooling off by up to 11.5 degrees.

“Hot nights are as dangerous as mid-day peak temperatures,” the Centre’s report said. “People get little chance to recover from day-time heat if temperatures remain high overnight.”

Vatsa said most Indian states were implementing heat action plans that include provisioning drinking water and better medical facilities, as well as rescheduling outdoor work and school vacations.

But Anumita Roychowdhury, CSE’s executive director, said there was no clear mandate to implement long-term strategies. Delhi’s long-term plan includes increasing heat insulation of buildings, developing shelters for urban poor and slum dwellers, and investing in cooling water bodies.

Such plans need to be backed financially, said Vishwas Chitale of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water think tank in New Delhi.

“Cities are struggling with their own finance and they don’t have additional budget to implement actions for heat,” he said.

A woman walks under an umbrella as heat wave grips the city of Guwahati, India, Saturday, May 25, 2024. Most parts of the north India are sweltering under scorching temperatures with the capital New Delhi under a severe weather alert as extreme temperatures strike parts of the country.
| Photo Credit: AP

Indian cities have become “heat traps” due to their unbalanced growth devouring water bodies and increasing greenhouse emissions, a senior government official said on June 17, as a scorching summer killed dozens in some parts of the country.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast above-normal temperatures for June in the northwest and central parts of the country including Delhi, making it one of the longest heatwave spells.

The highest daily temperatures in the capital have stayed above 40 degrees Celsius since May 12 and are forecast to fall below that mark only on June 26. The IMD’s heatwave criteria start with 40 degrees in the plains and 30 degrees for hills where it is generally cooler because of elevation.

Delhi, which is also facing a water shortage, recorded about 44 degrees late Monday afternoon but the IMD said it felt like 49.2 degrees.

“Climate change plays an important role,” Krishna S. Vatsa, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority, told Reuters.

Unbalanced urban growth, which has reduced wetlands and water bodies, was another factor, Mr. Vatsa said.

“The emission of greenhouse gases has gone up. The permeable spaces have gone down considerably. The cities actually have become heat traps.”

As a result, he said, nights are nearly as uncomfortable as days.

According to a study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published last month, land surface temperatures in the summers of 2001 to 2010 in cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai used to drop by up to 13.2 degrees C during the night from their day-time peak.

Between 2014 and 2023 they were only cooling off by up to 11.5 degrees C.

“Hot nights are as dangerous as mid-day peak temperatures,” the Centre’s report said. “People get little chance to recover from day-time heat if temperatures remain high overnight.”

Vatsa said most Indian states were implementing heat action plans that include provisioning drinking water and better medical facilities, as well as rescheduling outdoor work and school vacations.

But Anumita Roychowdhury, CSE’s executive director, said there was no clear mandate to implement long-term strategies.

Delhi’s long-term plan includes increasing heat insulation of buildings, developing shelters for urban poor and slum dwellers, and investing in cooling water bodies.

Such plans need to be backed financially, said Vishwas Chitale of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a think-tank in New Delhi.

“Cities are struggling with their own finance and they don’t have additional budget to implement actions for heat,” he added.

According to a recent research, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

The intense northern hemisphere summer heat that drove wildfires across the Mediterranean, buckled roads in Texas and strained power grids in China last year made it not just the warmest summer on record – but the warmest in some 2,000 years, new research suggests.

The stark finding comes from one of two new studies released on Tuesday, as both global temperatures and climate-warming emissions continue to climb.

Scientists had quickly declared last year’s June to August period as the warmest since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

New work published in the journal Nature suggests the 2023 heat eclipsed temperatures over a far longer timeline – a finding established by looking at meteorological records dating to the mid-1800s and temperature data based on the analysis of tree rings across nine northern sites.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said study co-author Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.

Last year’s summer season temperatures on lands between 30 and 90 degrees north latitude reached 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial averages, the study said.

Based on tree ring data, the summer months in 2023 were on average 2.2 C (4 F) warmer than the estimated average temperature across the years 1 to 1890.

The finding was not entirely a surprise. By January, scientists with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service were saying the year of 2023 was “very likely” to have been the warmest in some 100,000 years.

However, proving such a long record is unlikely, Esper said. He and two other European scientists argued in a paper last year that year-by-year comparisons could not be established over such a vast time scale with current scientific methods, including gleaning temperature data from sources such as marine sediments or peat bogs.

“We don’t have such data,” Esper said. “That was an overstatement.”

Last year’s intense summer heat was amplified by the El Nino climate pattern, which typically coincides with warmer global temperatures, leading to “longer and more severe heatwaves, and extended periods of drought,” Esper said.

Heatwaves are already taking a toll on people’s health, with more than 150,000 deaths in 43 countries linked to heatwaves for each year between 1990 and 2019, according to the details of a second study published on Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.

That would account for about 1% of global deaths – roughly the same toll taken by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

More than half of those heatwave-related excess deaths occurred in populous Asia.

When the data are adjusted for population size, Europe had the highest per capita toll with an average of 655 heat-related deaths each year per 10 million residents. Within the region, Greece, Malta, and Italy registered the highest excess deaths.

Extreme heat can trigger heart problems and breathing difficulty or cause heat stroke.

The world just experienced its hottest April on record. File (Image used for representation purpose only)
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The world just experienced its hottest April on record, extending an 11-month streak in which every month set a temperature record, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service said on May 8.

Each month since June 2023 has ranked as the planet’s hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

Including April, the world’s average temperature was the highest on record for a 12-month period – 1.61 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.

Some of the extremes — including months of record breaking sea surface temperatures — have led scientists to investigate whether human activity has now triggered a tipping point in the climate system.

“I think many scientists have asked the question whether there could be a shift in the climate system,” said Julien Nicolas, C3S Senior Climate Scientist.

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change. In recent months, the natural El Nino phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, has also raised temperatures.

Scientists have already confirmed that climate change caused some specific weather extremes in April, including a heatwave in the Sahel linked to potentially thousands of deaths.

Ms. Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, said the data showed the world is perilously close to breaching the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to cap global warming at 1.5 degree Celsius.

“At what point do we declare we’ve lost the battle to keep temperatures below 1.5°C? My personal opinion is we’ve already lost that battle, and we really need to think very seriously about keeping below 2°C and reducing our emissions as fast as we can,” she said.

Countries agreed the 1.5°C goal at a U.N. climate summit in 2015. It is the level scientists say would avoid the most disastrous consequences of warming, like fatal heat, flooding and the irreversible loss of ecosystems.

Technically, the 1.5°C target has not yet been missed, as it refers to an average global temperature over decades. But some scientists have said the goal can no longer realistically be met, and have urged Governments to cut CO2 emissions faster to limit overshoot of the target.

C3S’ dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest April since the pre-industrial period.