A livable future : Protecting jobs and growth from extreme heat in South Asia’s cities

The report examines how urban heat threatens the creation of more and better jobs in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It assesses current and projected impacts on health, productivity, and urban economies, and it proposes an agenda for mobilizing public and private investment to protect people, cool the built environment, and keep infrastructure running through the hot season.

The report finds that dense urban areas in South Asia can remain more than 10°C hotter at night than the surrounding countryside. By 2070, around 520 million people in the region will face a month or more of dangerous heat each year, four times as many as today. Heat's true death toll is far larger than official records show. Heat deaths tend to be recorded as cardiac or renal failure, so they rarely reach the statistics governments act on; excess-mortality analysis associates a single five-day heatwave in India with roughly 30,000 deaths. In addition, extreme heat already subtracts the equivalent of 31 million full-time jobs a year across South Asia. This report proposes an action agenda with 15 priority interventions. These interventions span the health system, social protection, the built and natural environment, energy and transport, and the finance and institutions that connect them. The action agenda recommends investing in the human, natural, and physical infrastructure that cities will need, strengthen the rules and institutions that govern heat and mobilize private capital to meet the costs the public purse cannot.