Today, there are separate early warning systems for extreme heat and air pollution in India. A new project will assess exposure and health impacts from concurrent extreme heat and air pollution in Delhi and Kolkata and work to make a joint early warning system for both these challenges.
India faces increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, children, outdoor workers and those with existing health conditions such as heart and lung diseases. With climate change the likelihood of heatwave events in India is now 30 times higher than it used to be.
At the same time, the air quality in northern India has consistently and severely deteriorated over the last three decades degrading public health. The capital Delhi as well as Kolkata is frequently ranked among the most polluted cities in the world. Exposure to elevated levels of air pollution negatively affects people’s health, again with vulnerable groups facing the highest risk.
“Extreme heat and air pollution are both deadly. In combination, things get worse. An increasing number of studies show that health risks are amplified when people are exposed to both hot temperatures and air pollution”, said Kristin Aunan, Research Director at CICERO Center for International Climate Research and project coordinator for the new research project Combined impact of heat and air pollution exposure on human health in India: Evidence and solutions (COPE).
The four-year COPE project brings together a multidisciplinary and international consortium with partners from India, Norway, the UK, the US and Australia. This week, the partners are meeting in Delhi and Kolkata for project meetings and stakeholder workshops.
Assessing exposure and health impacts from concurrent heat and air pollution
Effective forecasting and mitigation strategies are critical to protect human health from the combined impacts of heat and air pollution. Addressing the shortcomings of the current individual warning systems for heat and air pollution, COPE will assess the associated health consequences in the Indian cities of Delhi and Kolkata and develop a combined Early Warning and Decision-support System (EWDS) for exposure to both heat and air pollution.
“Developing health-based warning is crucial to strengthen climate resilience and minimize health risks of climate change in India. Understanding city-specific health risks using local environmental and health data is a key step towards developing appropriate local adaptation strategies,” said Professor Sagnik Day, Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
COPE will expand the scope of an existing early warning system for air quality in Delhi by including exposure to heat, their concurrent exposure and health impact forecasts and evaluating its advantages, along with investigating the social and behavioral factors that impede their efficacy. Further, the project will develop a similar Early Warning and Decision-support System for heat and air pollution for Kolkata. COPE will also pinpoint other cities in India that could benefit from implementation of a similar early warning system. In this way the project aims to help local authorities and vulnerable groups to prepare better and thus contribute to mitigate the health impacts of exposure to heat and air pollution in India.
The research will be co-designed and conducted in collaboration with user groups from vulnerable groups and stakeholder partners from the health and governmental sector. The operationalization of the EWDS will be carried out by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), leveraging their position within the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) and extensive expertise in developing and implementing the Air Quality Early Warning System for Delhi AQEWS.
“Extreme heat and air pollution episodes are increasing simultaneously in Indian cities, driven by climate change. Urgent action is needed at policy and community levels. With COPE, we are developing India's first early warning and decision support system to provide impact-based warnings for combined exposure to heat and air pollution”, said Sourangsu Chowdhury, Senior Researcher at CICERO and co-lead of the project.
The COPE team includes climate scientists, epidemiologists and social scientists from the following partner institutions:
The project is funded through Belmont Forum by co-funders Research Council of Norway, Future Earth, US National Science Foundation and UK Research and Innovation Natural Environment Research Council.
Find out more about the project:
https://cicero.oslo.no/en/projects/cope
Contacts:
Project Coordinator Kristin Aunan
Research Director, CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway
kristin.aunan@cicero.oslo.no
Ph: +47 990 05 269
Professor Sagnik Dey
Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
sagnik@cas.iitd.ac.in
Ph: +91-9873544872
Miriam Stackpole Dahl
Senior Communication Advisor, CICERO Center for International Climate Research
miriam.dahl@cicero.oslo.no
Ph: + 47 93 49 44 98