South Asia is taking the heat for a crisis it didn't cause

More than a third of humanity now lives in places acutely vulnerable to climate extremes, and South Asia holds more of that population than almost any other region on earth. That vulnerability isn't abstract. It looks like this.

A fisherman collapses at a dockside settlement in Karachi. His colleagues don't call him an ambulance. There isn't time, and there might not be one coming anyway. Someone presses lemon water onto his lips. Someone else half carries him to a clinic down the road. An IV drip brings him back.

Nearby, the local hospital is quietly drowning. Children keep arriving with dehydration, stomach infections, fevers that won't break, three or four times the normal caseload. This isn't a one off. Thousands died in Karachi's 2015 heatwave, and again in 2024. This year the city hit 44.1°C, its hottest reading since May 2018, and at least ten people died in a single day as the heat peaked.

The same story repeats across South Asia. In India, construction workers and farmers labor through 46°C heat because missing a day's wage means missing meals. Maharashtra's Akola and Amravati hit 46.9°C and 46.8°C in the same week, part of a stretch when more than 90 of the world's hottest cities were Indian on a single day. In Bangladesh, Dhaka and the districts of Faridpur, Rajshahi and Pabna sweltered through 37°C to 38°C, and schools shut as the country logged 24 heatwave days in one month, the most in 75 years. Conflict-stricken Afghanistan, too, is expected to experience prolonged extreme heat, particularly in southern regions where temperatures commonly reach 36°C to 43°C.

Different countries. The same crisis.

Officials call it unprecedented every year. Scientists say otherwise. Human caused warming has roughly tripled the odds of the extreme heat now battering India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and what used to be a once in a generation extreme is now expected every five years. "Unprecedented" has started to say more about our unwillingness to prepare than about the weather itself.

This is no longer only a South Asian story.

Europe has been through it too, and the numbers are stark. France recorded at least 300 excess deaths during a May heatwave that triggered health alerts in 17 departments, with emergency medical calls up by half in some cities. The UK's Met Office logged its second warmest June on record, and London's ambulance service recorded its busiest day for life threatening calls ever. Spain's mortality monitoring system counted more than 300 heat associated excess deaths in just a few days, and Italy reported five deaths in 24 hours, prompting some regions to restrict outdoor work during peak hours.

Adaptation measures already in place are estimated to have kept European heat deaths some 80 percent lower than they otherwise would have been, a cushion built from stronger health systems and far greater fiscal room, even though more than half of European countries still lack a comprehensive heat action plan.

South Asia is confronting comparable temperatures with almost none of that cushion. Heat doesn't invent inequality. It just finds every crack already there and pries it wider. Even without an official warning, heat stress in Indian cities is high enough to raise all-cause mortality risk by more than 8 percent.

Here's the part that should make people uncomfortable: South Asia contributed almost nothing to the warming now cooking it alive. Pakistan alone is responsible for well under one percent of historical global emissions, yet the region sits among the places paying the steepest price, part of a world where 3.6 billion people live in areas the IPCC calls highly vulnerable, facing death rates many times higher than elsewhere.

This disparity was supposed to be met with real money. It hasn't been.

Developing countries' adaptation costs are estimated at $300 billion to $365 billion a year within the next decade. What's arriving is closer to a tenth of that and falling. Loss and damage pledges from recent summits have peaked at $700 million, but how and when that money reaches anyone remains unanswered. More of it arrives as loans rather than grants, leaving debt stretched countries to lend their way into surviving a crisis they didn't cause.

It's easy to read this as somebody else's emergency, happening somewhere far off. It isn't. New Zealand's mild, maritime climate has long felt like protection from all this. The projections suggest otherwise.

By the end of the century, peak summer temperatures in Auckland and Christchurch could climb several degrees higher than today, straining homes built to keep warmth in, not out.

Pacific neighbors are already facing rising seas are watching how that plays out. So is South Asia, which isn't waiting around to find out.

Ahmedabad's heat action plan, running since 2013, is estimated to prevent close to 1,200 deaths a year through early warnings and coordinated cooling. In Rajasthan, more than 80 community-built water harvesting structures help thousands across two hundred villages cope with worsening scarcity. Pakistan, like India, has coordinated heat alerts through its own disaster management authorities, even without the funding for the cooling centers and early warning networks experts say are still badly needed.

The question was never really whether South Asia will adapt. It already is, out of necessity, with or without the money it was promised.

The real question is how many more summers of this it takes, workers collapsing, schools shutting, hospitals overwhelmed across South Asia, before pledges stop living in press releases and start showing up as ambulances that arrive on time, wards with room to spare, and grids that hold when the heat peaks.

-Asia Media Centre

Banner Image - Photo for representation Dry cracked earth with a tortoise shell, illustrating severe drought conditions- Pexels