The Politics of Extreme Heat in Urban South Asia

The recurrent heatwaves of the past five years have enmeshed Pakistan in a paradox. Despite a long history of coping with and mitigating heat through architectural, medicinal, and agricultural practices, the present conjunction of climate change and heatwaves in Pakistan is one of the most unfavorable in the world.

In contrast to Europe, where extreme heat is a recent phenomenon, in Pakistan—and South Asia in general—techniques for sheltering from extreme heat go back hundreds of years. For instance, the use of earthen pots to keep water cool has been a traditional way to mitigate overheating in bodies since 1000 BCE. Ayurvedic medicine has been an integral part of protecting the body from heat over several centuries. The use of courtyards in homes was a ubiquitous architectural practice for sustaining indoor cooling. In the Mughal era, vaulted and domed roofs, lattice screens, thick stone walls, and arched ceilings prevented the absorption of solar heat, keeping inner surfaces cool.

Even though heat has been a pervasive experiential reality in Pakistan, it has never been a uniform one in historical terms. Social hierarchies and material inequalities have played a critical role in determining how heat is experienced.

During the colonial period, the relation between heat and bodies was marked with assumptions of race, gender, class, and caste. In a 2022 article in the journal BJHS Themes, anthropologist Bharat Venkat shows how knowledge of climate was intimately tied to ideas about race and biology. Heat, in particular, became a key part of colonial discourse about the sensory capacities of differently racialized bodies.

Heat, or the dangers of thermal exposure, also played out in notions about the “tropics,” regions where nature, or the climate, was understood to be the prime determinant of the built form. This was apparent in how architecture and medical discourses were entangled in the urban planning of British colonies. India’s tropical climate was assumed to be hostile to human life, and especially deadly to the English race.

By the early twentieth century, the tropics were considered not only a pathological site, but also an underdeveloped one that needed improvement, with germ theory emerging as the prevailing paradigm of medical knowledge. The “improvement trusts,” led by colonial officers, undertook large-scale land acquisitions and road-building projects for urban development, and were known for their coercive practices. Buildings found to be insanitary were declared unfit for habitation and demolished; inhabitants were evicted without adequate housing alternatives being provided.

As architectural historians have noted, housing and planning problems “discovered” in the tropics in the early twentieth century often remain unresolved in the postcolonial context. Development programs meant to address them have often had violent consequences for the poor, in terms of relocation or the complete abandonment of affordable shelter.

In modern Pakistan, the broader story of the failure of housing provision for the poor can be traced to its colonial origins. It is also tied to the challenges of low-quality housing pervasive in informal and low-income settlements, where poor and vulnerable residents must endure extreme heat exposure as a slow-onset disaster. They suffer the effects of acute and chronic heat on daily life, worker productivity, health, and well-being. Modern standards of comfort that rely on air conditioning reinforce class distinctions, since such cooling technologies are largely unaffordable for low-income households.

Pakistan’s cities are highly unequal. Land, housing, and inequitable infrastructures—in addition to temperatures that vary in urban cores and peripheral areas—are drivers of residents’ vulnerabilities. For vulnerable populations in Pakistani cities, living with heat means living with the risk of death. Residents of low-income communities and informal settlements in major cities like Karachi (Pakistan’s largest metropolis, with a population of over 20 million), as well as in smaller cities such as Jacobabad, are less likely to have access to the basic services or infrastructure required for adapting to rising temperatures.

The structural vulnerabilities of heat-trapping buildings may be heightened by socioeconomic elements such as overcrowding, limited access to water and electricity, indoor use of solid-fuel burners, and ventilation closed off due to neighborhood air pollution. (South Asian cities are afflicted with some of the world’s worst air pollution. In Lahore and New Delhi, the air quality index can pass the 1,000 mark repeatedly in certain months—anything above 300 is considered hazardous.) Low-caste and poor women are often at greater risk of prolonged heat exposure and are much more likely to be hospitalized due to heat stress. Such conditions limit their ability to plan for and respond to urban heat, perpetuating existing thermal inequities and exacerbating mental health and even nutritional issues.

In Pakistan, people living in rural areas and small towns are considered the most vulnerable in terms of absolute poverty and access to infrastructures. But a megacity like Karachi has its own dynamic of vulnerability. Unstable governance structures, anti-poor urban planning, and political violence have been both causes and effects of differential and contested access to land, livelihoods, and infrastructure. In Karachi, well over 62 percent of the population resides in informal settlements with unequal infrastructure access. An unknown number of people live in makeshift housing such as jhuggies, and many are homeless.

Moreover, 72 percent of the country’s total population, and 68 percent of its urban population, rely on informal employment. Many low-wage workers in Karachi are engaged in precarious jobs. Under these uncertain arrangements of employment, housing tenure, and hardship assistance, people become even more vulnerable to sudden shocks such as climatic events.

In Karachi, climatic shifts are likely to worsen vulnerabilities that have been conditioned by long-standing spatial and infrastructural inequalities. These arose in a context of colonial and post-Partition legacies of anti-poor urban planning, migration, inadequate housing, and inequitable land distribution. Since 1947, urbanization has produced differentiated urban spaces, with stratification along class lines and consumer lifestyles.

An emergent urban middle class aspires to invest and live in exclusive housing developments on the city’s new peripheries, against the backdrop of an acute housing crisis for poor, low-income, and working-class populations. Rapid and varied urbanization has also led to rising energy usage for lighting and cooling the city’s private spaces, a trend that will become more acute in response to climate change. Unsustainable levels of electricity consumption reflect demand for cooling technologies such as air conditioners and changing middle-class lifestyles.

Extreme heat manifests through invisible, shifting, and intensifying bands of ultraviolet radiation that are inflected by changes in topography, vegetation, and altitude, affecting bodies in asymmetrical ways. Karachi is located at a latitude of 24 degrees north of the equator, within the zone of ultraviolet radiation. This zone, between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south, is increasingly exposed to intense atmospheric risks of solar exposure and pollution. By 2100, UV radiation at these tropical latitudes will intensify to more dangerous levels, whereas mid- and polar latitudes will see decreasing amounts of radiation, making the inequity of solar exposure for already vulnerable regions even worse.

A study published in 2022 by the Karachi Urban Lab at the Institute of Business Administration found that since 1960, Karachi’s nighttime temperature has increased by approximately 2.4°C, while daytime temperatures are up by 1.6°C. Relative to the global average increase in temperature of 1.1°C since 1900, the rate of warming in Karachi is especially high. Although the authors highlight spatial, seasonal, and diurnal variations in the warming experienced across the city’s uneven terrain, the summer season in Karachi now lasts longer and begins earlier, with daytime ambient temperatures averaging over 35°C in April.

These findings align with studies that have predicted changing climatic trends in the coastal hubs of South Asia, as well as the onset of temperature extremes in Pakistan. Despite such noticeable shifts in Karachi’s climate patterns, not enough has been done to consolidate temperature data and integrate it with urban indicators to build a more nuanced understanding of the implications of climate change for Pakistan’s urban environments. This kind of information could play a critical role in designing nuanced urban planning interventions that might alleviate inequality associated with access to infrastructure and shelter.

There are close interdependencies between heat (mis)management and infrastructure—particularly water and energy. Electricity and public water provision in the more densely populated districts of Karachi is in dire need of repair and maintenance. Infrastructural services in much of the peripheral areas of the city are either basic or completely absent.

In June 2015, Karachi experienced a weeklong heatwave, the deadliest to hit Pakistan in over 50 years. Between June 19 and 23, an officially recorded 1,181 people died as temperatures rose to 45°C, with a corresponding heat index value of 66°C. Although these were not even the highest temperatures in the city’s history, the 2015 heatwave drew extensive media attention due to the high casualties in the official record.

Most deaths occurred in low-income areas; they included laborers and homeless people. But the official numbers offer limited scope for understanding the material and environmental contexts in which people died. Certain factors in the natural and built environment, such as neighborhood densities, house construction materials, infrastructure access, and workplace conditions, may have exacerbated the effects of high temperatures during the heatwave.

Until recently, the dominant discourse on disaster management in Karachi focused largely on urban flooding. Heat was never considered; even in the National Multi Hazard Contingency Plan, there is no mention of heat as a threat in the Sindh provincial context. The 2015 heatwave changed that, triggering extensive discussion of extreme heat as a type of disaster requiring management by the state. This event led to the drafting of the Karachi Heatwave Management Plan (KHMP) following the template originally developed for the Indian city of Ahmedabad, which also experiences high temperatures.

Although the KHMP lists broad normative strategies that set out what should happen before and during periods of severe heat, it does not provide specific definitions of what constitutes a heatwave or contextually relevant coping mechanisms compatible with Karachi’s varying microclimates. But it is the first heatwave action plan ever drafted for any city in Pakistan. Its counterpart at the national level is the National Adaptation Plan for Climate Change.

The KHMP’s heatwave action strategy has several shortcomings. It relies on ambient temperature readings, which provide a narrow understanding of how heat events occur. It also assumes that heat-related disasters are discrete, short-term events. This approach overlooks the extended periods of extremely hot summer weather that have become a recurring phenomenon, as well as the long-term, chronic effects of heat, which should be understood as a slow onset of disaster and death.

Nor does the KHMP consider interactions between heat and social variables such as age, gender, and class. It calls for short-term interventions—primarily heat-stroke relief camps and public information dissemination—that are mostly geared toward managing acute heat, not its long-term consequences. Inequalities within communities and the value of local knowledge in relation to materials, the built environment, and social relationships are not considered. There is no acknowledgment that social networks, connectivity, and culture might play a role in generating knowledge about how to reduce vulnerability.

Much of the responsibility for managing heatwaves has been shifted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social welfare agencies, and philanthropic groups carrying out on-the-ground relief work. The provincial government’s role is largely confined to raising awareness through advisory notices. Karachi’s municipal budget has been shrinking since 2008, with bleak implications for the local government’s capacity for future heat-risk mitigation. Neither the provincial budget nor the Provincial Disaster Mitigation Agency’s website mentions funds or activities directed toward heat-risk mitigation. There is no sign of provisions for preempting heatwaves or anticipatory planning for the impacts of heat.

Today, there are multiple non-state actors operating in Karachi’s heat governance space, from NGOs and international organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, to medical schools and corporations. Many of these are first responders that operate at multiple scales, from emergency relief provision to capacity building to fill gaps in the formal policymaking process. But representatives of these NGOs are aware of their own limited capacities and outreach. Their initiatives do not engage with long-term planning because they assume that the state itself should have the capacity to act in the long term.

A consequence of this approach is a common perception that hope lies in the agency of the individual citizen, supported by NGOs and other non-state actors in managing heat impacts. Government policies and plans have implicitly and explicitly shifted the onus of responsibility for dealing with the effects of heat onto the individual, instead of addressing the long-standing socio-spatial, infrastructural, and economic inequalities that have conditioned people’s vulnerability and undermined their capacity to cope with sudden and extreme climate events. Yet the apparatus and infrastructure of planning has been portrayed by governments, technocrats, and urban planners as entirely benign, operating in the service of reasoned, rational intervention, and immune from the indirect influence of Karachi’s real estate developers (who may seek to circumvent regulations that call for deploying climate-resilient building materials in construction and design).

Extreme heat affects a person’s capacity for life and work, altering his or her breathing, metabolism, and awareness. But managing “overheating” is also a cultural technique involving air conditioners, fans, ventilation systems, water, and food, or the lack thereof. Those who focus only on its outdoor effects may view extreme heat as a lesser evil compared with other disasters, such as flooding, in part because of the invisibility and indeterminacy of heat effects. The fact that thermal effects are so varied, dependent on context and the particularity of the body, makes them virtually illegible in rubrics of harm.

In Pakistan, the political economy of urbanization, high population densities, spatial inequality, industrial activity, deteriorating infrastructures, and precarious labor has created unique conditions for compounding the risks posed by extreme heat to human health. Extreme heat warrants a new approach to Pakistan’s politics of climate change adaptation, especially in the context of its cities, where the impacts will be of greater magnitude. The parameters of targeting and action outlined in the KHMP, for example, omit any consideration of how unequal vulnerabilities to heat might be a product of city-level policies and plans, urban histories, and geographies, or how they might be addressed by urban planning.

Current interventions at the local scale to manage extreme heat may end up reproducing long-standing inequalities of gender, caste, and livelihoods. Across the world, the effects of heat in cities disproportionately impact their poorest residents. High levels of exposure to extreme heat intersect with such vulnerabilities through socially constructed norms, roles, attitudes, and gender relations, as well as socioeconomic status and forms of labor. This should result in specific risk profiles and risk-management strategies.

Extreme heat must be acknowledged in terms of its situatedness. But in Pakistan’s field of heat governance, heat has come to refer narrowly to the thermal tolerances of the human body outdoors, based on relatively fixed physical paradigms (like race, age, or sex), rather than being located within social, historical, political, and material contexts. Heat must be understood as a dynamic that interacts with differentiated urban spaces and unequal geographies and ecologies to generate varying forms of heat exposure, putting vulnerable populations especially at risk.