HYDERABAD: In order to tackle rising temperatures, there is an urgent need for Hyderabad to have a dedicated Heat Action Plan (HAP) configured to how heat impacts its various areas, according to climate researchers. The demand arises from the fact that the city has several kinds of settlements — built up homes, offices, slums, low-income housing, open spaces, all of which experience heat differently.
“There is an argument to be made for both a Heat Action Plan and a Climate Action Plan (CAP) for the city. Presently, HAP’s tend to be generic, for instance Telangana has one at state level, Ahmedabad has one at the city level, and there are now close to 40 HAPs that span different cities, regions, and states in the country. The observation we made is that though these plans are important as they put in place certain protocols and responsibilities on what’s to be done and by whom, yet they lack specificity. There aren’t very significant differences between the Ahmedabad and Telangana plan, for example. The plans are insufficiently localized.” said Aalok D Khandekar, assistant professor from IIT-H.
He said that for these plans to be more effective, they must respond to the specific ways in which a city works in a more finely-grained manner, encoding an understanding of the city at the neighbourhood or ward level.
Swastik Harish, an urban development expert, said the plan can be based on a city’s infrastructure by leveraging mutual shading between buildings, enhancing shaded spaces, passive cooling techniques, using cool material wherever possible and also actively encouraging the community to use white cooling paints, slopes on roofs, and broken light-coloured tiles on roof to reflect the heat from the sun.
They further recommend a ‘meso-level’ policy for CAP, recognising that it is difficult to make very tailored, specific policies in this area.
“As part of this study we looked at about 1,700 informal settlements in Hyderabad and visited 31 of them to understand their heat signature. We arrived at five types of neighbourhoods/streets and four-five types of housing with different heat signatures. An effective HAP for Hyderabad can be for these specific types, codified as building codes etc.,” Swastik said.
Emphasising that periodic events that are very disruptive must not be forgotten, Khandekar said, “Cities and municipalities must assume greater decision-making power and get access to necessary resources to support proactive climate adaptation planning.”
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