Severe Indian heatwave will bake a billion people and damage crops

Adam Vaughan is a writer.

More than a billion people are facing a severe heatwave across India this week, which will have wide-ranging consequences for the health of the most vulnerable and will damage wheat harvests.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued heatwave warnings for several states due to the forecast of high temperatures in the 40s.

According to the UK Met Office, temperatures in India are currently above average. The Met Office says that India is entering a season ahead of the monsoon when heatwaves are common, but this year it follows a period of early heat.

The national average maximum temperature in March was 33.10 degrees, beating the previous record of 33.09 degrees set in March 2010. The recent heatwaves have been notable because they occurred during a La Ni F1 weather pattern, which usually has a cooling effect globally, according to R K Jenamani, head of the national weather forecasting centre at the IMD.

The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, where Arpita Mondal works, says that high humidity makes it feel like 38 degrees. She says it's notable how early the heatwaves have come. The central north-western region, including Rajasthan, and the south-eastern region are two of the hottest places in India.

Mondal says that the recent heat is likely to have been caused by climate change. She points out that last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that heatwaves across land globally had become more intense and frequent with high confidence that human activity is to blame.

Local weather patterns are playing a role. There has been an absence of storms that can bring rain from the Mediterranean to northern India, with just five occurring in March and all of them dry. He says that March saw lower than usual thunderstorm activity. The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology's R Krishnan says that the La Ni F1;a may be contributing.

India is seeing a growing number of extreme heat days. The IMD team found 600 heatwave days between 2011 and 2020 compared with 413 between 1981 and 1990 according to an update of a study by the NRDC.

The impacts go beyond making life unbearably hot for people working outdoors. At a time when global supplies of the crop are already under pressure due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the heat is threatening wheat harvests. In India's biggest wheat-production states of Punjab, Haryana and UP, officials warn production targets will be missed if wheat is found to have been damaged in the heat. India's wheat yields are projected to be reduced by future climate change.

While climate scientists and others on social media have compared the heatwave with a deadly fictional version in a novel by the author Kim Stanley Robinson, better early warning systems in India than in the past, and more people acting on them, appear to have reduced deaths. Data shows that deaths in Maharashtra and Rajasthan in April were lower than during a similar heatwave in April 2010, which he attributes to better forecasts and alert.

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