Radhika Khosla

Development and implementation of South Asia's first heat-health action plan in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India).

Recurrent heat waves, already a concern in rapidly growing and urbanizing South Asia, will very likely worsen in a warming world. Coordinated adaptation efforts can reduce heat’s adverse health impacts, however. To address this concern in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India), a coalition has been formed to develop an evidence-based heat preparedness plan and early warning system. This paper describes the group and initial steps in the plan’s development and implementation. Evidence accumulation included extensive literature review, analysis of local temperature and mortality data, surveys with heat-vulnerable populations, focus groups with health care professionals, and expert consultation. The findings and recommendations were encapsulated in policy briefs for key government agencies, health care professionals, outdoor workers, and slum communities, and synthesized in the heat preparedness plan. A 7-day probabilistic weather forecast was also developed and is used to trigger the plan in advance of dangerous heat waves. The pilot plan was implemented in 2013, and public outreach was done through training workshops, hoardings/billboards, pamphlets, and print advertisements. Evaluation activities and continuous improvement efforts are ongoing, along with plans to explore the program’s scalability to other Indian cities, as Ahmedabad is the first South Asian city to address heat-health threats comprehensively.

Towards demand-side solutions for mitigating climate change

Research on climate change mitigation tends to focus on supply-side technology solutions. A better understanding of demand-side solutions is missing. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to identify demand-side climate solutions, investigate their mitigation potential, detail policy measures and assess their implications for well-being.

India’s building stock: towards energy and climate change solutions

Reducing energy demand is increasingly recognized for its ability to boost climate change public policies and strategies, despite the historical focus on supply-side energy solutions (Creutzig et a...

Multi-criteria decision analysis in policy-making for climate mitigation and development

Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policy-making has largely been conducted in isolation of development considerations. An emerging literature, bolstered by the “nationally determined” nature of the Paris Agreement, explores the identification and assessment of the co-impacts of mitigation actions. There is now a recognized need to consider mitigation an integral part of a multi-objective development challenge. However, the literature on how to practically and effectively apply this in policy-making, particularly in developing economies, is limited. This paper explores the potential for using approaches that fall under the umbrella of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in guiding analyses and policy-making that relate to the climate mitigation–development interface. It categorizes three distinct types of decision problems in the broad area of climate and development policy-making, and presents lessons from three case studies, in India, Chile, and Peru and Colombia taken together, where aspects of MCDA approaches were explored. Based on these reviews, the paper concludes that MCDA approaches, despite certain limitations, can add substantive and procedural credibility to existing toolkits supporting climate and development decision-making. Key contributions of the approach are to structure the analyses, systematically include stakeholder deliberations, and provide tools to rigorously incorporate quantitative and qualitative co-impacts in multiple objective-based decisions.

The energy balance of an urban rooftop: a case study addressing cloudiness and evaporative cooling

This work examines the heating and cooling of an urban rooftop using radiative and meteorological measurements plus numerical simulations for the months June through September. Longwave atmospheric radiation accounts for 63.6% of the radiant energy absorbed by the roof, compared to a solar contribution of 36.4%. Changes in incident solar and longwave irradiance in response to varying cloudiness have opposite signs. As a result, the mean radiative heating on clear days differs by only 3.35% from that on cloudy days with precipitation. In response to radiative forcing, the roof reaches a temperature that provides the thermal emission, sensible heat transport to the atmosphere and heat conduction into the interior required to balance the heating. These three processes offset 79.4%, 18.4% and 2.2%, respectively, of the average heating for dry days. After precipitation, evaporation provides a 24 h average cooling of 36.4 W m−2. Evaporative cooling comes primarily at the expense of sensible heat transport and is accompanied by smaller surface-to-air temperature contrasts than exist during dry periods. Comparison of measurements and simulations for wet days shows that evaporative cooling leads to a 24 h average drop in surface temperature of 1.2–1.3 K, with larger instantaneous reductions during daylight.