Climate resilience: Why the lived experiences of people should guide policy responses to heat waves

Climate change is no longer an abstract environmental challenge. It is experienced through heat stress, illness, income loss and rising energy costs. In cities such as Delhi, rising temperatures are already reshaping daily routines, from when people work and travel to how households cope inside their homes.

However, a persistent gap remains between climate ambition and ground outcomes. This gap widens when policies and programmes are not designed around how people actually experience heat in their everyday lives, masking the uneven, neighbourhood-level realities of heat risk and vulnerability.

Delhi’s Heat Action Plans, like many across India, are still primarily guided by ambient temperature data and emergency response mechanisms. This makes a strong case for placing citizen-centred evidence at the heart of effective and equitable climate action.

A report by Artha Global, Mapping Heat Inequality across Neighbourhoods in Delhi, showcased that even when reported temperatures are uniform across a city, climate risk is experienced very differently across households; exposure is shaped by micro-climate conditions and urban form (density, building materials, tree cover and access to open spaces), while coping capacity and outcomes are determined by socioeconomic characteristics and access to adaptation measures such as cooling appliances and technologies.

Neighbourhood-level patterns show how urban design shapes everyday heat exposure. Areas where built-up land rises from around 25% to 55% can experience temperature increases of roughly 0.6° Celsius. By contrast, raising tree cover from just 3% to 11% can lower temperatures by nearly 1° Celsius, suggesting that even relatively small gains in urban greenery can significantly cool local environments.

But heat, as we know, is not only a physical phenomenon—it is experienced through how people interpret risk in their daily lives. Existing datasets can map exposure, but they cannot explain how households cope, adapt or make trade-offs.

Insights from other behavioural research show that climate impacts are weighed against income, mobility, safety and social obligations; and when heat is understood as a threat to earnings rather than only to health, responses shift dramatically.

This helps explain why many adaptation efforts struggle to take root. The barrier is rarely lack of awareness; it is the pull of everyday habits, financial constraints and slow institutional response. Citizen-centred surveys are, therefore, essential to capture not only where heat is experienced, but how people actually respond to it.

Artha Global’s study conducted primary household surveys to document the direct health impacts of heat and the coping strategies people adopt. Its findings show that extreme heat acts as a structural stressor: a 3° Celsius rise in experienced temperature (from 42° to 45° Celsius) corresponds with a 15% increase in the number of respondents reporting instances of illness lasting over five days. Additionally, the temperature increase also corresponded to a 10% jump in households missing work (from 18% to 28%).

Coping capacity, however, is deeply unequal. The study demonstrated that households with air-conditioners reported significantly lower work loss than those without. Wealthier householders already ran air-conditioners for around 12-14 hours a day (during the peak summer months), while lower asset households lacked both—access to cooling and the financial ability to increase electricity use.

This inequality is reflected in energy spending: wealthier households spend nearly twice as much on electricity, not only because they can own more appliances, but because they can afford to use it more intensively to protect themselves from heat.

These findings lead to a simple conclusion: heat policy must be built around lived realities and not just temperature data. Institutionalizing citizen experience means creating routine systems to collect and use neighbourhood-level data on health effects and coping alongside technical climate metrics.

This evidence can guide heat action plans (HAPs), shape early warning thresholds and direct investments in cooling, green cover and energy support to the communities that need them the most.

Agencies such as the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) and BSES Yamuna Power (as well as other power distribution companies) have an opportunity to operationalize this shift by embedding citizen data into disaster preparedness, adaptation programmes and grid planning.

Making lived experience a part of official climate evidence shifts policy from reacting to heat to responding to how people actually live with it.

The authors are, respectively, associate, and analyst, Artha Global.