Sleepless nights in Delhi
For some of us, thinking about the rapid evolution of climate change causes nightmares; for others, it is a lived physical reality that keeps them awake at night. Professor Amita Baviskar captures this reality in a painful yet poetic way in her recent LSE lecture, Cooling a Warming India: Ecology and Equity in Our Time, where she unpacks the shifting conditions of urban life in Delhi. She paints a picture that is now unfolding in many cities around the world, where traditional ways of coping with heat are no longer tenable and everyday life becomes increasingly unbearable.
It is rare to see a researcher tell this story so holistically:
Traditional cooling practices such as using water or headscarves are no longer viable as humidity rises.
The construction logic of sprawling, unplanned urbanisation produces heat‑trapping housing in one of the hottest regions on earth.
Changing lifestyles and falling prices have made air conditioners a top priority for the upper and lower-middle classes, even as their widespread use further heats the city.
At the centre of this unfolding story of sleep deprivation and ill health are women and girls in poor neighbourhoods without access to air conditioning. Because of gender norms, safety concerns, and fear of violence, they have even fewer options than men and boys to escape their boiling‑hot homes at night.
The accelerating need for ACs to cool poorly planned cities is, of course, deeply paradoxical: electricity in these cities is often generated from coal and other non‑renewable sources, which only intensifies the crisis. Having lived in Asian megacities myself, I understand how escaping the heat has become a necessity of modern life, yet this necessity makes the underlying problems even more dire.
As Baviskar describes, long‑term solutions to transform cities into livable environments for all do exist, but they remain out of reach. Political structures are ill‑suited to long‑term planning, and elites who benefit from the current system often resist change. And so the merry‑go‑round continues, without a deeper look at the root causes and sustainable change.
We need research like Baviskar’s to expose the deepening inequalities produced by the climate emergency. But the solutions we need are not only climate solutions; they require confronting the structural injustices embedded in our social order.
Photo by Suraj Tomer on Unsplash