Alliance Magazine | A heat justice compass for philanthropic action

By Tanya Kak (Climate & Environment Portfolio Lead, RNP)

On a field visit in Pune, India, I heard one refrain repeatedly: ‘It’s hot but we’re used to it’. I had made this trip with Prayas Energy and Health Group, one of several partners we support at the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP), and who work with street vendors, construction workers, and informal settlement residents to understand the impact of heat stress on the most marginalised communities. But what does it mean to be ‘used to heat’?

It means familiarity with midnight temperatures of 40°C trapped under tin roofs; fans circulating stale air; and water rationed—not just by scarcity but by the lack of access to toilets. It also means deciding whether to skip work to rest or eating dinner at night. In these contexts, heat is not just environmental, it is structural, social, and deeply tied to livelihoods.

Not a seasonal blip

Over the past few years, rising temperatures have been making headlines and we have seen the increase of heat action plans as a policy response. Yet experiences on the ground reflect a different reality—that of heat as a systemic risk instead of an episodic event. This is about asking whose bodies bear the brunt of rising temperatures, who is afforded rest and relief, and who is forced to trade safety for survival. Heat justice as a lens has been fundamentally absent. At RNP, we are curious about how heat is lived, not just measured. We want to move the conversation beyond weather stations and action plans, to how people cope, what they notice, and what they normalise. Naming heat as a hazard invites rest and care—luxuries that few daily‑wage earners can currently afford.

Driven to learn, RNP supported 16 partners deploying different approaches to heat stress in early 2024. After 12 months, we brought these partners together in a learning circle we called a ‘heat huddle’ where we explored what it takes to build public imagination around heat as a systemic risk, especially when people must act as if it isn’t to protect their incomes and routines. We also discussed how to design adaptation measures when infrastructure gaps, like toilets and shade, are seen as peripheral to resilience and urban planning.

These dialogues included macro questions, such as how cities can actively prioritise care, dignity, and recovery as they develop, rather than simply avoiding harm, and micro questions including whether low‑cost innovations like cool roofs, truly perform in messy, real‑world conditions where monsoons, maintenance, and community ownership matter.

Insights on the ground

Taking heed of these questions, and exploring low-cost technologies that help measure and adapt to heat stress in low- and middle-income settings, we came to four core insights:

1. Heat is treated as an event but lived as a daily condition.

Resilience without structural support can disproportionately shift the burden onto communities and often becomes a choice between survival (livelihoods) and discomfort (physical and mental health risks).

One of our partners, Dasra, highlighted, ‘Women in low‑income housing consistently described feeling trapped in poorly ventilated homes that act like heat chambers, especially during power cuts…We’ve come to realise that resilience must also include daily survival strategies, not just long‑term adaptation.”

Heat isn’t just a forecasted anomaly or a seasonal inconvenience with a clear start and end date. In informal settlements and rural villages alike, it lingers in sleepless nights, vendors closing by noon, and families choosing between a cooler or a meal. Globally, 1.1 billion people lack sufficient cooling, leaving one in seven at high risk of heat‑related illness. In India, nearly 75 percent of the labour force (some 380 million people) is routinely exposed to heat stress, costing the economy 2.5-4.5 percent of GDP annually, equivalent to $150–250 billion by 2030.

2. Heat doesn’t affect everyone equally.

It compounds structural inequities tied to gender, income, and informality.

As a grantee reflected, ‘for informal women workers, dignity of work and living wages are closely linked to climate justice.’ But the risks don’t end at work. Many return to cramped, poorly ventilated homes where women and girls often sleep inside for safety, even when it means enduring oppressive heat indoors. In these settings, ‘cooling’ must mean more than lowering temperature; it must address safety, rest, and dignity.

3. The policy-practice gap is wide and growing.

It comprises a divide between how heat is experienced and how it is governed.

Sustainable Futures Collaborative said, ‘state mobilisation around heat is limited to periods of declared heatwaves… Their focus is on managing impacts, not reducing systemic risk’. Despite advances in heat action plans in India, the threshold-based model of response (e.g. triggering actions only when a temperature crosses a benchmark) misses the chronic and cumulative nature of heat exposure in informal settings. It doesn’t account for indoor heat, power cuts, water scarcity, or the reality that many workers are making micro-adaptations such as starting work earlier, adjusting clothing to more breathable materials such as the traditional gamcha (a thin cotton towel) and taking unscheduled rest, all without institutional support.

4. Communities already hold the seeds of resilience.

In a low-income neighbourhood in Chennai, a cool roof pilot by our partner Rocky Mountain Institute India, harnessed reflective paint. This paint was expected to decrease in efficacy over time but 18 months later, the roofs remained intact—not because of external enforcement, but because residents took pride in maintaining them.

When communities are engaged early and see tangible benefits, they become stewards, not just recipients. Across contexts, we’ve seen similar patterns in the work of our partners, from youth mapping local risks and self-help groups, to informal workers advocating for safer environments.

According to another partner, Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), ‘Resilience is not something we bring in from the outside. It already lives within the people we work with. Our job is to recognise it, nurture it, and help it grow.’On the basis of these insights, you can see that addressing extreme heat requires more than standalone interventions—it demands a systems lens. To apply this, I offer a heat justice compass through which we can begin to move philanthropic action around heat as a system.

Heat as a system

Drawing from the practitioners attending the heat huddle, the below circular framework illustrates four interconnected domains of action— policy engagement, market and innovation, science and data systems, and community mobilisation—with each operating on two levels. Firstly, the immediate and short-term level with requirements for survival, adaptation and building community trust; and secondly, the longer-term level for resilience, institutional reshaping, and addressing underlying structural barriers.

Diagram 1: Heat Justice Compass: Driving Equitable Responses for a Warming World

These four core domains are surrounded by cross-cutting lenses that serve as design principles for more thoughtful, equitable heat action:

• Equity: Are the most affected communities centered?
• Agency: Do people have the power to shape, adapt, and sustain interventions?
• Adaptive Capacity: Can systems evolve with shifting climate, social, and political conditions?
• Scale: Can solutions grow without losing meaning or access?

By working across these pillars, funders and practitioners can design interventions that are both grounded in local realities and capable of shifting broader systems. In the huddle we hosted, the following illustrative examples can be mapped for immediate and systemic action:

Community mobilisation

• Immediate: Establish shaded rest zones and activate peer networks for heat alerts and care.
• Systemic: Build and sustain local collectives that co-own interventions (such as cooling centres); support community-led monitoring and planning.

 Policy engagement

• Immediate: Update heatwave thresholds to reflect lived realities (including indoor temperatures); set up low-cost monitoring measures to increase the accuracy of data and find ways to integrate hyper local data from communities into heat action plans.
• Systemic: Embed equity in national/state heat action plans; incentivise cross-sector coordination (urban, health, labour); Focus on risk mitigation and compensation measures in the form of devising better and more effectively targeted social protection schemes.

Science and data systems

• Immediate: Pilots that build better and localised data measurement mechanisms that can track local nighttime and daytime temperatures more accurately, record hospital admissions, map hotspots, and collect disaggregated data (e.g. by gender, income).
• Systemic: Develop open-access dashboards; fund longitudinal research on heat-health impacts across populations.

Market and innovation

• Immediate: Pilot low-tech cooling solutions (cool roofs, solar fans); test heat insurance for informal workers.
• Systemic: Scale accessible, affordable resilience products; create financing mechanisms to reach last-mile users.

What does it mean for philanthropies to apply this decision-making framework? The table below helps map out considerations for the example of cool roofs.

Interventions to last

Philanthropy can play a catalytic role in addressing heat stress and climate justice but only if it embraces the complexity of heat as a systemic issue. This means shifting from event-based to ecosystem-based support by funding heat resilience year-round, and doing so across sectors like health, housing, livelihoods, and urban planning.

It also requires investing in measurement that centres communities, with data on indoor temperatures, informal adaptations, and local health impacts informing more equitable policy. Equally important, is supporting coalitions that elevate intersectional solutions, such as cross-sector alliances that advance inclusive governance. Finally, long-term impact depends on backing local leadership, ensuring that interventions are rooted in community ownership and are built to last.

Moving from fragmented response to shared resilience means seeing heat not just as rising temperature, but as a deepening survival and livelihoods crisis. It reveals whose lives are protected, and whose are left exposed. For philanthropy then, the challenge isn’t just to fund and scale the most technocratic solution, it’s to fuel the systems of care, resistance, and adaptation that communities are already building.

If heat is a system, it’s time to ask: what systems are we willing to reimagine?

Alliance Magazine