Framing Solution Narratives for Heat
Key Questions
- How can heat be reframed from a seasonal weather event into a public health, labour, and development challenge?
- What narrative shifts are needed to move responsibility for heat protection from individuals to institutions?
- How can communication make invisible heat impacts on informal workers, women, low-income households, and public health—more visible? What narratives can accelerate the adoption of practical cooling solutions while strengthening policy accountability?
Following one of India’s hottest summers on record, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, Asar Social Impact Advisors, Momentum Shifts, and Youth Ki Awaaz convened over 40 journalists, researchers, communicators, civil society organisations, and policy practitioners in Bengaluru on 5 June 2026 to rethink how India talks about heat. Rather than focusing only on impacts, the convening explored solution-oriented narratives that could drive stronger public engagement and policy action.
Participants mapped existing cooling solutions, analysed barriers to implementation, and developed audience-specific narratives for citizens, policymakers, developers, journalists, and influencers. The report presents a set of narrative shifts, practical solutions, and shared commitments aimed at repositioning heat as a systemic issue requiring collective action rather than individual coping.
Key Takeaways
- Heat must be reframed from a private burden to a public responsibility. The strongest consensus across the convening was that heat is still treated as an individual problem to cope with, rather than a systemic challenge that governments, employers, and institutions have a responsibility to address through rights, accountability, and public protection.
- Heat is a public health emergency, not simply a weather event. Participants argued that reporting should move beyond temperatures and heatwave alerts to recognise heat as a disaster with significant but underreported health, livelihood, and mortality impacts, demanding the same urgency as other public health emergencies.
- Protection requires more than shade. While greening and cooling interventions are important, they are insufficient without labour protections, occupational safety measures, and recognition of the disproportionate heat exposure faced by informal workers, women, and people living or working in poorly ventilated environments.
- Heat resilience depends on accountable public systems. Whether through hyperlocal early warning systems that actually enable people to act, or by treating cooling as essential public infrastructure rather than a private commodity, participants emphasised that effective heat action should be measured by whether people are protected—not simply whether alerts are issued or infrastructure exists.
- Heat is a year-round and generational challenge. The discussion moved beyond viewing heat as a daytime summer phenomenon, highlighting night-time heat, warming winters, impacts on agriculture and livelihoods, and the reality that today’s decisions will determine the temperatures future generations inherit.
You may also want to read
