The Unequal Burden of Extreme Heat

Heat in South Asia is measured in two ways, and the difference matters.

A thermometer reading tells you how hot the air is. A second measure, called wet-bulb temperature, also accounts for humidity, which is what stops sweat from evaporating. A dry 50C day can be survivable. A humid 35C day may not be, because the body has no way to shed heat.

Jacobabad has had days that approach that limit. The city is not on the coast, but it sits in an irrigated basin where canals and rice fields add moisture to already brutal air. As the climate warms, those two problems — the heat itself and the humidity — are arriving together.

Electricity is the first line of defence, and it fails. Load-shedding schedules can cut power for hours at a time in the hottest part of the day. For households with air conditioning, that turns a hot afternoon into an emergency. For households without it, power makes no difference at all.

Water is the second. Canal water is allocated by a system built for irrigation, not for cities, and the tail-end villages get what is left. Drinking water is often purchased, delivered by tanker, and stored in whatever containers a family owns.

Trees and shade are the third, and they are disappearing as land is divided and sold.

The scientific picture is well established: heat waves in this region are becoming more frequent, longer and more severe. The local picture — which neighbourhoods lose power, which villages lose water — is documented mostly by the people living through it.

A labourer who works in the sun cannot choose to start at dawn if his employer does not. A nurse on a twelve-hour shift in a hospital with a failing generator cannot drink enough water to keep going. A farmer whose rice crop needs standing water in June cannot decide to use less.

Heat illnesses — heat exhaustion, heat stroke, kidney injury from repeated dehydration — are common and poorly recorded. Deaths are often attributed to "natural causes" on a certificate. The numbers in official statistics are almost certainly too low, and everyone working in the district knows it.

Women take on a larger share of the burden without being counted. They cook over gas or wood in unventilated kitchens, manage the household water supply, and care for elderly relatives and small children, who are the most vulnerable to heat. When a tanker comes, someone has to be at home to meet it, in the hottest part of the day.

Cooling is not shared equally. Some homes have air conditioning, a generator and a water tank on the roof. Others have a fan connected to a supply that may or may not be on.

The contributor's own observations in this entry are presented as testimony, not measurement. Where national or international data exist, they are cited separately. This distinction is the reason the story is published as a personal account rather than a research report.

People do not respond to heat as a statistic. They respond to how it feels and to what they can do about it.

The first thing to go is attention. Heat makes thinking harder and tempers shorter, and that is physical, not a matter of willpower. In a place like this, decisions get postponed, and the cost of postponing them is paid later in health.

The second is what researchers call a sense of control. Public advice — stay indoors, drink water, avoid the sun — assumes choices that many people do not have. Told to rest in the afternoon, a daily-wage labourer hears advice he cannot follow, and may hear it as blame.

The third is trust. Warning systems and relief services are only as good as people's belief that they will be delivered. Where past warnings came with no help and past relief lists went to the well connected, households build their own preparations and discount official ones.

The fourth is community memory. Heat is not remembered the way floods are, because there is nothing to photograph the morning after. Deaths are dispersed, often attributed to other causes, and the risk fades from public attention before the next summer.

None of this is fatalism. It is what people do when a hazard is relentless, poorly reported and unequally shared.

Ask who dies in a heat wave, and the answer is the same everywhere: people who work outside, people who live in houses without shade or cooling, people without water, people who are old or very young or pregnant, and people with no way to leave.

In Jacobabad, those categories overlap with income, land ownership and the position of a village along a canal. The heat is the same. The protection is not.

There is a second imbalance, harder to see. The emissions that have warmed this region were produced mostly elsewhere. Pakistan accounts for a very small share of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Its people are near the front of the queue for the consequences.

A third concerns procedure. Decisions about canal water, load-shedding and municipal services are taken by departments that citizens cannot easily reach, and the plans meant to protect them are written and reviewed in rooms they are not in.

Recognition matters too. Official heat deaths are undercounted, which shapes how much money and attention the problem receives. A hazard that does not appear in the statistics does not appear in the budget.

Responsibility for heat in Jacobabad is spread across at least five institutions: the provincial disaster authority, the health department, the power utility, the irrigation department and the municipal body. Each controls a piece of the problem. None controls the whole.

That structure produces a predictable result. Load-shedding is decided by the power utility with no reference to heat mortality. Canal water is allocated by irrigation with no reference to household drinking supply. Heat warnings are issued by a meteorological office that does not decide what happens next. Plans exist, but they are plans for departments, not for the city.

There is real progress. Some provinces have restricted outdoor work in extreme heat. Warning systems now issue heat-specific alerts in advance. Heat has entered national adaptation planning and has been named as a health risk in international reporting.

What is missing is one body with a single heat mandate and a published record: who was warned, who received help, which neighbourhoods lost power, and how many died. Without that, heat remains a hazard that everyone is responsible for, which is another way of saying that no one is.