Rising to the challenge of climate change, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is working to prepare residents against dangerous heat waves. The 2013 Heat Action Plan is the first comprehensive early warning system and preparedness plan for extreme heat events in India. The Plan creates immediate and longer term actions to increase preparedness, information sharing, and response coordination to reduce the health impacts of extreme heat on vulnerable populations.

This ground-breaking project, created by the AMC in partnership with an international coalition of health and academic groups, aims to implement three key strategies:

1. Building public awareness and community outreach
2. Initiating a simple early warning system
3. Capacity building among health care professionals

The 2010 heat wave was a wakeup call that intergovernmental agency action, preparedness, and community outreach is critical to saving lives. Future responses must be based on a city wide understanding of impacts and actions, with a strong focus on coordination, awareness and documentation. This plan serves as a master guide to the AMC and community by outlining strategies for coordinated government agency action on a range of levels, targeting directly those individuals who are most at risk during heat waves – slum communities, outdoor workers, elderly and children – and also individuals and organizations, such as Urban Health Centres (UHCs) and link workers, who frequently work with at-risk populations.

For further reading on Ahmedabad's heat action plan, see below:

• For Ahmedabad's slum communities: Rising Temperatures, Deadly Threat: Recommendations for Slum Communities in Ahmedabad
• Project homepage: Climate change: addressing heat-health vulnerability in rapidly urbanising regions of Western India
• For Ahmedabad's officials: Rising Temperatures, Deadly Threat: Recommendations for Ahmedabad’s Government Officials
• For health professionals in Ahmedabad: Rising Temperatures, Deadly Threat: Recommendations for Health Professionals in Ahmedabad
• For Ahmedabad's outdoor workers: Rising Temperatures, Deadly Threat: Recommendations to Prepare Outdoor Workers in Ahmedabad
• Survey on household vulnerability: A Cross-Sectional, Randomized Cluster Sample Survey of Household Vulnerability to Extreme Heat among Slum Dwellers in Ahmedabad, India
• Development and implementation of plan: Development and Implementation of South Asia’s First Heat-Health Action Plan in Ahmedabad
• Study on mortality of 2010 heat wave: Heat-Related Mortality in India: Excess All-Cause Mortality Associated with the 2010 Ahmedabad Heat Wave