Heat Action Plan
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
After a May 2010 heat wave that peaked at 46.8°C and left an estimated 1,344 excess deaths, Ahmedabad wrote what the peer-reviewed literature calls South Asia's first heat-health action plan. The India Meteorological Department sends the municipal corporation probabilistic maximum-temperature forecasts up to seven days ahead; a forecast of 41–42.9°C triggers a yellow alert, 43–44.9°C an orange one, and 45°C or above a red one. A nodal officer in the AMC health department converts each band into named actions — heat wards and oral rehydration corners in municipal hospitals and urban health centres, staff training, altered work and school hours.
📊 Impact
A pre/post evaluation published in 2018 compared 2007–2010 with 2014–2015 and found the all-cause mortality rate ratio at 47°C fell from 2.34 (95% CI 1.98–2.76) before the plan to 1.25 (95% CI 1.02–1.53) after it, estimating 1,190 (95% CI 162–2,218) annualised deaths avoided. The design is ecological: it cannot separate the plan from everything else that changed in those years, and the authors call it a pilot evaluation.
🎓 Lesson
The plan bought almost no sensing. What it built was an addressee — a forecast, a numbered threshold, and one official whose job is to act on it. Cities that buy the measurement and leave the last step unassigned end up with a reading nobody owns.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Heat Action Plan” — Ahmedabad, India. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/ahmedabad-heat-action-plan/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.