Every summer in India now arrives with a new record. In February 2025, for the first time in recorded history, India experienced a heatwave during what is generally defined as winter season. In 2024, between March and June, 37 cities crossed 45 degrees Celsius and thousands of suspected heatstroke cases were recorded. Colleagues at CARBSE, CEPT’s center for building science and energy research, have documented in detail that the cooling demands on Indian cities is rising steadily as the heat arrives earlier, stays longer, and does not cool down at night like it once did.
Cities are responding. More than 250 cities and districts across the country now have some form of Heat Action Plan. Climate Action Plans are being prepared, adopted, and integrated into master plans. What is largely missing in the discussions is any serious reckoning with what is happening to the fabric of our historic cities, and to the people living inside them. We need various aspects to be considered together, and they rarely are.
Historic fabric is already behaving differently under new climate baseline. The building materials that constitute India’s old city cores - lime plaster, traditional brick, timber, stone, earthen compounds – were developed and refined for a particular climate envelope. They are porous and responsive by design. That responsiveness, which made them intelligent materials in a stable climate, becomes a vulnerability in an unstable one. Rising temperatures accelerate thermal stress cracking in porous masonry, while fluctuating humidity promotes biological decay. The maintenance cycles that sustained these buildings for centuries are no longer adequate for what climate is now asking of them.
We need mitigation plans for historic cities that are specific to the fabric, rather than generic urban climate plans with heritage mentioned as an afterthought. The relief oriented, disaster-management based Action Plans need to give way to long term structured adaptation. A climate action plan for a historic city needs to ask different questions: which buildings and precincts are most at risk under projected temperature and moisture scenarios? Which degradation mechanisms are being accelerated and where? What materials and maintenance interventions can extend the life of threatened fabric under new conditions? Conservation practice has the technical knowledge to answer these questions, and climate planning has the institutional mandate as well as framework for implementation. The two have not yet been brought together systematically in Indian urban planning, and that gap is costing us time we do not have.
The least comfortable thing to say is this: some of what we have will be lost. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has called on national, sub-national, local and site authorities to integrate heritage properties into plans to avert, minimise and address loss and damage due to climate change. The language – avert, minimise, address – acknowledges that not everything can be saved. The question is what we prioritise, what we accept as irrecoverable, and what we document with urgency is as much a planning question, as it is a conservation one.
Running through all these arguments is something climate planning consistently underestimates: The close relationship between historic fabric and lives of its inhabitants. Research conducted at the Centre for Heritage Conservation, CEPT, for the ENGAGE network for Humanitarian Heritage, found that cultural institutions embedded in historic cities get activated during crisis and provide support systems for residents to recover, with cultural heritage functioning as the marker and anchor to these networks. These are resilience infrastructures, spatially attached to urban fabric, not informal arrangements that emerge at the time of crisis that any serious adaptation plan should be mapping. Losing these anchors would mean dismantling of a resilience infrastructure.
To return to the question asked in the title – are we planning for it? Not yet – not in any way that is commensurate with that is already happening on the ground. The erratic climate behavior and accelerated extreme events are accelerating deterioration of historic fabric at a pace that existing maintenance cycles were not built to handle. Generic climate plans will not address this. What is needed is for heritage conservation, urban planning, and climate crisis departments to treat this as a shared work and start from the basic acknowledgement that historic fabric behaves differently under climate stress, and that the inhabitants anchored to it are a part of the resilience system, not incidental to it. A toolkit prepared by CRCI, CHC – CEPT and UDC for NIUA already offers Urban Local Bodies a staged, practical process to assess, mitigate, adapt and plan for inevitable loss. The knowledge exists; the tools are here to be tried out. What is needed now is for the right people to sit at the same table and begin.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Jigna Desai, professor, Faculty of Architecture and Head of Centre for Heritage Conservation, CEPT University.