Life at 50°C: New BBC films on extreme heat in India
Friday, 29 October 2021 (00:16 IST)
A range of stories are presented across the films including that of Shakeela Bano, a grandmother living in Ahmedabad, one of India’s hottest cities where temperatures regularly hit between 45C to 48C degrees. Shakeela describes the heat as “intolerable” and struggles to get her grandson to fall asleep in their one room house. But the film reveals how a housing trust provides her with a simple solution that involves white paint.
In Delhi, traditional ice sellers offer an age-old solution to the city heat by making and selling blocks of ice that are distributed throughout the city. But as more people turn to refrigerators, this eco-friendly cooling method and its associated jobs, are increasingly at risk. Ice merchant Mohd Sameer says: “After 10 or 20 years, this work will disappear.”
A new use for ice is developed in India’s northern most region Ladakh, where glacial-like structures, known as ice stupas, are built from scratch.
Millions of people in India depend on glaciers as they feed rivers, but climate change is threatening to melt them forever.
Invented by environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk, ice stupas hold ten million litres of water in the winter. Due to their conical shape, they do not melt until June. When they do, the stored water is released to help irrigate dry land and also boost streams, which helps farmers receive water during times when the resource is scarce.
Wangchuk says: “Each year has been a record-breaking hot year since we remember, that is when I started looking at the bigger problem.”
He added: “Our glaciers are melting not just because of our actions, it is to do with the big cities of the world, New York, New Delhi, Beijing, Paris. We have lost 15% of glaciers already in the last ten years or so. By the end of this century 70% of the glaciers will be gone.”
Directed by Surabhi Tandon, the films are part of the BBC’s beautifully filmed series Life at 50°C and is running across BBC Hindi, BBC Gujarati, BBC.com.
On Saturday October 30th at 15:00 IST and Sunday 31st October at 03:00, 08:00, 21:00 IST BBC World News will telecast the full India-based film.
The programme will also include a story from Karachi, Pakistan. It explores the rise in energy-hungry air-conditioning, which helps to drive climate change. It follows Raza, a young air con repairman, who has never been busier, and entrepreneur Shahzad Qureshi, who is trying to cool the city by creating urban forests.
The Life at 50°C series, presents the reality of climate change through stories of people around the world and explores how communities living in cities and rural areas have had to adapt their lives to cope with extreme heat. The series is running across BBC outlets and digital platforms.
Recent analysis from the BBC, revealed the number of extremely hot days every year when the temperature reaches 50C has doubled since the 1980s, and now occur in more parts of the world. The analysis, which was commissioned by the BBC World Service and carried out by BBC News’ data journalism unit, reveals that temperatures reached 50C or more on 14 days per year on average between 1980 and 2009, but since 2010 the number of days that has surpassed the extraordinary temperature is now 26. (BBC World Service & BBC Global News)
