The Heatwave Has Passed but the Heat Has Not

Europe endured five separate heatwaves between May and mid-August this year, according to Copernicus data, each arriving before the continent had recovered from the last. France recorded its hottest day in June and witnessed its excess death toll climb past 2000, many of whom drowned trying to escape the heat in rivers. By August, the heat had fed wildfires that burned more than 1.2 million acres across Spain, France and Italy, and pushed the Danube to levels so low that Hungary and Romania had to shut down nuclear reactors that depend on the river for cooling. In the US, roughly 150 million Americans came under heat alerts as Washington DC recorded its hottest Fourth of July in over a century.

The United Nations has started talking about this the way it talks about a different kind of emergency. UN climate chief Simon Stiell called the crisis one with “the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it.” Secretary-General António Guterres said the world had just lived through its eleven hottest years on record and warned that a strengthening El Niño is "not just knocking on the door" but risks "blowing the house down." El Niño does not cause heatwaves on its own; it adds energy to a system already destabilised. Scientists say such heatwaves are now far more likely than they were in 2003, once seen as a historic outlier.

For Bangladesh, none of this is a distant risk. It is closer to a description of daily life, with a different accent. As of this writing, the country is not under a nationwide heatwave. The Meteorological Department's August forecast points to above normal temperatures and only isolated, mild to moderate spells, not the sustained heat Europe went through. That should not be read as reassurance. Humidity makes Bangladesh's heat dangerous even without a declared heatwave. When moisture in the air stops sweat from evaporating, the body's cooling system stops working, and a "mere" 35°C can feel, and kill, like something far worse. The number of days each year when Bangladesh's feels-like temperature crosses that mark has nearly tripled since 2000, according to a Daily Star analysis of World Bank and Lancet Countdown data. Heat-linked deaths have climbed by a third over the past decade, the same data shows.

Having more time to adapt is not the same as being prepared. Bangladesh has weathered heat for generations, and that exposure has bred a kind of everyday resilience. But resilience built by individuals improvising is not the same as an institutional system built to hold under pressure. What the country has not yet built is the architecture to absorb a heatwave without each one becoming its own crisis. That is where the harder questions begin.

Start with schools, the clearest and most visible flashpoint. Bangladesh closed schools nationwide for extreme heat in both 2023 and 2024, keeping tens of millions of children out of classrooms for days at a stretch as temperatures crossed 42°C. If a heatwave closer to this year's European or American scale reaches Bangladesh in a future season, schools will likely close again. So the question worth asking now, in the calm between heat seasons, is simple: do we have anything in place to recover what is lost when they do? A remote learning fallback, a catch-up curriculum, any way to identify which students fall furthest behind? Closing schools has become the default response. Recovering afterward has not.

The same question applies to the country's institutions more broadly. There is still no officially adopted national definition of a heatwave in Bangladesh, and no dedicated early warning system that reaches ordinary people the way cyclone alerts do. If a heatwave arrives with the intensity Europe just experienced, does any hospital in Bangladesh know in advance how many heatstroke admissions it can absorb? 

Then there is the question of who is protected, and who is not. Garment factory workers, often under tin roofs with limited ventilation, have few enforceable protections that kick in once temperatures cross a dangerous threshold. Does a supervisor have any obligation to slow production when the heat index spikes, or is that left to the employer’s goodwill? Multiply that uncertainty across every company and office, and it becomes an open question whether Bangladesh has any labour protection during heatwaves that functions as policy at all.

Have a look at the rickshaw puller, day labourer, street vendor and farmer. They are Bangladesh’s largest and most exposed workforce but with the least institutional protection. A rickshaw puller who cannot normally work through the hottest hours simply earns less that day. A farmer whose crop is stressed by an unseasonal spike absorbs that loss directly, usually without insurance. When heat action plans are drafted, are these people being consulted, or are they simply the population such plans are meant to reach? Is there a cash transfer mechanism ready for informal workers the moment a heatwave is forecast, or does support like that only ever arrive as a one-off, the exception rather than the routine?

None of this is unfixable. India’s Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan, built on early warnings, cooler building design and hospital readiness, was found in a peer-reviewed study to have cut mortality on the city’s hottest days by 27 per cent, avoiding an estimated 1,190 deaths every year. That is proof the gap between exposure and preparedness can close quickly once it becomes an institutional priority, not a seasonal story revisited each April to August. Bangladesh has fragments of similar architecture: the Red Crescent’s protocol, and a WHO-backed health resilience plan that exists more on paper than in hospitals. The task now is to connect what already exists into something that functions automatically, rather than being assembled under pressure each time the temperature spikes.
____________________________________
The writer is Founder and President of Shwapno Youth Development Organisation