In reviewing the first decade of heat action planning in India, Chandni Singh, of Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bengaluru, found that a majority of the proposed actions were incremental, such as tree plantation campaigns, heat awareness campaigns, and building temporary shelters. Singh argued that longer term, transformative changes needed adequate attention as well, such as revising labour codes for heat-safe outdoor work and new building codes for improving heat tolerance.

The workshop also discussed how climate action plans lack engagement with regimes of land tenure and property making. In their study of climate action plans through the lived experiences of Mumbai's marginalised residents, Lalitha Kamath and Rohit Mujumdar found that fishers of Thane Creek were being estranged from the sea and coastal livelihood spaces, with the development of state-led coastal infrastructure. To negotiate their estrangement, fishers persistently built a legal case for claiming compensation and rehabilitation based on their traditional right to catch fish in the sea, rather than on their precarious private property relations. These shifting tenurial relations are central to the lived experiences of these vulnerable groups, and as Kamath and Majumdar argue, further engagement with land tenure will help construct a more inclusive and diverse climate action plan, grounded in the fluid realities of these groups.  

The workshop also interrogated how problems of flooding, sea-level rise and coastal erosion are addressed through the dominant paradigm of urban planning, which prioritises dry property and real estate, instead of the epistemologies of water. Urban anthropologist Nikhil Anand, in his ongoing ethnography of Mumbai’s climate planning, discusses how the municipal authorities are exploring alternative methods of flood prevention, such as maintaining swamps, marshlands and existing mangrove forests that are facing rapid destruction with urban development.

As Indian cities rapidly produce new urban ground by constructing real estate on commons/ lakes and wetlands, they have further intensified caste and class inequalities. While these social and environmental marginalizations continue to matter in urban life, they are rarely engaged with in climate action planning - which remains largely ahistorical in its approach. In their historical study of Chennai's hydrocarbon industry, Bhavani Raman and Aditya Ramesh trace the colonial roots of the city's hinterland development back to agrarian practices of salt-making. With the colonial state monopoly of salt, the coastal landscape gradually came under government control and paved the way for the setting up of polluting state-run coal plants that power the city today. Thus, the extractive relationship between the city and its agrarian hinterland is woven into the fabric of the city from its colonial past - and continues to produce conditions of marginality.

Deepak Malghan’s analysis of Bengaluru’s population reflects that urban spaces perpetuate caste-based hierarchies. The pairing of spatially explicit demographic census data with high-resolution satellite imagery shows that the spatially marginalised communities such as Dalits and Muslims live in the densest neighbourhoods that are closest to stationary sources of air pollution. This results in their exposure to greatest heat island effects and have the least access to mitigating green spaces. We unpacked how cities are organised along the lines of caste as well as class, and how the degree of environmental injustice varies along these lines.