The numbers are stark. By 2050, nearly 41 per cent of the world's population will be living under extreme heat, almost double the 23 per cent recorded in 2010. India is likely to be the worst affected, said Radhika Khosla, Research Director at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, at the Global Heat and Cooling Forum 2026, citing new global data that is already making its way into parliamentary discussions in New Delhi.

The event is organised by the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) in partnership with the National Disaster Management Authority, Government of India, the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.

Presenting findings from a recently released global dataset on cooling degree days — a measure of how much cooling energy a population needs — Khosla pointed to something that often gets lost in the bigger climate conversation. The sharpest rise in cooling demand will not come at 2 degrees of warming. It will come earlier, in the narrow window between 1 and 1.5 degrees.

"We're probably going to hit that 1.5 degree threshold in the next five years or so," she said. "That means the largest shifts in heat intensity, and our need to adapt, are going to be highest right now — not somewhere in the distant future."

The urgency, she argued, is not something that can be pushed down the agenda. What caught her off guard was the response from India's own government. A study her team published in the journal Nature Sustainability was picked up by the Ministry of Science without the researchers even sending it across. There was a parliamentary response — one that acknowledged India's position as the most affected country, while also laying out what the government is doing on governance and the role of technology. 

"That was actually heartening to see," Khosla said. But acknowledgement alone is not enough. The harder question, she told the forum, is what the pathway out looks like. For that, she pointed to work her team contributed to the United Nations Global Cooling Watch Report in 2025 — an update of analysis first done in 2023. The scenario they modelled starts with cooling emissions as they stood in 2022, then adds the effect of rising extreme heat pushing up air conditioning use, and layers on top of that the emissions that would come from giving everyone in the world access to cooling, which, she was clear, should be the goal.

From that total, four levers bring the world down to near-zero cooling emissions. Passive cooling. Low-energy cooling, particularly efficient fans. Best-in-class energy efficiency. And a rapid phase-out of high-emission refrigerants. Together, these account for roughly 63 percent of the reduction needed. The remaining 30 per cent comes from decarbonising the electricity grid.

One trend she flagged with particular concern is what she called leapfrogging in the wrong direction — populations moving straight from no cooling to air conditioning, skipping the intermediate step of low-energy options like fans entirely. "That intermediate category is being cut out," she said, "and we are pushing hard to change that."

Her closing argument was essentially a call for joined-up thinking. Extreme heat and cooling energy demand are not two separate problems. They are, in her words, two sides of the same coin of resilience. Treating them in isolation — whether in science or in governance — is part of why the response keeps falling short.

And underneath all of it, she said, sits the question of equity. Who gets access to cooling, when, and how? In answer to that she suggested that is where the policy conversation needs to go next.