How a coat of paint is tackling extreme heat in an Indian slum

STORY: For the residents of this informal settlement in India’s Gujarat, tackling extreme heat could be as simple as a lick of paint.

White paint to be exact, containing highly reflective pigments such as titanium dioxide.

Over the past two months, hundreds of roofs have been given a new coat in a bid to keep people cool as the hottest time of the year approaches.

:: THIS EARTH

With climate change making India’s summers more extreme, residents here – in Ahmedabad – have suffered temperatures over 115 degrees Fahrenheit in recent years.

The painting initiative is part of a global scientific trial to study how indoor heat impacts people’s health and economic outcomes in developing countries – and how the “cool roofs” might help.

“They are very highly reflective and they also emit and radiate the heat away…”

Epidemiologist Aditi Bunker is leading the project.

“Half of the community are assigned a cool roof, and half are not, and then we want to track a whole range of outcomes including health, and indoor environment outcomes, and we want to know what the effect of reducing the indoor temperature is on these outcomes.”

Most of the homes in Ahmedabad’s crowded Vanzara Vas slum are airless, one-room dwellings.

Resident Suman Pravin Vanzara said that before talking part in the study, the heat indoors was unbearable.

“Now that the color has been applied, the house stays cooler. Earlier we could not even sit on the floor, now we can. If the fan is not turned on at night, it’s still fine.”

The Ahmedabad trial will run for one year.

Other study sites are in Burkina Faso, Mexico and the island of Niue in the South Pacific.

Early results from Burkina Faso show that the cool roofs did reduce indoor temperatures and that that subsequently lowered residents’ heart rates.