In June 2024, Delhi experienced one of its most severe heatwaves in decades. Over 190 people lost their lives, and the city witnessed a record-breaking 52.3 degrees Celsius temperature. From school closures to temporary work-hour policies, this directly impacted people’s lives. During the Delhi heatwave Mindworks partnered with Youth Ki Awaaz to conduct our first-ever rapid heatwave monitor survey that aimed understand how extreme weather events like the heatwave impact not just physical well-being but also the emotional and psychological states of citizens and young people in particular.
As our research has shown extreme weather events and disruptive crises disrupt how people feel, think and behave. These powerful moments can reshape the narratives people believe in and give rise to a range of powerful emotions, especially as the crisis evolves or changes. However, to understand this we need to take an audience empathetic approach: digging deeper into their emotional state, the narratives they adhere to or the social norms they follow.
Mindworks does this on a regular basis through its emotional mapping tool the Anger and Agency Monitor (the latest results will be released very soon!) Yet, in times of crisis we need to find rapid ways of monitoring how people’s mindsets can shift so we can adapt our campaigns to not only adapt to people’s new realities but also make the most of the change-opportunities that crises can contain.
Delhi Rapid Heatwave Monitor: Key findings
The rapid survey captured the experiences of 568 Delhi inhabitants during the heatwave and how it impacted their lives, emotions and narratives. The main findings of the survey included:
1) Positive emotions decrease and negative emotions increase in the heatwave:
- Positive emotions such as love (-56%), happiness (-47%) and hope (-29%) decrease while negative emotions such as anger (+23%), powerlessness (+15%) and worry (+17%) saw an increase.
2) Women felt more angry and powerless than men:
- They also felt significantly more angry about being powerless at 61% compared to only 49% of men.
- Anger about powerlessness was even higher amongst young women and women who worked outside both being at 68%.
3) Climate became a significantly more important crisis, especially for young people
- Climate overtook COVID-19 as the most important crisis, with a +12% increase generally and an +18% increase amongst young people in the city.
4) Corporations and fossil fuel industry were blamed most:
- Corporations or businesses (67%) and the fossil fuel industry (64%) were felt to be most to blame for the heatwave, more than the national government (46%) or the Delhi government (35%).
5) There was a massive shift to a competitive scarcity narrative:
- There was was a large increase in the number of people who agreed that “scarcer resources are causing competition and creating winners and losers” (from 13% to 55%).
- This was higher amongst women, older people and those who work outside.
6) People feel most impacted by the heatwave during their commute to work:
- The commute was the highest at 43% while the impact at work was at 21%, and doing errands at 19%.
- For women, errands become the second highest after the commute with 26% and the home third with 19%.
- Even people who work outside still see the commute as the most impactful time (43% commute and 21% work.)
You can read the full report here.
What does this mean and what’s next?
In the age of the polycrisis where the world faces many overlapping and interconnected crises we must get better at understand not only the impact of these crises on people’s minds, but also how to adjust our strategies, messaging and narratives to leverage these changes. From this first iteration of our rapid monitoring tool we already identified some critical insights, for example designing interventions to engabge women’s anger or the sense of powerlessness during the next heatwave or on a city level pushing for changes designed around the commute as the pain point. Equally narratives around corporate blame seem likely to work better and, in this case climate is brough to the forefront.
We now plan to repeat this survey during future events in different contexts to better understand the nuances of specific geographies or specific contexts. Our aim is to refine the process so that organisations and campaigns can very quickly understand what is happening and adjust their messaging and campaign strategy accordingly and in real time.
If you’d be interested in running a rapid monitor in your campaign then please get in touch below, we’d love to work with you.
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