Sumedha Basu presented her recent work exploring the human dimensions of climate vulnerability at the University of Tokyo

On Wednesday 9th July 2025, the Sustainability and Society Collaborative Project hosted a seminar at the University of Tokyo featuring Dr Sumedha Basu from the Visions of Urban Heat Systems team. The presentation, titled “Narratives from the Heated Margins: Lived Experiences and Cooling Aspirations from the City of Pune, India” explored the human dimensions of climate vulnerability in informal urban settlements.

According to a 2021 UN-Habitat report, nearly 30% of urban residents live in informal settlements globally. Informal settlements, also colloquially known as slums, emerge from the unplanned and irregular congregation of migrant and poor communities in burgeoning urban spaces. Often engaged in precarious occupations, residing in inadequate housing, lacking access to formal urban utilities and infrastructure, and deprived of political and social power, these communities are disproportionately vulnerable to climate impacts. In South Asia, heat stress is one such “silent” climate disaster, whose ubiquity and ever-changing nature, despite its invisibility, push the limits of climate change adaptation.  Heat stress is a fundamentally ‘concentric’ problem, in that it intensifies as a result of multi-scalar factors, including physiology, clothing, physical activity, housing, and surrounding areas. It is also an intersectional problem that implicates age, gender, caste, and religion. Yet, technocentric approaches, such as heat action plans, often overlook everyday thermal comfort or structural issues, while cooling policies largely frame cooling in terms of appliance efficiency or other technologies that are inaccessible to lower-income communities.

Decolonial approaches foreground community lived experiences and strategies to challenge hegemonic climate solutions and perspectives that have marginalising effects. Going beyond the “neutrality and objectivity” of recorded temperature data and forecasts, I will present a co-production approach to build a picture of the lived experiences and social narratives of heat stress, responses, cooling needs, and aspirations in two slum communities in Pune.

About Sumedha Basu 

Sumedha Basu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, UK, where she is developing a complex systems approach to address the socio-political challenges of decarbonising cooling systems in India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of multilevel politics, state power, and governance of sustainable energy transitions and climate change. Sumedha completed her PhD from the Politics and International Studies Department of the University of Warwick, UK. In 2016, Sumedha was awarded the Humboldt Foundation International Climate Protection Fellowship, where she collaborated with the Wuppertal Institute in Germany. Before joining academia, she was engaged in climate and energy policy advisory and later in political advocacy.