Transitions Research – aastha hazarika – 2025

Summary

Aastha Hazarika assisted in the development of a community-driven heat resilience report through secondary literature review and by identifying key gaps, limitations and datasets required for effective climate vulnerability mapping.

Goals

Aastha Hazarika served as a climate risk and vulnerability mapper with Transition Research, supporting their PULL.AI team in launching their Building Community Resilience to Extreme Heat project. PULL is a platform for co-creating, testing, and implementing data-driven climate solutions in the real-life and real-use context of India’s mid-sized cities. The project aimed to develop a heat risk map for select wards through deep analysis of existing heat action plans and mapping current heat adaptation measures, examining their structure, limitations, and gaps. Existing heat action plans in the region often overlook ground realities and lived experiences. This project sought to bridge those gaps through deep community engagement, recognising that people must be at the center of any climate-resilient adaptation framework.

Solutions

To support the development of the heat risk report, Aastha Hazarika adopted an iterative approach in the face of key data gaps: several datasets were either missing, outdated, or inconsistent. She worked closely with the PULL.AI team to identify alternative data sources and continuously refined the methodology to ensure the outputs remained both rigorous and community-informed. This adaptive process allowed her to build a vulnerability map that reflected comprehensive information on heat adaptation, not just physical exposure but also lived experience and social resilience from secondary sources.

Potential Impact

If implemented, the Building Community Resilience to Extreme Heat project has the potential to significantly enhance the city’s preparedness and response to rising temperatures. The project’s community-first approach places vulnerable groups as core decision-makers, encouraging solutions that are context-specific and more likely to be adopted. With accurate heat-risk mapping and active community participation, the wards can better allocate resources, improve early warning systems, and deploy adaptive infrastructure that is more long-term. The project lays the groundwork for a scalable, community-driven model of heat resilience that can serve as a blueprint for other cities facing extreme heat under climate change.