When Summers Stopped Being Fun: How Climate Change Stole Our Childhood

When Summers Stopped Being Fun: How Climate Change Stole Our Childhood

Kakali Das

Close your eyes for a moment and think about your childhood summers. Remember playing gully cricket with your friends until the sun went down, when it was almost dark?

About eating ripe mangoes so juicy that the juice would run down your chin and your fingers would be sticky? Or chasing the ice-cream man in the afternoon, hoping to catch him before he left the street?

Maybe you remember running barefoot on hot roads, feeling the warmth under your feet but not caring at all.

Dusty hands from climbing trees or picking up balls, knees scraped and bruised from playing outside all day long, lying on the grass looking at the clouds, or sitting with your friends under a tree, drinking cold sugarcane juice or Rasna. Those days were full of laughter and freedom.

What all these memories have in common is that the heat was never really a problem. Nobody worried much about the sun being too hot. It was just summer, and summer was fun and special, the best time of the year. The sun was hot, yes, but it didn’t stop us from playing or enjoying our time outdoors.

But do you think summers still look like that for children today? The simple answer is no. Today, many kids spend most of their summer days inside, with the air conditioner running. There are warnings about heat waves almost every year, and playgrounds stay empty because it’s too hot to go outside. This difference kept bothering me. It wasn’t just about missing the good old days. I felt something had changed, and not in a good way.

So, I decided to learn more about it. What I found was honestly scary. Every day, the temperature keeps going up. India recorded its hottest year ever in 2024 since records began in 1901.

In May 2024, Delhi, the capital of India, hit a temperature of 52.9 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in the country. You might have read these headlines too. But it’s not only nature that’s suffering. The heat is causing big problems for people and the economy as well.

Last year, India lost more than 167 billion potential work hours because people could not work during extreme heat. Experts warn that if this continues, by 2050 India could lose almost 3% of its GDP – that means the country’s economic growth will slow down a lot because of heat.

Yes, this is because of global warming. But it’s not just that. It’s also about how our cities are built. The glass skyscrapers, concrete buildings, busy roads full of cars, and fewer trees all create what experts call an urban heat trap.

You might wonder, is this really happening? Am I just worrying too much, or maybe, like some older people say, “your generation is not tough enough for the heat”? Or is it really getting hotter?

To answer this, I found a website called “#ShowYourStripes.” It’s very simple. You type the name of any city in the world, and it shows you coloured stripes representing temperature changes every year. Blue means cooler years and red means hotter years.

I checked for many Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Assam, Pune – and the result was the same everywhere. India’s average temperature has already gone up by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1901. That might sound like a small number, but in climate terms, it is like going from a slight fever to a very high fever.

In 2016, India had its hottest year so far, until 2024 broke that record. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that cities are not just victims of climate change. They are making their own heat. Cities are creating their own layer of warmth.

If you live in a city, you are not just feeling the effects of global warming. You are also living with something called the “urban heat island.” What this means is that cities act like giant ovens. They trap heat and make the temperature rise more than surrounding rural areas.

In every city, the hottest places are usually the commercial areas with many buildings and shops. Residential areas nearby are cooler but still hot. Just a few kilometers away, rural areas with trees and fields are often much cooler. So, even though the weather is the same, the temperature can feel very different depending on where you are.

For example, in Ahmedabad, some dense parts of the city are 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter than the nearby countryside. This difference is even greater at night.

During a heatwave in May, night temperatures in parts of Delhi’s built-up areas were over 20 degrees Celsius hotter than the nearby forests and fields.

In Bangalore, the average yearly temperature difference between the city and rural areas ranges from 4.6 to nearly 6.7 degrees Celsius. During summer nights, this difference can go up to 7.1 degrees.

Cities like Raipur and Bhopal also show temperature differences of 2 to 4 degrees compared to nearby rural areas.

Over the past few decades, Mumbai has seen 15 more very warm nights each summer compared to the previous thirty years. Bangalore had 11 more warm nights, Delhi had 6, and Jaipur and Bhopal had 7 more each.

But heat is not just about the temperature we see on a thermometer. It’s also about what our body feels, which depends on humidity too. This is called the heat index or the “feels like” temperature. Many Indian cities have seen rising humidity levels, making the heat feel worse. Sometimes, the monsoon months in cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Kolkata feel even hotter and more uncomfortable than the peak summer days.

So, why do cities get so much hotter?        

In rural areas, trees, water, and soil absorb sunlight and slowly release it, helping the environment stay cooler. But cities are different. The materials used to build them – concrete, asphalt, glass, and steel – soak up heat during the day and release it at night. That means cities stay hotter long after the sun has set. Sometimes, the temperature difference between city and rural areas at night can be as much as 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.

Cities are not hot by accident, they are built that way. The materials used for urban surfaces, like concrete and asphalt, hold heat much more than grass, soil, or trees. On top of that, the way buildings and roads are designed often blocks the wind and traps hot air.

Think about narrow lanes that don’t let the wind pass through, tall buildings that block the breeze, or rooftops that do not reflect sunlight. In Mumbai, for example, new glass towers block the sea breeze that used to cool whole neighbourhoods.

Most Indian city roads are made with dark asphalt, which absorbs 90 to 95% of sunlight. This heated asphalt radiates heat for many hours after sunset, turning streets into slow-cooking tandoors.

Then there are the cars. Cars parked bumper to bumper give off heat with nowhere to escape. The growing number of vehicles only adds to the heat.

On top of that, most cities have lost their green cover and water bodies at an alarming rate. According to Global Forest Watch, India lost over 2.3 million hectares of tree cover since 2000. Water bodies are also shrinking. The first national water bodies census in 2023 showed that only about 3% of India’s 2.4 million water bodies are now in urban areas. Cities have expanded, but lakes, ponds, and canals have disappeared.

Take Bangalore as an example: nearly 80% of its lakes and 90% of its green cover have vanished in just a few decades.

And finally, there is us, people. The intense human activity in cities makes everything worse. More vehicles, more air conditioners, more buildings, more pollution, and more heat. This creates a vicious cycle.

For example, many people use air conditioners to escape the heat. But ACs cool indoor air by pushing hot air outside. The more ACs used, the more heat is released outdoors. That extra heat raises the city’s temperature, which means people need even more ACs. This vicious cycle keeps making cities hotter. And with so few trees around to cool the air naturally, it only gets worse.

This is not just poor planning, it is planning that forgot heat. Some cities are now 80 to 90% covered by buildings, roads, and other concrete structures. At this stage, they stop being cities with open spaces and green cover. Instead, they become heat islands surrounded by traffic and pollution.

This is not just a story about climate change; it is also a failure of urban design and city planning. But the good thing is that since it is a design failure, it can be fixed.

We have built cities that trap heat, but we can also build cities that fight it. Many solutions already exist.

One simple but effective idea is cool roofs – painting rooftops white to reflect sunlight instead of absorbing it. This can lower indoor temperatures by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius. Cities like Hyderabad and Ahmedabad have already started using cool roofs with good results.

Early warning systems that inform vulnerable communities before a heatwave hits can save lives and help people prepare. Heat shelters designed to keep people safe during extreme heat days can offer relief without using too much electricity.

The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) shared a series of innovative heat solutions from five Indian cities. These include UV alerts in Kerala to warn people about harmful sun exposure, heat insurance in Ahmedabad to help farmers, emergency cooling units in Delhi, net-zero energy bus stations in Jodhpur that stay naturally cool, and cool roofs in Odisha.

These local, low-cost ideas can inspire other cities to act.

Besides technology and innovation, planting native trees in the right places is very important. Bringing back water bodies like ponds, lakes, and canals allows the city to breathe and cool down naturally. This is not just about surviving summer heat but about reclaiming summer as a joyful season.

Maybe one day, children will again chase the ice cream man, play gully cricket in the evenings, and enjoy summer vacations outdoors like we used to.

If we want summers to be fun and safe again, we need to understand the problem and work together to fix it. Our cities can become cooler, greener, and healthier places to live. Let’s not lose the magic of summer.

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