Focus on Arts and Ecology

Apekshita Varshney, founder of the HeatWatch initiative, explains why heat deaths in India are undercounted, who is most at risk, and what the country is still getting wrong. 

By Shalinee Kumari, May 11, 2026

The temperature was 48C and the sun bore down on Apekshita Varshney. Reporting from the city of Akola in western India’s Maharashtra state, the journalist remembers how ill she felt that day eight years ago. What stayed with her was how, despite the searing heat, everything around her was business as usual – farm labourers worked in the fields, vendors sold food on the streets and others went about their daily work routines.

Prolonged physical activity in such conditions, she would later understand, makes heatstroke almost inevitable. A 2024 study across major Indian cities found that a single day of extreme heat was associated with a 12% increase in the daily mortality rate, increasing to 33% for heatwaves lasting five days.

In India, the economic losses caused by heat are well-documented. According to the Lancet Countdown, the country lost an estimated 247 billion labour hours in 2024 due to extreme heat, resulting in USD 194 billion of lost potential income. But heat-related deaths and the impacts of prolonged heat stress aren’t documented as extensively, Varshney found.

Realising that India might be undercounting heat-related deaths, Varshney began compiling numbers based on media reports. In 2022, she founded HeatWatch, an initiative focused on heat awareness, research and policy advocacy.

By conducting studies on vulnerable populations such as waste and garment workers, and collecting data on heatstroke cases, the non-profit helps expand awareness, capacity and accountability to facilitate better decision-making and on-the-ground action. Her work also brings up data points that show the broader, compounding impact heat has on people across the country. “We cannot just be focusing on mortality. We also need to think of morbidity,” Varshney says. “What’s the impact on our people’s cardiovascular health? What’s the impact on our people’s kidney health?”

Dialogue Earth spoke to Varshney about some of the key questions surrounding heat in India, including how the most vulnerable suffer, as well as the long-term impacts of heat stress and what more can be done to mitigate these issues. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dialogue Earth: India’s official records cannot agree on the number of deaths caused by heat. Why?

Apekshita Varshney: Heat is a slow-onset hazard. It’s not visibly dramatic like storms. We don’t immediately recognise that heat is causing so much damage – not just to people’s health, but also to productivity, to businesses and to the economy.

Because of that, even the idea that heat can kill is still quite contentious. Our healthcare systems are only now getting more equipped to deal with the impacts of extreme heat on the human body, and it’s still an evolving area of research.

There is a lot of confusion among medical practitioners, policymakers and bureaucrats about what counts as a heatstroke death. Was it a person with pre-existing conditions whose health was worsened by heat, or was it someone otherwise healthy who was exposed to extreme conditions? That distinction becomes difficult to make.

On the ground, doctors often say they don’t have the resources or time to carry out the detailed examinations or postmortems needed to be certain. In states where heatwaves have been notified – meaning officially recognised – as a disaster, there is also the question of compensation for families, which adds another layer of complexity. All of this has made heatstroke into a political challenge.

At the same time, what is undeniably true is that people are dying because of heat.

There is increasing evidence of this and more questions being raised. Researchers and public health experts have also pointed out that the actual number of heatstroke deaths is likely far higher than what is officially reported. So what we really need is a much more honest and transparent approach to understanding heat-related deaths.

Different government agencies are collecting data in different ways, with no standardised system. There are guidelines, but they are not consistently implemented. There are also platforms like the Integrated Health Information Platform, where data is supposed to be uploaded. But these are not publicly accessible, so people outside the system cannot verify or understand what is being reported.

There is also a tendency to downplay the crisis, with people often saying India has always been a hot country. This makes it harder to recognise the scale and severity of what is changing.

Since you established HeatWatch, have you come across a story of a person or community that shocked you about heat in India?

There are many examples that show how gigantic the problem is. One that has really stayed with me is a Mongabay story about 54-year-old security guard Devi Prasad Ahirwar. He belongs to a marginal caste and suffered a serious heatstroke at work just outside Delhi. After spending six days on a ventilator, unconscious, he survived but was left bedridden. With no income or employer support, Ahirwar and his family were pushed into financial distress.

That story highlights simple but important truths: we want people to survive, and we want our healthcare systems equipped to be able to immediately provide lifesaving relief to heatstroke victims. But we are not really thinking about what kind of recovery is possible afterward. The impact of severe heat on the body is tremendous.

Would you say caste, class and labour conditions are still underplayed in coverage?

There has definitely been an increase in coverage in the last couple of years, especially on the impact of heat on vulnerable communities, and that is important to acknowledge. But we still have a long way to go.

There is not enough research or reporting on how caste and occupation are linked to heat exposure. We are also not making the argument strongly enough that these communities, which contribute very little to carbon emissions, are the ones facing the most severe impacts of climate change. Similarly, when it comes to gender, we tend to generalise women as a single group – but there are further vulnerabilities within that category. For example, Dalit women are far more impacted than dominant-caste women.

On labour, the conversation has largely moved towards heat action plans, but these plans do not address working conditions in a meaningful way. They do not talk about enforceable protections for outdoor workers or compensation for lost wages. We are still at the stage of fighting for basic amenities like water, sanitation and shade. The conversation needs to move further to include healthcare, compensation and broader protections.

One extremely important study from IIM Bangalore and others finds that marginalised caste groups experience higher heat exposure because caste and occupation are so closely linked in India. However, we still do not have enough research, or even enough media reporting, on how deeply interconnected these issues are: the impact of heat on manual scavengers, waste workers, sanitation workers, and others who work on the streets; why they are forced into these jobs; and the impact of climate change and extreme heat on communities that have contributed virtually nothing to carbon emissions.

A HeatWatch study found that indoor heat is an everyday reality for garment factory workers. Many reported stagnant air and lack of ventilation at workstations. Can you talk more about the dangers of this type of heat?

Indoor heat is a major issue especially in informal settlements and smaller factories. Many of these spaces are built using materials like tin and asbestos, which trap heat. There is poor ventilation, overcrowding, and multiple people living or working in small spaces, which adds to the heat.

Studies that have measured temperature and humidity in these environments show they can be significantly higher than outside.

In factories, there may be limited cooling – sometimes just an exhaust fan or distant fans – and in some areas, cooling cannot be used because of the nature of the work. All of this means that people indoors can experience conditions as severe as those working directly under the sun.

People cope in small ways: by sitting near doorways to get some airflow, sending children to neighbours who have access to coolers or air conditioning, or continuing to work despite extreme discomfort.

The solutions are complex. They involve using better building materials, improved design, access to credit, and addressing issues like land rights and eviction fears. Without addressing these structural issues, it is difficult to provide meaningful thermal comfort.

Heat stress seems to only increase with every passing year. This year, since March, Maharashtra alone has reportedly recorded 163 heatstroke cases and three suspected deaths, along with more than 400,000 hospital visits linked to heat-related symptoms. If nothing changes, what will Indian summers look like in the next decade?

We are already seeing changes in places that did not experience heatwaves before. Bangalore, for example, has had very intense summers recently.

We are likely to see more heatwave days and more extreme temperatures. Unless we make significant changes to how our cities are designed and managed, they will become increasingly unliveable. Only those who can afford cooling will be able to maintain some level of normalcy.

This also raises larger questions about who has access to cooling and who does not, and whether cooling should be treated as a necessity rather than a privilege available only to those who can afford it.

If you could implement one fix before the next heatwave season in India, what would it be?

There are no easy solutions as this is a complex problem. But one important step would be to notify heatwaves as a national instead of state-specific disaster. That can help unlock financing at a national level, not just for reactive measures when a heatwave strikes, but for actual mitigation efforts. Right now, we tend to respond after the fact, but what is needed is planning and investment before conditions become extreme.

Alongside that, we need large-scale capacity building. This is not just about communities, who are often framed by the nonprofit sector as beneficiaries. What we really need is for bureaucrats and policymakers to be trained and equipped to understand the scale of the problem. They need to be armed with data on what extreme heat and climate change are doing to the country, and knowledge on what solutions are available.

And there are solutions. But unless the people in positions of power understand them and are able to act on them within their own constituencies, it becomes very difficult to implement meaningful change. These are things that should have already been in place, but they need to happen as soon as possible.

If the world’s second largest steel producer is to cut emissions in the sector, the country must navigate a complex scrap metal landscape. 

By Patrick Moore, May 1, 2026

Steel scrap has become an increasingly strategic resource for countries and their steelmakers as a key input for emissions reductions. India, the world’s second largest steel producer, has set ambitious targets to double the share of scrap use in its total steel output in the coming decades. The question is: where is the scrap?

Scrap steel can significantly reduce emissions in steelmaking when used to feed electrified furnaces. It can also bring down emissions from traditional blast furnaces by replacing shares of iron ore used in production, which usually requires carbon-intensive processing.

The coal-powered blast furnace route accounts for nearly 60% of Indian crude steel capacity – a share set to rise with planned expansions. This process drives the iron and steel sector’s contribution of roughly 10% to the country’s total carbon emissions. The potential benefits of greater scrap usage have therefore been highlighted by top industry figures. But supply constraints represent a significant hurdle.

The Indian government aims for scrap to feed 50% of its steel production by 2047, a figure that currently stands at 23%. It is also seeking to more than double its crude steel output in the next decade, to reach 400 million tonnes per year.

With domestic scrap metal availability tight, and systems for its collection still developing, India is currently reliant on imports to meet the shortfall. Roughly a quarter of its 41 million tonne ferrous scrap consumption in the 2024-25 financial year was met with imports, according to recent analysis by the consultancy EY-Parthenon, alongside the Confederation of Indian Industry and WWF-India.

But this flow of steel scrap is being squeezed by rising global barriers: as of March 2025, 48 countries had imposed some form of restrictions on scrap exports. By 2030, the global scrap trade is expected to shrink by 15%, EY-Parthenon notes. India’s key suppliers, the US and the European Union, are expected to see a drop in exports of 39% and 23% respectively.

“Supply constraint of scrap is a big challenge – not just for India, for the world over,” Sanjay Mehta, president of the Material Recycling Association of India (MRAI), told Dialogue Earth. “Countries don’t want any kind of metal scrap to go out because they have realised in the last seven, eight years that it’s an essential commodity for reducing carbon emissions.”

Amid these global dynamics, analysts and industry figures told Dialogue Earth of the need to focus on developing domestic scrap recovery. Here, they assess recent progress towards this and, with a new steel scrap recycling policy on the horizon in India, share their outlook on the way ahead.

Developing domestic systems

The authors of EY-Parthenon’s analysis are clear on the chances of India hitting its 2047 scrap production goal.

“In short, India will find more scrap, but not enough to fully meet both its steel growth targets and the decarbonisation needs,” Swapnil Kaushik, an EY-Parthenon senior consultant who co-authored the report, told Dialogue Earth. The country is expected to face a scrap supply deficit of 40-50 million tonnes by 2050 “even under optimistic scenarios”, the report notes.

Nonetheless, domestic scrap stock is anticipated to grow by 6-8% a year through to 2050. Analysts are therefore emphasising the need to focus on improving scrap recovery and processing to reduce import dependence. As Kaushik said, “the long-term answer must be domestic ecosystem building”.

Sakshi Balani, director of Indian steel decarbonisation at the non-profit Climate Catalyst, explained that these supply constraints simply reflect “where India is in its development trajectory”.

“Much of the steel consumed during India’s rapid growth in recent decades is still locked up in infrastructure, buildings and vehicles that are in active use,” she told Dialogue Earth. “The large end-of-life scrap volumes that advanced economies now enjoy reflect steel installed generations ago.”

Establishing the systems to capture increasing volumes of domestic scrap has been a policy focus since 2019, when the national steel scrap recycling policy was launched. Alongside a 2021 vehicle scrappage policy and a 2019 ship recycling act, this created “a more coherent regulatory environment for scrap than existed before”, said Balani.

These policies have sought to coordinate a fragmented system largely dominated by the informal sector, which Mehta of the MRAI characterised as the key challenge.

In an interview with Dialogue Earth, Mehta, joined by the MRAI’s secretary general Amar Singh, said that progress has been made in setting these scrap policies. But they also pointed out that measures such as goods and service tax (GST) and collection procedures have made formal recyclers more expensive. The informal sector avoids this tax, allowing it to undercut formal recyclers while disincentivising formal participation. This is holding back scrap from moving up supply chains to the steelmakers. Singh said the MRAI is therefore asking the government to cut GST on scrap from 18% to 5%.

Other challenges mentioned by the MRAI include a lack of uniform national quality standards, with a need to strengthen systems for scrap grading and certification, as well as a lack of traceability systems linking scrap origin to end use.

India’s Ministry of Steel is currently finalising a new policy that will replace the 2019 scrap steel recycling guidelines, alongside a proposed national steel policy. Many of the experts Dialogue Earth spoke to have been actively involved in consulting with the relevant officials on these.

Mehta said he feels positive about the government’s awareness of and engagement with these challenges, and “optimistic” for the recycling sector’s development. However, he was cautious on the potential for swift change: “Policy is one part. Implementation is another. We can’t force each and everyone to implement overnight.”

Vehicle scheme highlights challenge

India’s vast fleet of vehicles has been seen as a promising domestic source of scrap steel. There has been a vehicle scrapping policy in place since 2021, but progress toward its goals has been slow. Balani said this is the “most visible example” of the gap between policy and implementation.

This policy established a system for registered vehicle scrapping facilities (RVSFs), which were tasked with processing a total of 500,000 vehicles annually by 2026. However, between August 2022 and July 2025, only around 350,000 vehicles were scrapped of an estimated eligible pool of 12 million, EY-Parthenon notes.

“The constraint is not the policy architecture but the physical infrastructure required to deliver it,” Balani added. She pointed to a lack of testing stations, regional dismantling centres and processing facilities.

Amar Singh highlighted the lack of incentives, and mandates, for drivers to take vehicles to these registered facilities: “If I sell it to a RVSF, they will pay me 30,000 rupees. But if I sell my car to any informal guy, he will pay me 60,000 rupees.” 

Until RVSF scrapping is mandated, Singh does not expect the policy to work. But “once the material starts flowing to registered vehicle facilities, there will be a huge turnaround in this sector”, he said. EY-Parthenon’s analysis projects that vehicle recycling could grow by around 13% by 2030, supported by such policies.

Finding new sources

Other sectors highlighted by analysts as potential sources of scrap steel for India include its growing manufacturing sector, alongside construction, infrastructure and shipbreaking.

Singh said the construction and demolition sector is at a “very nascent stage” as a scrap source. EY-Parthenon analysts told Dialogue Earth that, due to these projects’ long lifecycles, this source will only deliver significant scrap steel volumes in the medium to long-term.

Scrap from shipbreaking, meanwhile, has received some policy and research attention.

India scraps roughly a third of the world’s end-of-life vessels, mostly in its western state of Gujarat. A 2024 study co-authored by Balani found that scrap steel from shipbreaking accounted for as little as 0.5% of India’s steel production. It projected the sector to expand in the coming decade, as a vast swathe of the global fleet is due to reach retirement. But this, too, is bound up in international scrap dynamics: notably, some European organisations have called for the restriction of end-of-life vessel exports, in favour of retaining the material internally.

New scrap-based production is also coming online in India, signalling growing efforts towards scrap use among key steelmakers. In March, Tata Steel inaugurated an electric arc furnace in Ludhiana, in the northern state of Punjab, with plans to only use scrap steel as the feedstock.

A Tata spokesperson told Dialogue Earth that 40% of the required scrap will be sourced from the company’s recycling plant in Haryana, approximately 200 km south of Ludhiana. The remainder will be sourced from within a 300 km radius. They stated that 50% of the facility’s power will come from renewable sources, with an expected carbon footprint of less than 0.3 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel. This compares to approximately 2.2 tonnes for Tata’s typical Indian operations.

Beyond policy, experts highlighted that steelmakers could collect, aggregate, dismantle and process scrap themselves – what EY-Parthenon’s analysis terms “backwards integration”. Doing so could not only secure supplies but also capture margins of up to 16% – which, the report notes, currently go to intermediaries.

“The companies building integrated domestic scrap supply chains now will be in a stronger position than those that remain dependent on imports as global availability tightens,” said Balani.

Looking ahead

With new policies being finalised, experts highlighted several ways for the government to support domestic scrap collection and unlock supply.

As with crude oil, liquified natural gas, coal and coke, “scrap has to be looked at as a raw material at the same level of nation-building security – at a strategic level,” according to Kapil Bansal, the lead author of EY-Parthenon’s recent report, and an energy transition and decarbonisation partner at the consultancy. Balani, likewise, said such a designation would be “the most consequential step” for the scrap sector’s development.

Bansal also suggested stronger regulations that extend the responsibilities of producers could be useful – for example, mandatory recycling for steel end-user industries.

Balani concluded that policy must move from guidance to enforceable standards, incentivise investment in scrap collection and infrastructure, and bring informal collectors into regulated supply chains. “Until that happens”, she said, “the gap between India’s scrap ambitions and its scrap reality will persist. But with the policy revision on the horizon and growing industry momentum, there is a real opportunity to close it”.

With a scrap supply deficit set to persist, Kaushik underlined the wider implications for India’s attempts to turn its steel sector green: “Scrap should be looked to as a short-term lever, while the major decarbonisation routes to produce steel would be through green hydrogen-based direct reduction of iron, alongside scrap-based electric arc furnaces powered by renewables.”

By Alia Hoyt originally posted Oct 3, 2019 

Sister Nicolette, 94, (center) and fellow elderly nun subjects at the School Sisters of Notre Dame convent in 2001 where a long-term study of Alzheimer’s disease has been conducted since 1986 and still goes on today. Photo credit Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

Speaking an extra language or two is more than just a cool party trick. It turns out that multilingualism may have a protective effect against dementia, according to data from a recent study out of The University of Waterloo in Canada. It was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in September 2019.

This effort looked at data from 325 Roman Catholic nuns who were members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame order in the U.S. The study found that 31 percent of nuns who spoke only one language developed dementia, compared with only 6 percent of nuns who spoke four or more languages (proficiently, but not necessarily on a daily basis). This lends further credence to the belief that extra brain use can somehow ward off dementia.

“Language is a complex ability of the human brain and switching between different languages takes cognitive flexibility. So, it makes sense that the extra mental exercise multilinguals would get from speaking multiple languages might help their brains be in better shape than those who speak only one language,” says study co-author and University of Waterloo associate professor Dr. Suzanne Tyas in an email. “This is consistent with recommendations to remain cognitively active as a strategy to prevent dementia: it’s well established that when it comes to the brain, it’s ‘use it or lose it.'”

Although it might seem random to look at nun data, rather than that of the general population, it’s actually the unique situation of sisterhood that makes their data extra useful. The Waterloo study is but one prong of the internationally acclaimed “Nun Study,” which started in 1986 with a small group of sisters, but has since expanded to cover nearly 700 Catholic nuns across the country. So far, the Nun Study has helped scientists better predict how cognitive and linguistic abilities factor into Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia risk. In addition, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how incidence of neuronal hypertrophy (increase in certain nerve cells in the brain) factors into Alzheimer’s disease development and progression.

“What makes them [nuns] such a valuable group to research is that they share very similar adult lives, including factors such as income, social support, marital status, reproductive history, alcohol and tobacco use, and access to health services,” says Tygas. “So, in the Nun Study, we have a greater ability to focus on multilingualism without it being influenced by all these other factors that usually vary from person to person during adulthood and that can weaken other studies.”

These similarities made the nuns perfect for the study of how multilingualism affects dementia. “People who speak multiple languages differ from those who speak only one language in many characteristics, and it’s important to be sure we are truly looking at the effect of multilingualism and not the effects of those other characteristics,” Tyas says.

But it is also possible that the brains of multilingual people are structured to fight back against dementia, and that’s why they enjoy lower risk. “This is similar to interpreting the established protective impact of higher levels of education on dementia: We cannot say whether it is the education itself or the fact that people who attain higher levels of education may be different, and it is those differences that explain the reduced risk of dementia,” Tyas explains. However, a study to definitively determine this (where one group learns a new language and another does not and the researchers follow up later) would be extremely difficult to pull off.

Don’t fret too much if multilingualism isn’t your bag, however. “Multilingualism is only one of a growing list of strategies that people can use. Dementia is more preventable than people realize,” Tyas says, noting that certain health choices provide protection, including lots of physical and mental activity; a good social network; eating well and controlling health conditions such as high blood pressure.

A bonus finding of the study is that other forms of linguistic ability, such as writing, could actually be more important than speaking several languages. The researchers discovered this by looking at the autobiographical essays the nuns wrote as young adults before taking vows, which were decades old. Each essay was analyzed in regard to the structure of the writing, idea density, grammatical complexity and general content.

“We found that when we looked at these measures together, written language ability had a stronger protective effect on dementia than multilingualism,” Tyas says. “Previous studies have not looked at multilingualism in the context of other measures of language ability, and this looks like a promising direction for future work. And, for those not interested in speaking more than one language, exercising language abilities in other ways may also be helpful in reducing the risk of dementia.”

(Sources: Dementia Training for NH Home Care & Hospice)

Some have migrated from the Valparaíso region, but others have organised to remain in the face of advancing forest fires. 

By Muriel Alarcón, May 22, 2026

Carmen Mardones first began to call Canal Chacao home when she was 29. Set among the hills of Quilpué, the neighbourhood offered a life closer to the forest with their two young children: Kattya, four, and Jorge, two. Catalina, their third, was born after they had made the move, in 1997, from the nearby coastal city of Viña del Mar.

At first, she rented. Over time, she bought a house and spent years fixing it up. She continued to work in Viña del Mar, selling automobile parts in a business she had inherited from her father. She built a life.

Then came the great fire of 2-3 February 2024 – the deadliest in Chile’s recent history, killing 138 people and affecting more than 21,000, according to government figures. She remembers the day. She remembers how a black cloud settled over their homes. Sirens wailed, gas pipes exploded, and smoke filled every space. The water was cut off.

She evacuated with her husband and youngest daughter, damp towels pressed to their faces because the air was unbreathable and the flames were everywhere. They got into the car, and for a while, left the fire behind. Still, she did not leave.

Mardones left two weeks later – after days of clearing away earth and burnt debris, and listening to the sound of the neighbour across the street crying. “I just wanted to stop seeing everything destroyed every day,” she said. What hurt the most, was “losing the history of each family”. “It does you a world of harm. It gives you no hope.”

She isn’t alone. Mardones’ decision is part of an issue drawing increased attention. Between 2016 and 2022, nearly 39,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to a weather event or to avoid its effects. Earthquakes accounted for 41% of these displacements, followed by forest fires (30.8%), floods (17.4%), extreme temperatures (6.4%) and landslides (3.3%). More recently, nearly 50,000 people were evacuated in a matter of hours after wildfires stuck southern Chile in January 2026, shows data from the National Service for Disaster Prevention and Response (Senapred).

In Canal Chacao, that vulnerability was part of the everyday. The neighbourhood sits on a strip of land where the town meets the forest. Summer fires, Mardones said, “were relatively normal”. They would last an hour, and residents knew what to do: Mardones would run hoses and soak her roof till they subsided.

Until February 2024, normal had not meant this. It had not meant a fire driven by fierce winds that refused to subside. And it had not meant the heartbreaking question: should they stay or should they go?

Preparing for disaster

One year before the February 2024 fire, some residents began to organise themselves to prepare for disaster. The Canal Chacao area comprises around 1,400 homes, spread across the neighbourhoods of Canal Chacao itself, Villa Botania, Cumbres de Quilpué and Bello Horizonte, where some 12,600 people live. In 2023, they founded the Canal Chacao Association, with 12 people on its board.

The urgency had been building for years. In 2014, the Great Valparaíso Fire had destroyed 2,900 homes and affected 12,500 people. Across the region, increasing heatwaves and strong winds renewed the pressure every summer. And there was no faith in the state’s early warning systems, explains Estrella Barrios, a member of the association’s board. “There was a lack of trust in the authorities, who are supposed to protect us, but don’t arrive on time,” she says.

Latin America has become one of the epicentres of the global climate crisis. UN climate science body the IPCC says the region is experiencing warming, and an increased frequency of droughts and other extreme weather events. “Central and South America are highly exposed, vulnerable and strongly impacted by climate change”, it states. The situation is “amplified by inequality, poverty, population growth and high population density, land use change particularly deforestation with the consequent biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and high dependence of national and local economies on natural resources for the production of commodities”.

The members of the Canal Chacao Association knew they had to act. In 2023, they began participating in training sessions organised by Caritas Chile, a Catholic aid organisation, in partnership with the National Forestry Corporation (Conaf) and the Quilpué municipal government. The five-month programme focused on understanding the local environment – its strengths, risks and vulnerabilities – as well as the resources available within the community. Conaf provided the more technical information: regulations, what can or cannot be pruned, and protected species. They even set up a command centre, complete with a computer and printer for administrative work, as well as tools like brush cutters, wheelbarrows, rakes, radio equipment and a camera to document their activities.

“Communities that feel frightened and abandoned by the state often want to go and tackle the fire themselves,” says Andalucía Corvalán, a specialist in community disaster risk management at Caritas Chile. “Part of the project’s transformation process was to explain that the community’s role is prevention too.”

In the months that followed, the group put that training into practice. By January 2024, they had cleared areas with dense vegetation, built firebreaks by removing vegetation from residential zones, pressured the local council to install water tanks to dampen areas exposed to high temperatures, and planted doca (Carpobrotus chilensis), a succulent that acts as a natural defence against fires. They designed a community risk map identifying, among others, older people and those with reduced mobility who would need help evacuating.

When the fire came, it was these actions that helped save lives. The clearing and brush removal helped keep roads open and access routes unobstructed. Barrios said that the community knew not to head towards the fire, so as not to hinder the work of firefighters. 

In nearby Villa Independencia, the destruction was far greater and the death toll significantly higher. Estimates suggest that around 60 people died there. In Canal Chacao, the death toll was seven. “Chile has a serious shortage of resilient infrastructure. So when the great fire came, the population had no defined excavation routes. In Canal Chacao, people knew the area and how it worked,” says Sofía Jacob, a researcher on disaster displacement at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

One of those who lost their life was a voice that had been warning of the risks. Months earlier, the Canal Chacao Association had hit a wall during their training: public land could be cleared of weeds, but adjacent private land was beyond their remit. Carmen Mardones’ home bordered a privately owned forest, and her neighbour, Delia Uribe, an octogenarian who was a member of the Canal Chacao Association, had warned of the need to clear it, Barrios said. “She told us literally: ‘If the forest catches fire, I’m going to burn to death’”.

When the fire came, and raged through the weeds, Uribe refused to evacuate, choosing to stay with her husband who had previously suffered a stroke. Today, the Canal Chacao Association meets at a command centre named after her: Delia Uribe.

Living with the fire

Though she was aware of the association’s resilience work, Mardones did not take part in their training sessions in 2023. Her job made it impossible. “Retail hours are quite demanding,” she says.

And yet, she has never doubted that leaving was the right decision. Staying was taking a psychological toll. In the days after the fire, her husband refused to leave the ruins of their home. He slept inside the car, in the garage, and watered the remains every day. “I was afraid he would be left with trauma. That is why I decided to leave, and go far away,” she says about the decision to move to Limache, another inland city in the region.

For Jacob, community preparedness efforts like those in Canal Chacao can help reduce distrust and, in turn, displacement. The decision to leave is rarely triggered by a specific moment, she says, but by a continuum of factors which build up in the months or years before. “Without environmental education, there is no resilience,” she says.

In Canal Chacao, residents now have portable radios connected to Senapred and the Fire Service. They watch weather data closely and analyse it to anticipate the behaviour of fires. Given the uncertainty about authorities issuing timely alerts, they can initiate an evacuation themselves. “If we see the situation is unfavourable, we issue the first warning through a WhatsApp group made up of community members and managed by the Canal Chacao Association,” explains Barrios. They now hope to implement a third lever of alert using an emergency siren. “That’s what we still have pending,” Barrios adds.

Much of the challenge ahead is financial: USAID funding that enabled them to acquire basic equipment is now gone. “It stopped providing funding,” Barrios says. The group now applies to different funding sources, with some limited success – they recently bought some chainsaws, and a drone is next on the agenda.

Mardones, on her part, still visits Canal Chacao where her former neighbours still live. The house she left behind was demolished and later rebuilt with support from the social organisation Desafío Levantemos. It is now home for her son Jorge, 31, his partner, and her daughter Catalina, now 23.

“It’s beautiful now,” she says.

And yet, she still feels afraid for her children. She knows they live with the burden that they must always be prepared, and always at the ready; caught between leaving and staying. “Before, it never even crossed our minds that Canal Chacao could burn. Now, I think it could happen again.”

Muriel Alarcón