https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4744-9812
Figures
Abstract
Urban heat is increasingly emerging as a major constraint on sustainable development, particularly in rapidly growing cities of the Global South. Although urban heat is commonly addressed through local adaptation and urban heat reduction measures such as urban greening, cool and super cool roofs, and building retrofits or passive design, these interventions are increasingly implemented against a backdrop of accelerating planetary warming, fiscal constraints, and persistent socio-economic inequalities. This Essay argues that urban heat should be understood not merely as an environmental, technological, or urban planning challenge, but as a structural development problem arising from the interaction of climate change, rapid urbanization, uneven governance capacity, and political-economic processes that shape vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Drawing on evidence from urban climate, adaptation, development, and climate justice literatures, we examine how escalating heat risks intersect with infrastructure deficits, debt burdens, limited access to climate finance, and unequal access to cooling resources across rapidly growing cities. We show that climate change mitigation and local action, including urban heat reduction and broader adaptation measures, perform distinct but complementary functions, and that local interventions alone cannot overcome the broader climatic and structural conditions that increasingly constrain their effectiveness and scalability. Urban heat risks are further amplified by profound inequalities in exposure, vulnerability, and access to adaptation resources, creating a widening mismatch between those facing the greatest heat burdens and those possessing the greatest capacity to respond. We, therefore, argue that effective urban heat governance requires moving beyond predominantly local and technocratic approaches toward integrated strategies that combine climate change mitigation, equitable climate finance, enhanced fiscal capacity, and multi-level governance. Reframing urban heat as a structural development challenge provides a more comprehensive framework for addressing climate justice, resilience, and long-term urban habitability under a warming climate.
Citation: Khan A, Hamdi R, Ahmed T, Niyogi D, Akbari H, Santamouris M (2026) Urban heat as a structural development challenge in rapidly growing cities. PLOS Clim 5(10): e0001010. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001010
Editor: Francesc Baró, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, SPAIN
Published: October 5, 2026
This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Funding: D.N. acknowledges support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the Austin CARES program (grant 8NSSC25K7417) and NASA grant 80NSSC20K1268; the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under grant 60NANB24D235 through the Office of Hon. Lloyd Doggett; the UNESCO Chair; the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants 2413827 and 2324744; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under grant NA21OAR4310146. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
1. Introduction
Urban heat is recognized as one of the most pervasive manifestations of climate change in cities [1]. Yet the escalating heat burden observed across the Global South cannot be understood solely as an environmental, technological, or urban planning challenge; it is also deeply embedded in socio-economic inequality, governance, and climate justice [2]. We argue that urban heat is fundamentally a structural development problem emerging from the interaction of global climate forcing, rapid urbanization, socio-economic inequality, fiscal constraints, and uneven governance capacity. We follow established IPCC definitions throughout. Climate change mitigation refers to anthropogenic intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases [3,4], and thus addresses the warming baseline on which all urban temperatures are superimposed. Adaptation refers to adjustment in human or natural systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, moderating harm or exploiting beneficial opportunities [4,5]. Within adaptation, we distinguish urban heat reduction - local interventions such as urban greening, cool roofs, sub-ambient (“super cool”) radiative materials, reflective surfaces, and passive building design that lower the local thermal hazard, often termed urban heat mitigation in the urban-climate literature [6] - from vulnerability-reducing adaptation such as heat action plans, early-warning systems, social protection, resilient and affordable housing, and expanded healthcare and cooling access. Mitigation and adaptation are related and can overlap [4,7]; urban heat reduction, in particular, sits at their interface, lowering the local hazard while forming part of a broader adaptation response. Some cooling interventions also yield a secondary climate change mitigation co-benefit by reducing cooling energy demand, though this effect is typically modest relative to their adaptation function. Maintaining a clear distinction nonetheless sharpens the central argument: local action of either kind operates within, and is ultimately bounded by, the warming baseline that only climate change mitigation can address. This Essay treats climate change mitigation as the structural background condition that bounds local action and focuses its analysis on urban heat adaptation and the structural conditions that shape it. While these approaches remain essential components of urban resilience, they are implemented against a backdrop of accelerating global warming, constrained public finances, limited climate finance, and persistent socio-patial inequalities [8]. Consequently, many cities experiencing the most severe heat burdens possess the least institutional and financial capacity to respond effectively. Urban heat therefore represents not only a climatic challenge but also a climate justice concern, reflecting a profound mismatch between the global drivers of warming and the uneven capacity of cities and populations to cope with its consequences [2,9].
This mismatch is particularly evident across cities of the Global South, where extreme heat intersects with informal settlements, precarious housing, inadequate infrastructure, weak public services, and unequal access to cooling resources [10,11]. Urban heat is therefore experienced unevenly, disproportionately affecting low-income households, informal workers, women, migrants, older adults, and other socially vulnerable groups [12]. Exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity are shaped by intersecting inequalities related to income, housing quality, occupation, land tenure, healthcare access, and the availability of essential services [13,14]. These disparities are not accidental but are produced and reproduced through historical patterns of urbanization, uneven infrastructure investment, exclusionary planning practices, and broader political-economic processes that concentrate environmental risks within already marginalized communities [15]. From the perspectives of climate justice and urban political ecology, urban heat reflects not only rising temperatures but also the unequal distribution of environmental risks, adaptive capacity, and access to protective resources [16]. Populations contributing least to greenhouse-gas emissions frequently bear the greatest heat-related burdens while possessing the fewest resources to adapt [17]. Moreover, local adaptation measures often operate within broader structural constraints, including limited fiscal capacity, debt burdens, inadequate climate finance, and governance asymmetries that restrict the implementation of transformative responses [13,18,19]. Understanding urban heat therefore requires moving beyond purely technological solutions toward a broader examination of the political, economic, institutional, and financial structures that shape vulnerability and resilience.
Urban heat has become a structurally embedded feature of the global urban system, driven by the interaction of anthropogenic climate change, rapid urbanization, and entrenched socio-economic inequality, and now constitutes a defining background condition for cities worldwide [13,20,21]. Global analyses covering more than 13,000 urban settlements indicate that extreme heat exposure increased in approximately 46% of cities between 1983 and 2016, affecting nearly 1.7 billion urban residents, with the fastest increases concentrated in low- and middle-income regions [22]. Satellite-based assessments of more than 2,000 urban clusters worldwide demonstrate that urban cores are warming approximately 29% faster than adjacent rural areas, reflecting the combined influence of background climate change, urban expansion, land-use change, impervious surface growth, altered surface energy balances, and anthropogenic heat emissions [23]. At the planetary scale, global mean surface temperature has approached or briefly exceeded 1.5 °C above the 1850–1900 baseline in recent individual years, most notably in 2024, the first calendar year to do so, while the longer-term, decadal-average warming trend remains closer to 1.3 °C above pre-industrial levels. Nearly 90% of the excess heat accumulated in the Earth’s climate system has been stored in the oceans [24,25]. This sustained planetary heat accumulation elevates baseline temperatures, increasingly constraining the effectiveness of local urban cooling interventions unless accompanied by broader climate change mitigation efforts. These trends reveal a fundamental disconnect: while urban heat is experienced locally, many of its underlying drivers operate at regional and global scales, limiting the effectiveness of responses focused solely on individual cities and highlighting the need to connect local resilience efforts with broader climate change mitigation strategies [13,26].
Observational assessments by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) indicate a marked increase in the frequency, duration, and intensity of heatwaves worldwide, with repeated episodes exceeding 40–45 °C across large parts of Asia and Africa in recent years [27,28]. Heatwave frequency, duration, and intensity have increased substantially since the 1980s, with the most pronounced increases occurring across tropical and subtropical regions, including many rapidly urbanizing cities in developing countries, where rising background temperatures and rapid urban expansion have amplified heat exposure [22,29]. Recent high-resolution analyses of more than 2,300 cities across the Global South show that summertime heat index increased at an average rate of 0.41 ± 0.01 °C decade−1 during 2003–2020, with urban browning contributing an additional >0.05 °C decade−1 in several regions. These findings highlight the compounding effects of climate change, vegetation loss, and rapid urbanization on urban heat stress [30]. Projections indicate that even under 1.5 °C of global warming, a substantial majority of the global urban population will be exposed to dangerous heat, with exposure increasing sharply under higher warming levels. The greatest increases are projected for rapidly urbanizing cities in the Global South, where high baseline temperatures, population growth, and limited adaptive capacity combine to amplify heat risk [31]. These trends suggest that urban heat is becoming a chronic and systemic feature of urban life rather than an episodic environmental hazard.
The public health burden of extreme heat is escalating rapidly. Between 2000 and 2019, heat was associated with approximately 489,000 deaths annually worldwide, including 45% in Asia and 36% in Europe [32], while heat-related mortality among adults aged ≥65 years increased by approximately 85% between 2000–2004 and 2017–2021 [33]. The growing severity of heat extremes is further illustrated by an estimated 70,000, 56,000, and 61,672 excess deaths during the 2003 European, 2010 Russian, and 2022 European heatwaves, respectively, underscoring the escalating health risks posed by a warming climate [34]. Across South Asian megacities, heat stress has intensified markedly, with the heat index increasing by 1.2–2.3 °C between 2015 and 2019 and by 2.0–5.31 °C between 2011 and 2019 across major cities in India and Bangladesh. Consequently, annual labor capacity losses attributable to heat stress are estimated to range from 0.25–860.6 h for light work, 43–1,595.9 h for moderate work, and 291–2,402 h for heavy work during 1990–2019, highlighting the escalating occupational, health, and economic consequences of climate change and rapid urbanization in the region [35]. The Lancet Countdown (2025) estimates that heat exposure caused a record 639 billion potential labor hours to be lost in 2024, a 98% increase over the 1990–99 average, resulting in approximately US$1.09 trillion in losses, nearly 1% of global gross domestic products (GDP). Weather-related extremes caused a further US$304 billion in damages, while insurance coverage declined from 67% (2010–14) to 54% (2020–24), increasing the financial burden on governments and households [36]. These impacts illustrate that urban heat is not merely an environmental hazard but a significant constraint on human well-being, labor productivity, public health, and sustainable development trajectories, particularly in economies where large proportions of the workforce remain engaged in outdoor, informal, and climate-sensitive occupations.
Urban heat also places growing pressure on energy systems, public finances, and ecological resources, exposing deeper political and economic vulnerabilities in overheated cities of the Global South. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that air conditioning adoption has accelerated globally, with household ownership increasing from 19% in 2000 to 37% in 2023. Access expanded most rapidly in very high developed countries (35%–48%), high developed countries (16%–48%), and China (24%–73%), whereas low developed countries experienced only marginal (1%–2%) growth [37]. Despite improvements in energy efficiency, air conditioning remains highly energy intensive, with associated greenhouse gas emissions increasing by 89% since 2000 to reach 1,100 Mt CO2 in 2023 [38]. The IEA also projects that, without major efficiency improvements, electricity demand for space cooling will more than triple by 2050. Air conditioners already account for 20% of building electricity use (10% of global electricity consumption), yet household ownership ranges from 91% in Japan to only 5% in India. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s households could own an air conditioner, with China, India, and Indonesia accounting for 50% of the global stock. Doubling average air-conditioner efficiency could reduce cooling demand by 45%, halve cooling-related CO2 emissions, and save approximately US$3 trillion in cumulative energy-system costs [39]. Macroeconomic assessments suggest that heat stress could reduce global GDP by 0.6–4.6% by 2060, with 37–45% of losses attributable to health impacts, 18–37% to labor productivity declines, and 12–43% to supply-chain disruptions. These impacts are projected to be disproportionately concentrated in developing economies across South-Central Africa, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, where limited fiscal capacity and institutional constraints further restrict investments in climate adaptation and urban resilience [40].
Against this backdrop, this Essay argues that urban heat should be reframed not as a seasonal environmental hazard or a challenge solvable through local technological interventions alone, but as a structural constraint on development shaped by the interactions among climate change, urbanization, socio-economic inequality, governance capacity, and fiscal conditions. Drawing upon perspectives from climate justice and urban political ecology, we examine how urban heat risks, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacities are unevenly distributed across populations and places, particularly within rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South. We further argue that while local adaptation and urban heat reduction measures remain essential, their effectiveness and scalability depend upon broader structural conditions, including access to climate finance, public debt burdens, institutional capacity, and multi-level governance support. By highlighting the mismatch between the global drivers of warming and the localized capacity to respond, this Essay moves beyond predominantly technocratic approaches to urban heat and advances a broader framework that links local resilience efforts with climate change mitigation, fiscal reform, equitable climate finance, and multi-scalar governance. In doing so, it positions urban heat as both a climate risk and a development challenge requiring coordinated responses across environmental, economic, political, and institutional scales. Fig 1 summarizes these structural relationships, illustrating how planetary warming, urbanization, inequality, and governance capacity interact to produce escalating heat risk, compounding infrastructural and financial constraints, and a widening mismatch between heat burden and adaptive capacity.
Planetary warming, rapid urbanization, socio-economic inequality, and uneven governance capacity combine to produce escalating and chronic urban heat risk. This risk intersects with infrastructure deficits, debt burdens, limited climate finance, and unequal access to cooling, producing a structural mismatch between heat burden and adaptive capacity that is borne unevenly by low-income households, informal workers, women, migrants, older adults, and other socially vulnerable groups. The vertical arrangement is conceptual rather than causal or directional; the relationships shown are mutually interacting.
2. From incremental cooling to systemic heat governance
2.1. Local cooling without global mitigation is thermodynamically bounded
Urban heat reduction measures such as urban greening, cool and super cool roofs, reflective materials, super cool surfaces, and building retrofits remain essential components of urban adaptation because they reduce local heat exposure, improve thermal comfort, and can lower cooling energy demand [6]. However, city-scale cooling interventions are implemented against a background climate that is determined by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. As global warming raises the thermal baseline, local urban processes increasingly modulate, rather than control, urban heat exposure, highlighting the need to integrate urban heat reduction with sustained climate change mitigation [41]. Much of the contemporary urban heat discourse concentrates on city-scale interventions, implicitly treating local cooling as capable of offsetting future heat risks; yet this overlooks a fundamental asymmetry between the scale at which urban heat is experienced and the scale at which its principal drivers are generated. While local interventions can modify surface energy balances and reduce neighborhood-scale temperatures, they cannot alter the broader climatic baseline upon which urban temperatures are superimposed [20,42]. As global warming intensifies, local cooling efforts must continually compensate for an increasingly warmer atmosphere, reducing their relative effectiveness over time [6,20]. The challenge is therefore not whether local cooling works, but whether its benefits can keep pace with the rate at which background climatic conditions are changing. We, therefore, argue that urban heat reduction and climate change mitigation are best understood as complementary rather than substitutable strategies: the former manages the local manifestation of heat, whereas the latter addresses its underlying cause.
This distinction has important implications for urban governance and climate policy [43]. Much of the contemporary urban heat discourse remains centred on city-scale interventions, implicitly assuming that local heat mitigation can substantially offset future heat risks [44]. Yet the effectiveness of heat mitigation is ultimately constrained by the magnitude of global warming and the frequency and intensity of compound climate extremes that societies collectively allow to unfold [45,46]. As planetary temperatures rise, the resources required to maintain comparable levels of thermal safety increase disproportionately, particularly in rapidly growing cities where infrastructure deficits, population growth, and expanding energy demand already strain adaptive capacity [1]. Under these conditions, adaptation risks becoming an increasingly reactive process focused on managing escalating impacts rather than reducing underlying risks. The maximum burden falls on cities with limited fiscal capacity and constrained access to climate finance, despite their relatively small contribution to global emissions [47]. From a climate justice perspective, this creates a profound mismatch between responsibility and consequence. Local adaptation, including urban heat reduction, remains indispensable, but without sustained progress in climate change mitigation it becomes difficult, costly, and inequitable to maintain urban habitability. Durable heat resilience therefore depends not only on improving local cooling strategies but also on limiting the climatic conditions that continually erode their effectiveness.
2.2. Conventional urban heat reduction works physically but faces structural barriers to scale
A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that conventional urban heat reduction measures, including urban greening, reflective materials, cool roofs, and energy-efficient building design, can effectively lower local temperatures and improve thermal comfort, functioning primarily as adaptation while also yielding a secondary climate change mitigation co-benefit where they reduce cooling energy demand [48–50]. For these cities the binding constraint is one of scale: interventions proven at building or neighbourhood level must be deployed across entire urban regions, fast enough to counter intensifying heat exposure. The effectiveness of many cooling strategies depends on resources that are themselves unevenly distributed and often constrained. Urban greening requires land, water, and long-term maintenance, all of which become increasingly scarce in densely populated and informally developed urban environments [51]. Similarly, large-scale deployment of reflective materials and building retrofits depends on regulatory enforcement, technical capacity, and sustained investment over extended periods [48–50]. As cities expand and densify, the physical requirements for achieving meaningful city-scale cooling frequently conflict with competing demands for housing, infrastructure, transportation, and economic development. Consequently, interventions that perform well at the building or neighborhood scale often encounter substantial practical limitations when translated into city-scale urban heat reduction strategies [52,53].
These implementation challenges are particularly pronounced in cities of the Global South, where rapid urban growth frequently outpaces institutional capacity and infrastructure provision [54]. Large proportions of urban populations reside in informal settlements characterized by insecure land tenure, limited access to services, and weak regulatory oversight, reducing the feasibility of uniform planning interventions and large-scale retrofitting programs [55]. At the same time, municipal governments often face significant fiscal constraints that limit their ability to finance and maintain long-term adaptation investments [56]. This creates a structural mismatch between the scale of the heat challenge and the resources available to address it. Importantly, the consequences extend beyond thermal comfort. Rising heat exposure is eroding labor productivity, economic output, and household incomes, disproportionately affecting informal and outdoor workers whose livelihoods depend on prolonged exposure to urban heat [20,57]. As heat-related productivity losses accumulate, they further erode the economic capacity required to invest in adaptation, creating a reinforcing cycle in which vulnerability and resource constraints intensify one another. The challenge therefore lies not in demonstrating the physical effectiveness of conventional cooling measures, but in overcoming the governance, financial, and socio-economic barriers that constrain their implementation at the scale required to sustain urban resilience under continued warming.
2.3. Missing resources reflect debt, inequality, and climate finance asymmetries
The limited capacity of many cities to respond to escalating heat risks is frequently portrayed as a problem of insufficient planning, governance, or technological deployment [58,59]. However, the persistent shortage of resources available for urban heat reduction reflects deeper structural conditions embedded within national and global political economies. The capacity to implement cooling infrastructure, expand green space, retrofit buildings, strengthen public health systems, or improve access to affordable cooling depends fundamentally on fiscal space and public investment [60]. Across much of the Global South, these enabling conditions are constrained by rising debt burdens, narrow municipal revenue bases, and chronic underinvestment in urban infrastructure [61]. The result is a structural mismatch between rapidly growing adaptation needs and the financial capacity required to address them. As governments allocate substantial portions of public expenditure to debt servicing and other macroeconomic obligations, investments in long-term resilience are frequently postponed despite escalating climate risks [62]. Urban heat therefore emerges not only from climatic processes but also from development pathways that systematically limit the resources available for adaptation.
These constraints are further reinforced by profound inequalities in wealth distribution and access to climate finance [63]. The cities experiencing the most severe heat exposure often contribute relatively little to cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions yet face some of the largest adaptation burdens [59,64]. At the same time, adaptation continues to receive only a small fraction of global climate finance despite the rapidly increasing human and economic costs of extreme heat [65]. Wealth concentration further weakens public investment capacity by limiting redistributive mechanisms needed to finance climate-resilient urban development. Since 2015, the richest 1% have gained at least US$33.9 trillion in wealth (in real terms), while a minimum 2% annual wealth tax on billionaires could generate an estimated US$200–250 billion each year to support public investments, including climate adaptation and resilient urban infrastructure [66]. From a climate justice perspective, this represents a fundamental asymmetry between responsibility, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. Those most exposed to extreme heat frequently possess the fewest resources to reduce risk, while those contributing disproportionately to climate change are often insulated from its immediate consequences [65,67]. Urban heat resilience is therefore shaped not only by temperature trends but also by the institutions, fiscal systems, and financial architectures that determine who has access to adaptation resources [20]. Addressing urban heat therefore requires moving beyond local adaptation towards structural reforms in fiscal policy and global climate governance, including debt restructuring, equitable taxation, scaled-up climate finance, and redistributive public investment to strengthen long-term urban resilience. Without such structural reforms, adaptation risks becoming an increasingly reactive and unequal process that manages the symptoms of urban heat while leaving its underlying drivers of vulnerability largely unchanged [68].
2.4. Urban heat is constrained by political economy, not technology
The persistence of urban heat in many of the world’s hottest cities is often attributed to insufficient implementation of existing cooling technologies [69]. However, the continued escalation of heat risk despite decades of research and a growing portfolio of proven interventions suggests that the principal barriers to urban heat resilience are political and economic rather than technological. A wide range of urban heat reduction and broader adaptation measures, including urban greening, cool roofs, reflective materials, passive building design, heat action plans, and early-warning systems, have demonstrated their ability to reduce heat exposure under appropriate conditions, operating alongside climate change mitigation, which addresses the warming baseline itself [70]. The central challenge is therefore not a lack of technical knowledge but the limited capacity to deploy, maintain, and scale these interventions across rapidly growing urban regions [20]. This reflects a fundamental governance mismatch, heat impacts are experienced locally, yet many of the financial, regulatory, and institutional levers required to address them remain concentrated at national and international scales. Municipal governments are often expected to manage escalating heat risks while possessing limited authority over taxation, energy systems, infrastructure finance, housing policy, and long-term development planning [71]. As a result, the capacity of cities to respond is frequently determined less by technological feasibility than by broader political and economic conditions that shape access to resources and decision-making power.
These constraints are particularly visible across rapidly growing cities of the Global South, where accelerating urbanization coincides with fiscal limitations, infrastructure deficits, and increasing climate exposure [72]. Although many cities have adopted heat action plans, resilience strategies, and pilot cooling initiatives, implementation frequently remains fragmented and insufficient relative to the scale of risk [8,73]. The challenge is not simply one of governance efficiency but of structural capacity. Cities facing the greatest heat burdens often operate within national economies characterized by debt pressures, constrained public investment, unequal wealth distribution, and limited access to climate finance [61]. Under such conditions, adaptation becomes increasingly focused on emergency response and short-term risk management rather than long-term transformation. This asymmetry between exposure and capacity is, from a climate justice perspective, a structural feature of urban heat rather than an incidental one [74]. Urban heat therefore persists not because effective solutions are unavailable, but because the institutional, fiscal, and political conditions necessary for their widespread implementation remain inadequate. Addressing urban heat consequently requires moving beyond a narrow focus on municipal adaptation towards broader reforms in public finance, fiscal decentralization, climate finance allocation, infrastructure investment, and multi-level governance [75]. Without addressing these structural constraints, technological innovation alone is unlikely to deliver the scale of transformation required to sustain urban resilience under continued warming.
2.5. Addressing the mismatch between heat exposure, responsibility, and adaptive capacity
A defining feature of contemporary urban heat risk is the growing mismatch between exposure, responsibility, and adaptive capacity [76]. Here, exposure denotes the degree to which people and assets encounter high temperatures, shaped by where they live, work, and access services; adaptive capacity denotes the ability to anticipate, cope with, and recover from heat, shaped by income, housing quality, services, and access to finance and institutional support; and responsibility denotes contribution to the greenhouse-gas emissions driving warming. The climate-justice concern arises because these are inversely distributed: those most exposed and least able to adapt typically bear least responsibility for the emissions involved. In policy terms, this maps onto distinct levers, reducing exposure through shade, cooling access, and heat-resilient neighbourhoods; strengthening adaptive capacity through social protection, housing upgrades, and finance access; and aligning responsibility with differentiated financing obligations. Across rapidly growing cities of the Global South, the populations facing the greatest thermal burdens are often those with the fewest resources available to reduce risk [77]. Low-income households, informal workers, migrants, older adults, and residents of underserved neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat because of where they live, work, and access essential services. Poor housing quality, limited vegetation, overcrowded settlements, inadequate infrastructure, and unreliable energy supply amplify thermal stress while simultaneously constraining adaptation options [78]. These vulnerabilities are not simply the consequence of climatic conditions but emerge from broader patterns of socio-economic inequality, uneven urban development, and exclusionary planning processes. From the perspective of climate justice and urban political ecology, urban heat therefore reflects the unequal distribution of environmental risks and adaptive resources across society [16]. Importantly, those experiencing the highest heat exposure frequently contribute least to the processes driving climate change and often possess limited political influence over decisions that shape adaptation priorities [19]. As a result, heat-related mortality, health impacts, productivity losses, and livelihood disruptions become concentrated among already marginalized populations, reinforcing existing inequalities and creating a cycle in which vulnerability and disadvantage become mutually reinforcing under continued warming.
Addressing these inequalities requires recognizing that adaptive capacity is fundamentally shaped by access to financial resources and institutional support [58,73,76]. Many cities experiencing the most severe heat risks simultaneously face constrained fiscal capacity, infrastructure deficits, debt burdens, and limited access to climate finance [62]. Consequently, adaptation needs often grow faster than the resources available to meet them. This creates a structural imbalance in which cities with the highest exposure frequently possess the weakest capacity to implement large-scale cooling interventions, upgrade housing, expand public services, or strengthen resilience. At the global scale, adaptation finance remains substantially below estimated requirements despite the increasing economic and social costs associated with extreme heat [79]. Such disparities raise important questions regarding responsibility, equity, and the allocation of adaptation resources. Principles embedded within international climate agreements recognize that differences in historical emissions, financial capacity, and vulnerability should inform how adaptation burdens are shared [80]. Applying these principles to urban heat implies that financial support should be directed toward populations and cities facing the greatest risks and the largest resource constraints [20,81]. Without more equitable financing arrangements and stronger institutional support, adaptation is likely to remain spatially selective and socially uneven, leaving vulnerable populations exposed [80]. Strengthening mechanisms that connect financial resources with adaptation needs is therefore essential for sustaining urban equity, productivity, public health, and long-term habitability in a warming world. Yet finance alone cannot resolve the underlying mismatch: without commensurate progress on climate change mitigation, adaptation must compensate for a continually rising baseline, and the burden falls hardest on cities that contributed least to warming. Aligning adaptation finance with emissions responsibility is therefore not only a question of efficiency but of global equity between high-emitting and high-exposure regions.
3. Discussion
The central argument emerging from this Essay is that urban heat can no longer be understood primarily as a local environmental externality amenable to correction through incremental urban design interventions. Rather, it has become a systemic outcome of interactions among planetary warming, urbanization, socio-economic inequality, infrastructure deficits, and uneven governance capacity. Existing adaptation measures, including urban heat reduction, remain indispensable because they reduce exposure, improve thermal comfort, and save lives [20,44]. However, their implementation increasingly occurs within a context characterized by accelerating climatic change and growing development pressures [45,46]. The critical issue, then, is not the physical efficacy of local interventions but whether the structural conditions exist to deploy them at scale, which reframes urban heat resilience as a question of capacity rather than technology. Much of the contemporary urban heat literature remains focused on optimizing cooling performance at building, neighborhood, or city scales. While valuable, such approaches often treat broader climatic and economic conditions as external constraints rather than integral components of the problem itself. We argue that urban heat resilience is increasingly determined not only by the performance of cooling technologies but also by the structural conditions that shape their feasibility, accessibility, and long-term sustainability [20,44,73]. Understanding these interactions is essential for developing realistic pathways toward urban resilience under continued warming.
The relationship between climate change mitigation, urban heat reduction, and adaptation represents another critical implication of these assessments. These concepts are frequently discussed together but operate through fundamentally different mechanisms and timescales. Climate change mitigation seeks to limit future warming by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, thereby influencing the climatic baseline upon which urban temperatures are superimposed [47]. As defined earlier, urban heat reduction and vulnerability-reducing adaptation both act locally, lowering temperatures and reducing risk respectively, but neither can independently alter the trajectory of global warming [6,20,48]. Confusing these objectives with climate change mitigation creates unrealistic expectations regarding what local interventions can achieve. Conversely, climate change mitigation alone cannot eliminate existing urban vulnerabilities that have accumulated through decades of unequal development and infrastructure deficits. Effective urban heat governance therefore requires recognizing the complementary nature of these approaches rather than treating them as substitutes [68]. Long-term resilience depends on simultaneously reducing future warming, lowering local heat exposure, and strengthening adaptive capacity across vulnerable populations and places.
Urban heat cannot be understood solely as a climatic hazard but must also be recognized as a product of uneven vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Exposure to high temperatures does not automatically translate into equivalent levels of risk because impacts are mediated through social, economic, and institutional conditions [20]. Individuals living in informal housing, working in outdoor occupations, lacking reliable access to electricity, or possessing limited healthcare access experience heat differently from those with greater resources and protections [55]. Consequently, urban heat should not be viewed solely through the lens of atmospheric conditions but also through the distribution of resources, opportunities, and adaptive capacity. This observation aligns closely with perspectives from climate justice and urban political ecology, which emphasize that environmental risks are filtered through existing inequalities rather than experienced uniformly across society [16,74]. From this perspective, urban heat becomes a visible expression of broader development processes that determine who benefits from urban growth and who bears its environmental costs. Addressing heat risk therefore requires more than reducing ambient temperatures. It requires confronting the social and spatial inequalities that concentrate exposure within already marginalized communities and limit access to the resources necessary for adaptation [19,55]. Failure to address these underlying disparities risks reproducing vulnerability even where technological solutions are available.
The political economy of urban development plays a central role in shaping urban heat outcomes. Much policy discourse assumes that cities possess sufficient authority and resources to manage escalating heat risks through improved planning and governance; we argue otherwise. Because the capacity to invest in cooling infrastructure, housing, public health, and resilience is governed by fiscal space, debt burdens, and access to climate finance [82], adaptation outcomes are often determined as much by financial systems as by climatic conditions. This shifts attention from questions of municipal performance toward the broader economic structures that determine whether adaptation can occur at scale [83], and underscores an asymmetry noted earlier: the cities facing the most severe heat burdens often possess the weakest fiscal and institutional foundations from which to respond [61]. Urban heat resilience is therefore inseparable from debates over public finance, infrastructure investment, debt sustainability, and development policy [84]. Without addressing these structural constraints, adaptation risks becoming increasingly reactive, fragmented, and dependent upon short-term responses that do little to alter underlying patterns of vulnerability.
Moreover, the future of urban heat governance depends less on discovering new cooling technologies than on creating the institutional, financial, and political conditions necessary for their equitable deployment [85]. Reframing urban heat as a structural development challenge fundamentally changes the policy conversation. It shifts attention from isolated interventions toward the systems that shape who is protected, who remains exposed, and how adaptation resources are allocated. Such a perspective does not diminish the importance of local action; rather, it places local adaptation within the broader climatic, economic, and governance contexts that determine its effectiveness [83]. Durable urban resilience will require stronger connections between climate change mitigation, adaptation finance, public investment, and development planning [8]. It will also require greater recognition that heat risks are inseparable from questions of social justice, economic inequality, and institutional capacity. As warming continues, the challenge facing growing cities is not simply how to cool urban environments, but how to build development pathways capable of sustaining equity, productivity, and habitability under adverse climatic conditions.
4. Conclusion
Urban heat is increasingly emerging as one of the defining development challenges of the twenty-first century, particularly in rapidly growing cities of the Global South. This Essay argues that urban heat cannot be understood solely as a problem of urban design, technological performance, or local governance. Rather, it is the outcome of interactions among planetary warming, rapid urbanization, socio-economic inequality, fiscal constraints, and uneven governance capacity operating across multiple spatial scales. Existing urban heat reduction and adaptation measures, including urban greening, cool roofs, reflective materials, building retrofits, and heat action plans, remain essential because they reduce exposure, improve thermal comfort, and strengthen resilience. However, we argue that their effectiveness and scalability are increasingly conditioned by broader climatic, economic, and institutional forces that lie beyond municipal control. Climate change mitigation, urban heat reduction, and vulnerability-reducing adaptation therefore perform distinct but complementary functions: mitigation addresses the drivers of planetary warming, while local action lowers heat exposure and reduces vulnerability to unavoidable impacts. Durable urban resilience requires progress across all three, because the persistence of escalating heat risks despite expanding adaptation reflects not a shortage of technological solutions but a widening mismatch between the scale of climatic change and the institutional and financial capacity available to respond.
Urban heat is, in this framing, as much a climate justice and development issue as an environmental one: because exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity track existing inequalities in housing, services, and political representation, those most exposed to heat typically hold the fewest resources to respond. The contribution of reframing urban heat as a structural challenge is to make this distributional character central rather than incidental, recasting adaptation not as a purely technical exercise but as a developmental process, and warning that without attention to these inequalities, adaptation will remain selective and leave the most vulnerable exposed.
Reframing urban heat as a structural development challenge shifts attention from the performance of individual technologies toward the economic, institutional, and governance conditions that determine whether adaptation can be achieved at scale. Effective responses therefore link local adaptation and urban heat reduction with stronger climate change mitigation, expanded and equitable climate finance, enhanced fiscal capacity, and governance arrangements that better align responsibility with resources. Ultimately, the challenge facing growing cities is not simply how to cool urban environments but how to create equitable development pathways capable of sustaining public health, economic productivity, social stability, and long-term habitability under continued warming, a transition requiring coordinated action across local, national, and global scales, and recognition that urban heat is inseparable from the broader pursuit of sustainable, climate-resilient development.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge support from the Farish Endowment of the Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, USA, and the University of Texas at Austin–United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UT–UNESCO) India Initiative (U2I2), supported by Sam Kumar Family and Ram Bashyam Family.
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