Mahila Housing Trust uses affordable reflective roof coatings to cool low-income homes by up to 5°C and pioneering climate risk insurance to protect women’s livelihoods when extreme heat makes work impossible, scaling this heat-resilience model across India and beyond.
As the planet warms, one of the defining stories of this century will be how communities are not just learning how to stop climate change, but how to live safely with the impacts already here. Few places illustrate that challenge more clearly than India.
Despite contributing only a small share of historic global emissions, India is experiencing increasingly dangerous heatwaves that hit low-income communities hardest. With temperatures rising, the threat to urban livelihoods is acute and growing.
For low-income and informal sector women, the challenge is existential. Their homes; often with metal or concrete roofs in poorly ventilated spaces, trap heat to dangerous levels. When temperatures become unsafe, they face an impossible choice: avoid the extreme heat and lose the day’s income, or work and risk their health. Families already living hand-to-mouth cannot absorb that loss.
Mahila Housing Trust recognised this crisis early. In 2015, women in low-income settlements identified extreme heat alongside flooding, water scarcity and disease as interconnected threats to their homes, health and ability to earn. Globally, the stakes are as high: 200 cities with heat protection plans are needed by 2030 to reach the positive tipping point where cities are designed to naturally stay cool, helping avoid heat-related deaths worldwide.
Mahila Housing Trust’s response combines practical cooling with community action and financial protection. The centrepiece is an affordable solar-reflective roof coating that bounces sunlight away and can lower indoor temperatures by up to 5°C, a difference that matters profoundly for sleep, work and care. The coating also cuts reliance on fans and coolers, lowering electricity bills and carbon emissions.
The organisation has directly supported 36,500 cool roofs. Their method builds trust by demonstration: model homes with temperature monitoring let residents see the difference for themselves, and women trained as Climate Saathis help neighbours understand heat risks and bring community priorities to municipal authorities. They are working with local government to embed this approach in Heat Action Plans in cities including Jaipur, Indore and Jalgaon.
But cooling roofs alone cannot restore lost income. Since 2018, Mahila Housing Trust has pioneered parametric climate risk insurance, a product that uses independently measured temperature data to trigger automatic payments when agreed thresholds are crossed, without requiring families to prove their financial loss. So far, 49,000 women across Delhi and Gujarat have received this insurance, providing immediate financial support when dangerous temperatures disrupt their ability to earn.
By 2030, Mahila Housing Trust aims to protect three million households through cool roofs and reach 300,000 women with climate insurance, while expanding its approach beyond India, across Asia and into Africa. This work is turning community-driven action into replicable city-wide models, driving affordability and accessibility of products, and creating the conditions for a global positive tipping point where cities are designed to naturally stay cool.
Heat is already changing the daily choices women make; whether they can work, sleep, care for children or keep food and medicines safe. A cool roof can make a home more livable, but it cannot replace the income lost when it becomes too dangerous to work. Our approach empowers communities to take action, with women helping to design the solutions and city governments helping to scale them.
Being selected as an Earthshot Prize Finalist can help us build the partnerships, evidence and investment needed to reach significantly more households and show that practical heat resilience can become part of how cities everywhere prepare for climate change.
