Crushed by the blazing sun, the populace of South and Southeast Asia use the smallest shelter to shelter themselves and pray for refreshing rains as record temperatures hit the region.
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Bangladesh last week experienced the highest recorded temperature in almost 60 years, and in India at least 13 people died from heatstroke, according to local media, as did two residents in Thailand.
“It’s getting hotter every year,” said Mikalo Nicholls, hiding under his umbrella near Bangkok’s Lumpini Park on Wednesday.
She says this scorching time in Bangkok, which forces her to spend as much time indoors or in the shade as possible, is the hottest time she’s experienced in the five years she’s lived in the Thai capital.
The country’s meteorological service said on Wednesday that temperatures in western Tak province hit a record high of 44.6 degrees Celsius on April 15, and warned the weather would persist into next week.
“It’s possible that this year’s heat will be exacerbated by human activity,” said Thanasit Iamanchai, the service’s deputy director-general, echoing warnings from UN experts in March of higher risks of extreme episodes related to the virus of global warming when they estimated it in their first report in 2014.
The kingdom usually experiences a hot spell before the rainy season, but the sun has shown extreme intensity this year.
“This year’s record heat in Thailand, China and South Asia is clearly a climate trend and will pose public health challenges for years to come,” said Fahad Saeed, a researcher at the Climate Institute Analytics in Pakistan.
In addition, “the extreme heat we have experienced in recent days will hit the poorest hardest,” he adds. “It could even pose a life-threatening risk to those who don’t have access to air conditioning or proper shelter.”
The situation in Burma is similar. In Yangon, 42-year-old taxi driver Ko Thet Aung said he had to stop working if the temperature was too high during the day.
In Bangladesh, hundreds of people gathered in Dakha, the capital, this week to pray for life-saving rain as the temperature hit 40.6 degrees Celsius, the highest since the 1960s.
“They also prayed for the temperature to drop and for protection from the heat wave,” local police chief Abul Kalam Azad said.
In India, 13 people died of heatstroke during an outdoor ceremony in the west of the country on Sunday.
Urmila Das, a 42-year-old mother from Guwahati (northwest), said she had given up sending her children to school.
“We’re not used to this heat,” she said.
“We usually have rain in the region from mid-March. But we have no rain.