Heat waves in Africa and India: a multidisciplinary approach.

While the heat wave impacts on public health have been widely addressed in developed countries, less effort has been made to detect them and evaluate their impacts in least developed countries, especially in Africa and to a lesser extent in India, where climate is warmer and adaptation capacities are low. Climate and epidemiologic analyses show however that this problem is already present and climate projections indicate that such events should increase in frequency and intensity in the coming decades. However climate models display important temperature and radiative biases over this region, which must be reduced to provide robust information on the future evolution of heat waves. Moreover early warning systems have to face up to institutional malfunctions. This talk lays the elements for a multidisciplinary approach of tackling heat wave occurrences.