Climate change’s hidden toll: Night heat steals sleep as Gujarat loses 81 hours annually

Gandhinagar: Apart from the obvious impacts on climate, elevated overnight temperatures are majorly costing sleeping time of people. While the phenomena has been manifesting globally, in Gujarat, people have lost average 81.4 hours of sleep per year due to nocturnal heat during 2020-2025.

Residents in Ahmedabad lose an average of 78 hours of sleep annually to nighttime heat, while cities like Surat and Bhavnagar are experiencing 86 hours and 88 hours of heat-induced sleep loss each year respectively

The data was brought out in a global study conducted by Climate Central an independent non-profit group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about changing climate and how it affects people’s lives, that carried out a comprehensive global study analyzing 1,338 cities.


The findings of the study shows that globally, the average person lost nearly 56 hours of sleep per year due to high ambient temperatures during the 2020-2025 period. While cities across the Middle East experienced the highest levels of climate change-attributed sleep loss between 2020 and 2025, across nearly every city analyzed, the amount of temperature-related sleep loss linked to climate change has at least doubled since the early 1970s.

Interestingly, the study also noted that while “air conditioning can help protect people from hot nights, but access to cooling is often tied to income, and high temperatures can still reduce sleep when cooling is available.”

Climate change-linked sleep losses, the report noted is high in other already-hot places: “people in southern India and several countries in Southeast Asia lost 78 to 91 hours of sleep per year due to higher nighttime temperatures, including about eight to nine hours due to climate change”, it observed.

Calculating the seven cities if Gujarat covered under the study, which includes Ahmedabad, Bhavnagar, Bilimora, Jamnagar, Rajkot, Surat, and Vadodara, the state lost 81.4 hours of sleep per year due to nocturnal heat during 2020-2025, as compared to 76.1 hour annually in 1970-1975.

The study also covered 107 Indian cities and points out that between 2025, an average urban Indian lost 74.6 hours of sleep per year due to ambient nighttime heat as opposed to 69.5 hours per year in 1970-75.

The study indicates that while urban Gujarat’s sleep deficit at 81.4 hours annually is significantly higher than the national average of 74.6 hours, India is losing much more sleep than the global average of 49.6 hours per year.