Many parts of South Asia already have home-grown solutions to battle the heat. The rise of cheap construction without consideration for local climate conditions have made them less prevalent.
For example, in Jaipur, traditional stepwells dug under houses absorb a lot of the mid-day summer heat. With some engineering, these can be scaled up to cool entire neighborhoods with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps [1].
It's easy to be all doom and gloom about climate change. But some mitigations are staring at us in the face. Others will take a while to become usable/cheap enough to be deployed at scale.
It really depends on if prospective climate change is something that has prior solutions that can be adapted for modern land use and urban demands. There's always been historically appropriate architectural typologies to manage regional climate, but also massive enough climate shifts that cause entire regions to be abandoned. Typically it's water shortage, which can be a zero-sum problem, India/Pakistan, Egypt/Ethiopia, China and all of Mekong etc. But yeah, I think inhospitable heat and humidity in this study is largely... technically and economically solvable with building interventions, both historic and speculative. There's already many societies that's dependent on conditioned air at scale, but very few on desalinating water at scale.
For example, in Jaipur, traditional stepwells dug under houses absorb a lot of the mid-day summer heat. With some engineering, these can be scaled up to cool entire neighborhoods with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps [1].
It's easy to be all doom and gloom about climate change. But some mitigations are staring at us in the face. Others will take a while to become usable/cheap enough to be deployed at scale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump