labor productivity

Background: Consensus climate modelling projects highly altered climates by 2100 with small but not low probabilities of reaching 6-9 deg mean annual increases in mean global temperature and much larger increases in some regions and seasons. Such temperatures imply increasingly large increases in areas where outdoor work is restricted because of physiological limits due to the local wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a function mainly of temperature and humidity, but also considering wind and radiation.

Global climate change will increase outdoor and indoor heat loads, and may impair health and productivity for millions of working people. This study applies physiological evidence about effects of heat, climate guidelines for safe work environments, climate modeling, and global distributions of working populations to estimate the impact of 2 climate scenarios on future labor productivity. In most regions, climate change will decrease labor productivity, under the simple assumption of no specific adaptation.