Otto M

Occupational health is particularly affected by high heat exposures in workplaces, which will be an increasing problem as climate change progresses. People working in jobs of moderate or heavy work intensity in hot environments are at particular risk, owing to exposure to high environmental heat and internal heat production. This heat needs to be released to protect health, and such release is difficult or impossible at high temperatures and high air humidity. A range of clinical health effects can occur, and the heat-related physical

Increased environmental heat levels as a result of climate change present a major challenge to the health, wellbeing and sustainability of human communities in already hot parts of this planet. This challenge has many facets from direct clinical health effects of daily heat exposure to indirect effects related to poor air quality, poor access to safe drinking water, poor access to nutritious and safe food and inadequate protection from disease vectors and environmental toxic chemicals. The increasing environmental heat is a threat to environmental sustainability.

The impacts of climate change on global temperatures profoundly affect people’s ability to sustain their livelihoods as well as their health; both of these dimensions in turn influence the migration of people. Indeed, increasing heat related to climate change is likely to result in more disruptive events, such as frequent droughts, wildfires, episodes of extreme temperatures and heat waves. Such events are already directly and indirectly displacing large numbers of people each year and likely to lead to the migration of more people in the future.

Ambient heat exposure is a well-known health hazard, which reduces human performance and work capacity at heat levels already common in tropical and subtropical areas. Various health problems have been reported. Increasing heat exposure during the hottest seasons of each year is a key feature of global climate change. Heat exhaustion and reduced human performance are often overlooked in climate change health impact analysis. Later this century, many among the four billion people who live in hot areas worldwide will experience significantly reduced work capacity owing to climate change. In

Developed in collaboration with the ILO, the International Organization for Migration, UNI Global Union, the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Organization of Employers, and ACT Alliance, and together with the Climate Vulnerable Forum and the support of the the World Health Organisation, this report looks at the impact of rising temperatures due to climate change on the workforce.

Climate change threatens human health in many ways, through heat waves, extreme weather events, and shifts in disease vectors, as well as economic and social stresses on populations living in or trying to escape areas affected by seawater intrusion, drought, lower agricultural productivity, and floods. 1 In the short term, most of these impacts could be substantially ameliorated by actions to reduce background disease risks and other known causes of vulnerability.

A feature of climate impacts on occupational health and safety are physiological limits to carrying out physical work at high heat exposure. Heat stress reduces a workers work capacity, leading to lower hourly labour productivity and economic output. We used existing weather sta-tion data and climate modeling grid cell data to describe heat conditions (calculated as Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, WBGT) in South-East Asia.