Rising temperatures are drastically affecting the labor sector, with significant impacts on workers’ health and economic growth. A new study, involving researchers from multiple institutions including CMCC, details how extreme heat is shaping the future of work in various sectors and regions around the world. This in-depth research highlights the urgent need for effective adaptations and forward-thinking policies to safeguard workers in an increasingly warming world.

Labour, which can make up 50% of total value added, is greatly affected by heat stress. A growing body of literature shows that heat impacts workers’ health and economic growth negatively, varying by region and sector. A detailed and nuanced understanding of how warming affects labour and how responses from workers, firms, and governments evolve is crucial as global temperatures rise.

Much of the research including reviews on heat stress impacts on the labour force has focused on individual components such as labour capacity. This is the first comprehensive review exploring explicitly the extent to which heat stress affects the individual components of the labour force and the corresponding occupational health and economic impacts.

Heat stress affects the health of workers through physiological and behavioral responses, in turn, affecting the number of hours they can work (labour supply), their output during these working hours (labour productivity), and physiological ability to undertake work safely (labour capacity). In extreme cases, heat stress can lead to worker deaths, as evident from the fact that nearly 10,000 workers are estimated to die every year in the Gulf countries due to heat stress.

“Our paper is the first comprehensive review to explore explicitly the extent to which heat stress affects the different components of the labour force – labour supply, labour productivity, and labour capacity, and the corresponding occupational health and economic impacts,” said CMCC’s researcher Shouro Dasgupta, lead author of the paper.

The relationship between labour force outcomes and temperature is largely non-linear, declining sharply beyond temperature thresholds. Projections suggest these negative impacts on the labour force – including geographic and sector variability – will worsen due to future warming. High-exposure sectors such as agriculture and construction are projected to experience the greatest losses under future climate change, with the projected declines being highest across Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

Labour losses are also expected in low-exposure sectors such as manufacturing and utilities, but Northern Europe tends to benefit in the short run. These labour impacts lead to considerable reductions in GDP and welfare, with projected GDP losses of 5.9% in South Asia and 3.6% in Africa. Mitigation efforts can deliver global health and economic co-benefits across all sectors and regions, but adaptation will likely be important for protecting workers from increased heat stress, even if warming is limited to 1.5°C.

“Increased costs to firms in terms of lost production, higher health care expenditure or insurance coverage are the economic impacts one usually associates to heath stress on the labour force,” said CMCC’s principal scientist Francesco Bosello. “Nonetheless, indirect impacts, those that spread from the affected sectors to the overall economic system, albeit less detectable, are equally relevant and by no means a concern just for “hot developing economies”. For instance, according to recent research, in the moderate warming RCP4.5 scenario these could reduce EU GDP by almost half a percentage point by 2050.”

Our understanding of the overall impact of heat stress on the labour force is lacking, providing a limited picture that overlooks cascading effects. Composite metrics exploring total impacts on the labour force are therefore needed. Furthermore, economic models that integrate these impacts can provide more realistic estimates of economic damages due to the effects of heat stress on the labour force. A complete picture would also contribute to the loss and damage debate in the historical context and allow more realistic identification of future heat–labour damage hotspots.

“Costs are unevenly distributed across countries, regions, sectors, tasks and workers,” said Bosello. “Therefore other indirect economic consequences can be expected not only in terms of sectoral and regional competitiveness, but also across worker types, for instance potentially increasing certain types of gender imbalances.”

To date, little consideration of socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors has been given in the heat–labour impact literature. As a result, differences in vulnerability between workers and their occupational settings, such as those in manual labour or outdoor jobs, have not always been considered, potentially leading to inaccuracies in estimating the severity of heat stress and the effectiveness of adaptation policies. Prioritizing better knowledge in this area has high potential to generate a robust evidence base that can inform local labour policies.

“All these aspects deserve in-depth investigation, especially in the light of the fact that, according to what we already know, climate change impacts on the labour force are one of the most important sources of economic losses,” said Bosello.

Early warning systems and collaborative research with relevant stakeholders in the labour force will be key to protect workers from increasing heat stress. Such research can also serve as the foundation for designing tailored plans to protect workers from extreme heat, requiring maximum temperature benchmarks to be implemented for work to safely occur.

“Our review makes it clear that the literature is incomplete,” said Dasgupta. “Future research in collaboration with occupational safety and health institutions, labour unions, and regulators can help to create early warning systems that, when combined with heat health action plans and maximum temperature regulations, can safeguard workers from extreme heat.”

More information:

Dasgupta, S., Robinson, E.J.Z., Shayegh, S. et al. Heat stress and the labour force. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 859–872 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00606-1