Abstract:
Extreme heat has become one of the most widespread occupational hazards in the world, and in South Asia, the burden falls most heavily on informal workers, who make up the large majority of the workforce and labour in occupations where the body is the main productive asset. Yet most of what heat takes from these workers goes uncounted, because conventional assessments rarely capture it. This talk draws on new IIED research covering over 700 informal worker households in Delhi, Agra, Ajmer and Dhaka, across outdoor and indoor work such as construction, brick kilns, road building, garment manufacturing and food processing. Using the Comprehensive Climate Impact Quantification (C-CIQ) toolkit, the study looked at how heat affects workers both at the worksite and at home, and quantified the economic and non-economic losses that result: lost workdays and wages, widening living wage deficits, heat-related illness and kidney damage, and the psychological and family strain that follows. Taken together, the study estimates these losses at close to 2% of GDP in India and 1.4% in Bangladesh each year. The session will also discuss what this means for policy, including anticipatory social protection, stronger workplace protections, compensation options, and how existing health and welfare systems could be used to protect those most exposed at a small fraction of the cost of the losses they now bear. The two reports are available here:

India: https://www.iied.org/22750iied
Bangladesh: https://www.iied.org/22755iied

Speaker Bio: Ritu Bharadwaj is Director of Climate Resilience, Finance and Loss & Damage at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), where she leads the ALL ACT initiative on locally led loss and damage action. Her work covers climate finance, loss and damage, social protection, migration, and resilience in least developed countries and small island states, and she developed the C-CIQ methodology for quantifying the economic and non-economic costs of climate impacts. She is a Lead Author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group II chapter on responses to losses and damages.

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