No escaping the heat: health and economic impacts of heat stress on informal workers in urban Bangladesh

Extreme heat has become one of the world’s most widespread occupational hazards, with Bangladesh among the countries most exposed.

For Bangladesh’s informal workers, rising temperatures are reducing productivity, eroding incomes, worsening health and deepening poverty.

Yet most of this burden goes unaccounted for, because conventional assessments rarely capture it. This report measures that burden and sets out what it would take to reduce it.

Using the Comprehensive Climate Impact Quantification (C-CIQ) toolkit and a survey of 175 informal worker households in Bangladesh’s capital and largest city, Dhaka, we examine how heat affects workers both at work and at home, quantify the resulting economic and non-economic loss and damage, and assess the policy responses needed to protect those most exposed.