
A woman sells flowers in Madurai, India (Photo: ILO, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO)
This webinar highlighted the health challenges facing urban informal workers from climate change and the responses that can address them.
Across many African and Asian cities, the informal economy provides most livelihoods as well as key goods and services that enable these urban areas to function and to thrive.
Despite their importance, very little attention has been paid to how climate change is affecting and will affect the livelihoods, health and wellbeing of low-income urban informal workers. Still fewer efforts have explored climate-related risks in light of longstanding threats facing informal workers, such as occupational health hazards and low-quality living environments.
This webinar on Wednesday, 8 June included presentations from research teams in India and Zimbabwe, as well as commentary and analysis from global experts.
We heard from project partners, the Urban Health Resource Centre (UHRC), India, the Training and Research Support Centre (TARSC), Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA), Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organising and IIED.
A question-and answer session followed the discussion.
Case studies
In advance of the event, three case studies were published focusing on:
- How the health of informal workers is impacted by climate change in India and Zimbabwe
- How informal home-based garment workers invest in equipment and learn new skills in order to contribute to the family income in India, and
- How women working in peri-urban agriculture in India have to adapt to changing circumstances
Event coverage
A recording of the event is available below or on IIED's YouTube channel, where viewers are also able to use timestamps to go straight to specific speakers.
Funding
This project was commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Global Health Research Group using UK aid from the UK government. The views expressed are those of the speaker(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.
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Contact
Sarah Tucker (sarah.tucker@iied.org), coordinator, IIED's Human Settlements research group