Too hot to work, too poor to rest: health and economic impacts of heat stress on informal workers in urban India
Extreme heat is imposing a large and rising burden on India’s informal workers, who face continuous exposure both at work and at home. 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 538 informal worker households across three heat-exposed cities – Agra, Ajmer and Delhi – 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.
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Available at https://www.iied.org/22750iied
