Increased labor losses and decreased adaptation potential in a warmer world

Luke A Parsons,June T Spector,Yuqiang Zhang,Michelle Tigchelaar,Drew Shindell

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-27328-y

Abstract

Working in hot and potentially humid conditions creates health and well-being risks that will increase as the planet warms. It has been proposed that workers could adapt to increasing temperatures by moving labor from midday to cooler hours. Here, we use reanalysis data to show that in the current climate approximately 30% of global heavy labor losses in the workday could be recovered by moving labor from the hottest hours of the day. However, we show that this particular workshift adaptation potential is lost at a rate of about 2% per degree of global warming as early morning heat exposure rises to unsafe levels for continuous work, with worker productivity losses accelerating under higher warming levels. These findings emphasize the importance of finding alternative adaptation mechanisms to keep workers safe, as well as the importance of limiting global warming.

Highlights

Working in hot and potentially humid conditions creates health and well-being risks that will increase as the planet warms
When we regress global temperatures against annual, global sums of labor lost from the International Labour Organization (ILO) heavy labor sectors, we find that in the last 42 years (1979–2020), ~101 billion hours/year (±6 billion hours) of additional work was lost in the 12-h workday per degree of global warming (r2 = 0.89)
In the face of a warming world, workers are already shifting schedules to limit midday heat exposure[20,21,22,23], but daylight hours are limited[26], and as shown here, background global warming will increasingly restrict the ability of workers to adapt to warming by time shifting (Fig. 1)

Summary

Introduction

Working in hot and potentially humid conditions creates health and well-being risks that will increase as the planet warms. We show that this particular workshift adaptation potential is lost at a rate of about 2% per degree of global warming as early morning heat exposure rises to unsafe levels for continuous work, with worker productivity losses accelerating under higher warming levels. Basic adaptation measures may help reduce impacts of increasing future heat for outdoor workers These measures include ensuring adequate hydration, rest breaks in the shade, acclimatization to heat, personal cooling strategies[18], and moving work hours to cooler parts of the day. We combine heat exposure estimates from reanalysis data[1] with patterns of warming[16] from the latest climate model projections to examine workshift ‘adaptation potential’, or what percent of work time is recoverable if laborers move work hours from the hottest hours of the day to cooler hours, and how work loss and adaptation potential change as the planet warms. Here we define ‘adaptation potential’ as the ability of workers to shift labor to cooler hours, as mentioned above, adaptation mechanisms are not limited to time shifting

Methods

Results

Conclusion