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

This report measures the burden that heat places on workers 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 Dhaka, covering outdoor workers in construction and rickshaw pulling and indoor workers in garment manufacturing, 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. 

This study has shown that heat exposure imposes substantial costs on workers, their households and the wider economy of Bangladesh. Across the highest-exposure divisions, workers lose billions in wages each year, while millions face worsening health, rising debt and a widening gap between what they earn and what they need to live with dignity. Yet much of what is needed to reduce these losses already exists. The NID system is in place. The bKash and Nagad payment platforms are in use for government transfers. Forecast-based anticipatory cash transfers have already been tested. The food programmes are funded and the weather information needed to trigger action is already produced. The only exception is health, where no scheme covers the urban informal workforce, so the task here is to build, rather than connect, protection. 

Outside of health, however, the challenge is not one of initiating something new, but of coordination. Connecting the existing systems to heat, activating them before losses occur and extending protection from the workplace into the home would transform heat response from a reactive exercise into a form of anticipatory social protection. The costs to provide this support are modest compared with the losses already being borne by workers. Acting early through existing systems is an economic investment in protecting livelihoods, health and productivity in a warming Bangladesh.