Asian garment workers increasingly exposed to extreme heat due to climate change: Report

By Aamir Latif

KARACHI, Pakistan (AA) – Garment workers in South and Southeast Asian countries are bearing an increasing brunt of climate change in the form of heat stress, which causes exhaustion, fainting, and heat stroke, according to a recent report.

Billed “Hot Air: How will fashion adapt to accelerating climate change?” the report has been prepared by Global Labor Institute (GLI), a UK-based institute that provides research and education services to the local and international trade unions.

The report looks ahead at the economic damage that extreme heat and intense flooding can cause for fashion production, forecasting that nearly one million new apparel and footwear jobs will be “foregone” by 2030 in four key producers—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan and Vietnam—if they fail to make adaptation investments.

“They are cutting deeply into export earnings, employment and worker health. Without rapid adaptation, these falloffs in earnings and jobs will compound,“ the report further said.

It predicted that the falloff in nominal earnings by 2030 could be 22% across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

By 2050, it cautioned, these losses swing out to 68% and 8 million jobs in the four countries.

As climate change accelerates, the heat stress for apparel workers in South and South Asian cities is “accelerating and that heat waves are, on the whole, more frequent.”

More than 2.4 billion workers deal with excessive heat every year, as rising temperatures mean increasing evaporation and rainfall events are now more intense than in the past, according to the International Labor Organization estimates.