These findings followed two consecutively brutal summers. Death counts from heatwaves across Europe dominated news cycles this year as the continent’s aging infrastructure struggled to cool down. “Heat domes” trapped heat across the United States.
According to the International Labor Organization, billions of workers around the world are exposed to extreme heat every year. While the vast majority of them do not die, many suffer deeply from the arduous ignominy of a life exposed to heat, day and night, year after year.
Partnering with our team at Harvard, the Self Employed Women’s Association in India has recruited women from trades including street vendors, waste recyclers, home-based artisans, and farmers to participate in the Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies (CommHATS) study. For 13 months, each woman is equipped with a wrist wearable, microsensors measuring heat and humidity at home and workplaces, labs measuring critical biomarkers, and surveys documenting home and work layouts, wellbeing, and wages. Considered together, this data constructs one of the world’s largest such databases of the impact of heat on human health.
Through community meetings and WhatsApp groups, research findings are regularly shared with all participants, who routinely ask how the data will help improve their lives. Early findings, which we will share at New York Climate Week, reveal devastating wage losses on hot days, shortened sleep spans, and high cardiac stress. This kind of relentless, unforgiving heat forces a different kind of reckoning that goes beyond OSHA regulations and market solutions.
The CommHATS project is implemented daily by grassroots workers, a testament to its ease of use. They check on the sensors and the wearables, and most importantly, the participating workers. The participants are invested in the questions, the tools, and the analysis. The tool is thus built for scale and can help communities anywhere in the world understand what their environmental exposure is at an actionable scale that is relevant to decision-making. It helps measure exposure as well as the efficacy of interventions.
In our study, we find that the cost of our collective inaction is already being borne by those whose lives are already stressed. The human spirit is resilient, and perhaps life goes on. But in this warming world, life is compromised and diminished. Millions may still live through extreme heat and not yet enter the death counts, but they cannot thrive.
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