Ss20-06 Climate Change and the Labour Force – Building a Robust Evidence Base

Introduction Climate change already has negative effects on the labour force. However, limited evidence is available on the impacts on occupational injuries. Essentially, we do not know how many workers are being harmed by climate change. We will present state-of-art research on the impacts on several labour force and occupational health measures. Materials and Methods We use a large collection of micro-survey data aggregated to subnational regions across the world to estimate new, robust global and regional temperature and wet-bulb globe temperature exposure-response functions for labour supply and occupational injuries. We then estimate the effect of future climate change under 1.5°C, 2.0°C, and 3.0°C of global warming. We separately analysed low-exposure (indoors or outdoors in the shade) and high-exposure (outdoor in the sun) sectors. Results We found differentiated empirical regional and sectoral impacts for labour supply and more importantly occupational injuries. Climate change has already negatively affected the labour force effectiveness. Climate change will substantially reduce labour supply and increase the number of occupational injuries. These effects are projected to be higher for outdoor workers in full sunlight compared to indoors. In terms of regional differentiation, the highest impacts are projected to be in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Conclusions Our findings imply income and distributional consequences in terms of increased inequality and poverty, especially in low-income countries, where the labour effects are projected to be high, while injuries are expected to increase significantly. Our findings can be used to identify future labour impact hotspots and enable policies taking into account local labour force context.