Extreme Weather Events: Why Outdoor Workers' Rights Are a Matter of Climate Justice

Multiple research and journalistic reports confirm the double whammy of excessive heat on outdoor workers -- on health as well as on livelihood. The impact on health ranges from minor ones, such as dehydration, body ache, weakness, exhaustion, fever, to major impacts, such as fainting, and death.

Livelihoods are impacted due to reasons like diminished productivity of workers, inability to work in excessive heat, loss of business, and income. There have been similar findings in a study on heat stress impact on the street vendors in Pune, Maharashtra.

While the heatwave predictions are at district levels, it exacerbates within urban areas and outdoor workers, such as street vendors, face the brunt as they can’t control their working environment unlike office-based workers who may have fans and air-conditioning.

This summer, unprecedented duration, intensity, and frequency of heatwaves were witnessed across India. According to India Meteorological Department, heatwaves are a period of unusually high temperatures as compared to what is normally expected over a region. While the criteria slightly differ for plane, hilly areas and coastal areas, temperatures should remain higher for more than 2 days to become a heatwave.

In India, heatwaves occur mostly during March to June. Records indicate that since 1956 till now, 11 summers had heat waves (temperatures more than 45 Degree Celsius). However, the frequency has increased in the 21st Century. Consecutively, 2022, 2023 and 2024 have experienced heat waves, while 2024 has experienced the highest temperatures of 52.9 Degrees. The death toll so far has been more than 200 this year.

As per predictions, this trend (heat wave) is likely to increase every year, primarily because of climate change. Concerns are, therefore, being raised about lack of policy and action to protect outdoor workers, such as agricultural workers, construction workers, transport workers, street vendors, and brick kiln workers.

However, safeguards from climate change impacts are still far from being seen as rights that outdoor workers deserve and must claim, although protection from climate change has been recently acknowledged by the Supreme Court as a part of the fundamental rights to life and equality. Yet, an understanding of climate justice is starkly missing in the entire discourse.

A fight for justice and rights

Why is there a question of justice when we speak of climate change? Because climate change is caused by human activities. Also, different communities have contributed differently to global warming that causes climate change. Western nations have amassed tremendous wealth by colonising and industrial activities that have caused far more carbon emissions than the rest of the nations, many of which have also been colonised and exploited by the West.

Similarly, the capitalist class owning industries has contributed far more to global warming than the working class that is engaged in mostly in manual labour, gets underpaid in return, and survives on the least resources causing minimal carbon emissions.

However, when it comes to bearing the impact of climate change, it is the poor, the marginalised, the working class, and the underdeveloped nations that find themselves more disadvantaged because of their inability to protect themselves and cover their losses. Climate change “vulnerability” is commonly understood to increase with one’s “exposure” to climate conditions and her “sensitivity” to it, and decrease with improvements in “adaptive capacity.”

Outdoor workers are far more exposed than others to climate conditions, such as heat, rain or cold. They are also more sensitive to adverse impacts of climate change than those with access to better locations, infrastructure, resources, livelihood security, nutrition, and healthcare.

Even the spatial composition of the outdoors affects the heat experienced for workers, such as street vendors. For example, crowded market places where vendors work, usually lack vegetation, water bodies, and have densely packed buildings that retain heat and increase minimum temperature (night) and maximum temperatures.

Next, most outdoor workers struggling to make ends meet in India’s vast informal economy, also have poor “adaptive capacity,” that is, one’s ability to minimise loss and damage or maximise profit with changing climate conditions. Socio-economically marginalising factors, such as gender, caste, race, ethnicity, age, or disability, render individuals and communities further vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Outdoor workers having made the least contribution to global warming but are in the forefront of bearing the impact of climate change. This is a matter of injustice. Not being given the needed policy framework and funds to cope with their climate vulnerabilities further adds to this climate injustice.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate justice as “justice that links development and human rights to achieve a human-centred approach to addressing climate change, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable people and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its impacts equitably and fairly.” Securing the “rights” of climate vulnerable communities is very much at the core of IPCC’s idea of climate justice. Ensuring safeguards for outdoor workers against climate change impacts should thus be seen as a matter of their rights.

A lacking policy

India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, released in 2008, has no component that addresses the vulnerabilities of outdoor and informal workers. These workers have thereby been excluded from many state-level climate change action plans as well. Not surprisingly, none of the projects funded under the National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change, as listed on the NABARD website, address the vulnerabilities of outdoor workers.

In disaster management policy, such as the National Disaster Management Plan, 2019, outdoor workers are acknowledged to be vulnerable to disasters, such as heat waves, chemical (industrial) disasters, and biological and public health emergencies. However, no measures have been included in the plan that are specific to outdoor workers besides assessing their vulnerability and improving their awareness. Outdoor workers’ particular vulnerabilities to disasters are not addressed. Also, there is no attention paid to outdoor workers in the plan for urban flooding, which specifically affects outdoor workers in urban areas.

In India, Heat Action Plans (HAPs) are prepared to deal with heat waves by increasing preparedness to reduce the impacts of heat. These HAPs are being prepared at state, district and city levels. It is observed that there is no consistency of scale – i.e., not every state or district or city would prepare HAPs.

The most prominent lacuna in the HAPs is that it does not consider local conditions but follow national guidelines. These HAPs focus on individuals but ignore their socio-economic differences and thus, ignore the vulnerable populations having collective vulnerabilities. It is also not clear how much budget gets allocated to prepare HAPs and then subsequently for mitigation measures. Thus, it is difficult to for the transition from preparing HAPs to effective implementation.

Further, while outdoor workers have received some attention in the country’s HAPs, this attention has been mostly limited to construction workers. Other outdoor workers, such as street vendors, gig workers, transport workers, sanitation workers, waste pickers, and hamaal workers get no mention. The focus being highly urban, agricultural workers, mining workers, fish workers, saltpan workers, cattle-rearers and the likes have also received no attention. Similar lapses are there in the 2018 draft of the National Action Plan for Climate Change and Human Health and the National Action Plan on Heat Related Illnesses, 2021.

On the other side, the laws and policies on workplace safety in India do not acknowledge and address climate change vulnerabilities of workers. These include the new Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 and the National Policy on Safety, Health and Environment at Workplace, 2009. The various schemes and missions on skill development and livelihood support such as Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana - National Urban Livelihoods Mission and Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana are equally myopic and lacking in acknowledging and addressing climate change risks that workers face.

Workers’ challenges

The International Labour Organisation has recommended that workers and workplaces should be at the centre of conceptualising climate change action. It has clearly directed that heat action plans should address workers’ safety and health. However, India’s outdoor workers remain excluded from the nation’s climate change policies. This keeps them in a marginalised position, incapable of accessing resources to protect themselves or even participating in the climate change discourse and decision-making.

Moreover, when the law of the land does not secure workers’ right to protect themselves from climate change, the discourse is unable to move past the language of aid, assistance and charity to that of rights and justice. As a result, we are not finding outdoor workers in India demanding resources to cope with climate extremes as their rights. They themselves are yet to realise that it is their right and a matter of justice. 

At the global level, the discussions on climate change have started paying serious attention to loss and damage due to climate change. An understanding of climate justice is at the heart of these discussions so as to make sure that those with least contribution to global warming should not have to pay undue cost of it. These international conversations should be brought to regional and local levels to question how the losses of outdoor workers should be compensated.

Meanwhile, as we also found in our study with street vendors in Pune on heat stress impact, they continue to bear economic losses without any social security, insurance or compensation from anywhere to cover them. Such losses include but are not limited to loss of customers due to severe weather conditions, goods spoiled, and loss in productivity. A loss of income that is already at the subsistence level, further renders them incapable of coping with worsening climate. Diminished income can further push them to work in severe weather conditions, risking their health and safety.

There is no escape from acknowledging outdoor workers to be at the frontline of bearing the climate change impacts, and unfairly so. Also, there is no better recourse than safeguarding their right to protect themselves from climate change impacts through appropriate law, policy, and funding. Any delay in this is further adding to the climate injustice they are experiencing. 

The writers are faculty at FLAME University, Pune, Maharashtra. The views are personal.