Extreme Heat Could Slash Women Workers’ Income Across India: Report
The report recommends that adaptation strategies must be designed alongside vulnerable communities, particularly women in the informal sector
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A new report by Heat Resilience and Action and Her Action (HERA) found that extreme heat will have a disproportionate burden on women, especially those who work in the informal sector. This will result in a collective loss of $57 billion annually in earnings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These losses are projected to rise 44% by 2050.
The report estimated that without adaptation measures, the economic impact of heat would increase three to five fold by 2050. It warned that extreme heat is no longer a public health emergency but a growing economic threat that could shrink city economies, deepen inequality, and disproportionately harm women working in the informal sector.
The report said the impact of heat is already visible across four representative cities like Ahmedabad (India), Bangkok (Thailand), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and Monterrey (Mexico). Annual economic losses in these cities amount to between 4% and 8% of the city's GDP due to reduced productivity, higher healthcare costs, and wider economic disruptions.
Women Face Disproportionate Losses Due to Heat
According to the report, women experience greater health, economic, and social impacts from rising temperatures because of a combination of physiological vulnerability, unpaid care responsibilities, lower incomes, and limited access to cooling, healthcare and social protection.
Women in the informal sector often work in occupations such as street vending, domestic work, waste picking, and market trading, where they remain exposed to extreme heat with little or no labour protection. Informal housing conditions further increase their exposure, with poorly insulated homes trapping heat overnight.
The report said that heat-related productivity losses ranged from 3% in Monterrey to 11% in Bangkok. Because women reinvest up to 90% of their earnings into their households, declining incomes also reduce spending on children's education, nutrition and healthcare, creating long-term developmental consequences.
Heat Response Plans Delivered The Highest Returns
The report also suggested inexpensive adaptation measures that can help reduce both mortality and economic losses, including heat response plans, labour protections, urban greening, cool roofs, and parametric heat insurance that could reduce heat-related deaths by 36% across the cities that were analysed in the report while generating benefits that will outweigh implementation costs.
The report said that among the measures evaluated, Heat Response Plans delivered the highest returns, generating benefits worth between 12 and 90 times their cost. The report also cited Ahmedabad's Heat Action Plan as an example, noting that it prevented an estimated 2,380 deaths between 2014 and 2015 through early warning systems, public awareness campaigns, and coordinated emergency response.
Need for Inclusive Planning
The report warned that conventional heat adaptation measures often fail to reach those most at risk because they assume access to mobile phones, literacy, formal employment, or safe mobility.
The report recommended that governments need to prioritise sustainable financing for heat adaptation, strengthen coordination across agencies, improve gender-disaggregated data collection, and expand public awareness to build "heat literacy." It said that adaptation strategies must be designed alongside vulnerable communities, particularly women in the informal sector, to maximise both social and economic returns.