According to a new study, work hours may change in the coming years due to the impact of global warming.
A new study published in the academic journal Nature Communications says that rising temperatures in the day might force people to reconsider the wide-prevailing 9 to 5 workday and shift work to cooler parts of the day – either in the evening or early in the morning.
India already loses around 101 billion hours a year on account of the heat, the most in the world, and risks seeing this number rise to 230 billion hours a year when global warming reaches 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels, the paper published in Nature on December 14 said.
Rising temperatures will affect people’s ability to work across domains – from the service industry, manufacturing industry, and others such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and construction industries.
The study however focuses on the impact of rising temperature on heavy labour, which is set to be affected the most since a significant amount of it involves spending time outdoors, away from air-conditioned chambers.
Exposure to heat is linked to multiple health complications such as premature death; workplace injuries; morbidity from heat-related illness; and acute kidney damage.
“When we overlay per-capita labour losses on the working-age population in heavy outdoor labour, we find that countries with large populations in South and East Asia experience the most work hours lost, both in the coolest hours and in the full workday, with India showing the largest heat exposure impacts on heavy labour (>101 billion hours lost/year), despite its modest average per-capita labour losses (162 lost hours a year),” the paper said.
Luke Parsons, a climate researcher at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who co-led the study, noted that many workers in the tropics are already stopping work in the afternoon because it’s too hot.
“Luckily, about 30% of this lost labour can still be recovered by moving it to the early morning. But with each additional degree of global warming, workers’ ability to adapt this way will swiftly decrease as even the coolest hours of the day quickly become too hot for continuous outdoor labour,” he said.
Article Credit: indiatimes