Context

Informal workers keep cities running. They build the roads and houses, pull the rickshaws, fire the brick kilns and staff the small workshops and garment units that cities depend on. They are also the people most exposed to extreme heat, and the least able to recover from it. In most countries they have no contract, no sick pay, no occupational health cover and no say over when or where they work.

IIED's research with 538 informal worker households in Ajmer, Delhi and Agra in India, and 175 households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, measured what heat takes from these workers. The study applied IIED's Comprehensive Climate Impact Quantification (C-CIQ) toolkit to capture both economic and non-economic losses. Three findings stand out:

• The losses are large and mostly invisible: In India, outdoor workers lose an average of 24.29 workdays a year to heat and indoor workers lose 14.78. Most of this loss happens while workers are still at work, through reduced productivity, so assessments that count only absence understate the damage. These lost days translate into wage losses of US$151.20 a year for an outdoor worker and US$89.23 for an indoor worker, in households already earning 45.3% and 37.7% below a living wage.
• Indoor workers are no better off: Workers in enclosed, poorly ventilated workshops report heat stress comparable to those working in direct sun. Policy and research have tended to treat indoor work as lower risk. The evidence does not support that.
• Heat does not end at the worksite: Workers return to rented or temporary homes with tin, asbestos or tarpaulin roofs, low ceilings, crowded rooms and poor access to water and sanitation. Housing conditions are as important as workplace conditions in explaining severe heat-related illness, and for heatstroke they matter more. The psychological stress index more than doubles in the hot season, and workers link this to poor sleep, income insecurity and having no way to escape the heat at work or at home. Nearly one in five workers show symptoms consistent with acute kidney injury, which for some will become chronic disease.

These patterns are not limited to South Asia. Informal workers in cities across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean face the same combination of hot work, hot homes and no safety net. What differs is the institutional response, and the gaps in it.

Most of the measures that would reduce these losses sit with city and regional governments: housing and building standards, water and sanitation, shade and cooling spaces, heat action plans, worksite inspection, worker registration and primary health care. But cities are not able to fund income protection on their own, and heat rarely appears in the disaster management systems built for floods, storms and earthquakes. Protecting workers needs national social protection systems that are triggered by heat, workplace rules that apply to the people most exposed, and climate finance, including loss and damage finance, that reaches the local level. This session is about how those levels can work together.

Objectives

The event will:

• Share new evidence on the economic, health and psychological costs of heat for informal workers, at work and at home, and the C-CIQ approach cities can use to cost these losses themselves.
• Hear from city and national governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean on what they are doing to protect informal workers from heat and where their mandates and budgets fall short.
• Identify what cities need from national social protection systems, technical assistance providers, funders and the loss and damage finance architecture, and agree a short set of asks to carry into COP31 discussions.

Proposed agenda and format

13:30 to 13:37 — Welcome and what the evidence shows (7 min)
Ritu Bharadwaj, Director, Climate Resilience, Finance and Loss and Damage, IIED
Purpose of the session, a short clip from the documentary Too hot to work, too poor to rest, and the main findings: workdays and wages lost, why indoor workers are no better off, no respite at home, and the health and psychological costs that conventional assessments leave out.

13:37 to 13:57 — Panel 1: What cities and national governments are doing (20 min)
Four short interventions of 5 minutes each on what is being done to protect heat-exposed workers, and what stands in the way:

• Ambassador Antônio Francisco Da Costa e Silva Neto, Ambassador and Chief International Advisor, Ministry of Cities, Government of Brazil, and Co-chair, Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP): multilevel partnerships and what CHAMP asks of national governments
• Shahadat Hussein, Additional District Commissioner and Administrator, Sirajganj Pourashava (Municipality), Bangladesh
• Dr Dharam Raj Uprety, Chief Executive, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), Government of Nepal: heat as an emerging hazard in a disaster management system built for floods and earthquakes
• H.E. Ruleta Camacho-Thomas, Climate Ambassador, Government of Antigua and Barbuda: heat, informal work and small island states

13:57 to 14:17 — Panel 2: What cities need from the wider system (20 min)
Four short interventions of 4.5 minutes each on the evidence, infrastructure, technical assistance and finance that would let cities act at scale:

• Arthy Hartwell, Head of Policy for Climate and Health, Wellcome: heat and health evidence, and what funders need to see
• Dr Suchismita Mukhopadhyay, Lead Specialist, Advocacy, Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI): heat-resilient infrastructure, housing and worksites
• Lamis Elkhatieb, Research Coordinator, Loss and Damage Youth Coalition (LDYC).
• Sandra Romboli, Program Manager, Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD): how loss and damage finance can reach the local level
• Dr Elizabeth Carabine, Senior Programme Manager, Santiago network for loss and damage: technical assistance available to cities and countries (tbc).

14:13 to 14:26 — Moderated discussion and questions from the floor (10 min)
One question to the panel: what is the one thing that would let cities act at scale, and who has to provide it? Followed by questions from participants.

14:26 to 14:30 — Closing (3 min)
Three asks from cities to national governments and climate funds.