Climate change will reduce our ability to work

As global temperatures increase we will experience more extreme heat events. As a consequence, there will be increases in lost working time. The health consequences of the extreme heat events will mean that there are fewer days available for people to work safely. This will especially impact people in jobs where they work out of doors. This means that things like construction projects will start to take longer and agriculture will be more difficult to reach required productivity levels. This will impact the GDP of countries, but by how much?

Cheng and colleagues (2023) modelled the potential impacts of different climate change scenarios in China and found that the losses ranged from 0.1% to 1.4% of total annual GDP in China. Limiting warming to less than 1.5°C can avoid these losses.

One aspect of this is that different regions will experience significantly greater losses due to the dominant industries and available infrastructure. Rural, agricultural areas will have greater losses than many municipal areas.

1.4% of GDP might not seem like much overall, but it isn’t just economic loss that this connects to. To just consider one area, there could be significant losses in food production from the lost labour time. This could increase food insecurity significantly. And increasing food insecurity will have other impacts, potentially also to the GDP.

There are financial costs to preventing climate change. But, there are also costs associated with a warming climate that need to be considered. This is just one example and perhaps only part of the example. After all, increased extreme heat is only one possible reason for lost labour hours. Consider the smoke that impacted North America last summer from the Canadian wildfires. These smoke events are just one more potential cause for lost working ability.