Not everyone is equally vulnerable to heat – and workers are paying the price

Recent heatwaves affecting large parts of Europe – including Austria, where new temperature records and unprecedented numbers of hot days and tropical nights have been recorded – have highlighted how profoundly extreme heat affects everyday life. As these events become more frequent and intense and another period of extreme heat is already forecast for Austria, they are also moving to the forefront of public and political debate. Extreme heat is making daily life and working conditions considerably more difficult for many people and increasing the pressure on essential sectors like health systems. Despite important policy progress in Austria, the events show that vulnerability persists. To reduce vulnerability effectively, we need a better understanding of how and why people experience heatwaves differently.

The DISCC.at project explored how different aspects of people’s lives combine to shape their vulnerability to extreme heat, and what that means for climate adaptation policy in Austria. Our findings showed that vulnerability is not determined by a single factor, but by the interaction of social, economic, environmental, and institutional conditions. At the same time, we found an important blind spot: despite their key role in the provision of goods and services that societies rely on, workers have received surprisingly little attention in climate adaptation discourses so far. To address this, IIASA’s ongoing Transform-Labor project investigates the underlying conditions – or root causes – that make construction and long-term care workers in Austria vulnerable to extreme heat and identifies transformative climate adaptation options.

Austria has already taken important steps to protect people from extreme heat through national and local heat action plans (Hitzeschutzpläne) and the new heat protection regulations (Hitzeschutzverordnung). These measures play an important role in reducing immediate risks and protecting workers during periods of extreme heat. But climate adaptation needs to go beyond that by reducing vulnerability, which requires addressing its root causess.

Understanding unequal heat vulnerability in Austria

Whether people experience a hot day as uncomfortable or as a serious threat to their health and wellbeing depends on existing social inequalities related to age, income, housing conditions, health status, and occupation. People may face particularly high risk when several of these factors occur together. For example (see also the CCCA Factsheet for further examples):

• People with chronic illnesses or disabilities who have limited access to cooling and social support;
• Single parents balancing care responsibilities while living in overheated housing;
• Migrants facing language or institutional barriers alongside insecure employment or poor housing conditions;
• Workers performing physically demanding jobs outdoors or in hot indoor environments with precarious contracts, alongside poor housing conditions.

These examples show that vulnerability cannot be understood by looking at individual factors. Instead, different aspects of people’s lives combine to shape their experience of extreme heat. To reduce vulnerability, however, we also need to look deeper and understand the underlying conditions that create vulnerability in the first place. Limited access to infrastructure and decision-making processes, unequal power structures, and unequal distribution of resources and services all shape people’s vulnerability to heat. Climate change therefore does not create vulnerability from scratch, it reinforces existing inequalities as shown above. This becomes particularly visible in the world of work, where the way provisioning systems and labor are organized plays a central role in determining workers’ vulnerability.

Workers: a blind spot in climate adaptation

Although heat exposure at work is increasingly recognized, especially through the recent adoption of the Austrian Hitzeschutzverordnung, the impact of extreme temperatures on workers remains underexplored in adaptation research. We still know relatively little about the (working) conditions that make some workers particularly vulnerable.

This is striking because the provision of many essential goods and services depends on workers who cannot avoid heat exposure. For example, construction workers build and maintain the infrastructure needed for resilient communities and everyday life, and long-term care workers support many of the people most vulnerable to heat, whose care needs often increase during heatwaves. Agriculture, gastronomy, and logistics also depend on workers who continue working despite dangerous temperatures.

Many of these essential jobs are characterized by staff shortages, physically demanding work, time pressures, precarious forms of employment, gendered divisions of labor, and limited bargaining power. All underlying factors that may increase vulnerability to extreme heat. Yet discussions about working under extreme heat continue to focus mainly on productivity losses and other economic costs. The implications, however, extend much further: heat threatens workers’ health and wellbeing while also affecting the quality and long-term provision of essential goods and services that underpin human wellbeing.

What that means for climate adaptation research and policy

If vulnerability is shaped by the conditions in which people live and how work is organized rather than an inherent characteristic of individuals, this has important implications for climate adaptation.

The importance of understanding and addressing the structural drivers of heat vulnerability, particularly among workers, is not unique to Austria but is relevant across many countries facing more frequent and intense heatwaves. Traditional adaptation efforts in Austria and internationally often focus on reducing immediate heat risks. While such measures are important, they often do not address the conditions that create vulnerability. This has led to growing calls internationally for transformative adaptation, an approach that seeks to change the structural conditions that create vulnerability to enable just and sustainable wellbeing for all.

In the case of work, this means identifying and addressing the factors shaping vulnerability to extreme heat, including productivity and cost pressures, labor regulation, precarious contracts, low agency over the labor process, and gendered and racialized norms. This shifts the focus to transforming the way work and the provision of essential goods and services are organized under a changing climate.

Extreme heat is a social, economic, and governance challenge. Climate adaptation therefore needs to be closely linked with labor, social, health, and housing policy. Understanding how vulnerability is created and changing the conditions that produce it will be essential for protecting both people, particularly workers, and the essential goods and services that sustain societies in a warming world.

Note: This article gives the view of the authors, and not the position of the IIASA Insights blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.