Asia's informal workers face impossible choice: health or income as extreme heat intensifies

Brijpal Singh arrives at the construction site in Noida before dawn. By midday, the thermometer has climbed past 45 degrees Celsius. His heart races. His vision blurs. Dehydration pulls at him like a weight. He is 51 years old, and his body is telling him to stop. But he keeps working. To leave early, or worse, to take a day off, means losing 500 to 600 rupees—roughly six or seven dollars—that his wife and three children depend on, living two days' journey away in a village in Uttar Pradesh. The choice, for him, is not really a choice at all.

Across Asia's sprawling cities, millions of workers like Singh face this same impossible arithmetic every time temperatures spike. In the Delhi region alone, some five million people labor in the informal economy, making up roughly 80 percent of the total workforce. They are construction workers, street vendors, delivery riders, garment factory workers—people paid by the day, with no safety net, no sick leave, no buffer between a missed shift and a family's hunger. As the past decade has brought India's warmest temperatures on record, and as climate change continues to intensify heat waves across the continent, these workers are caught between two forms of harm: the immediate danger of heat exposure, and the grinding poverty that comes from stepping away from work.

The damage compounds in ways that ripple through their lives. Research from People's Courage International, which surveyed informal workers across five Asian cities, found that tasks once completed in eight hours now stretch to ten or twelve during the hottest months, as workers slow down to manage dangerous conditions. One study estimates that rising temperatures could cost informal workers the equivalent of two percent of India's GDP annually—nearly eighty billion dollars. Beyond lost wages, workers report respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal disease, heat stroke, and kidney damage. They spend more on over-the-counter medicines and clinic visits. They have no time to recover. And when they return home, there is no relief waiting.

Many informal workers are migrants, separated from their families by economic necessity. They live in densely packed neighborhoods with poor ventilation, little green space, and heat-absorbing concrete. Singh returns to a single room that becomes a furnace during the hot months from April to June. Power cuts make it impossible to cool down before the next day's shift. He cannot eat well. He drinks oral rehydration solution and goes to bed hungry. In Quezon City, in the Philippines, where forty-two percent of the employed population work informally, residents describe their neighborhoods as concrete jungles where even nighttime brings no relief. Aida Tano spent nearly two decades in a garment factory where four workers shared a single electric fan, and management told her that if she could not endure the heat, she could leave. She had to pay for her own drinking water. Now, after decades of such conditions, she works odd jobs—sewing, cleaning—and returns to a house with no air conditioning, relying on fans and covered windows that do almost nothing.

Women carry the heaviest load. They make up a majority of the world's poor, according to the United Nations, and in the informal economy they shoulder both paid work and unpaid caregiving. When children or elderly family members fall sick during a heat wave, the responsibility falls largely on women. Shanti Devi, thirty-six, has been her family's sole breadwinner since her husband was injured in a workplace accident. She manages the house, cares for her four children, and tries to earn a living. During heat waves, when schools close and shift to online classes, she must stay home instead of working. Each lost day of wages deepens her family's financial strain. She cooks for her children. She loses sleep caring for them through hot nights. She returns to work exhausted, facing increased risks of heart disease and diabetes.

Cities across Asia have begun introducing heat action plans. India has implemented measures. Quezon City is developing its own. But protections for informal workers remain limited and unevenly enforced. Researchers point out that these efforts focus largely on short-term responses and often overlook the realities of informal workers' lives—the fact that they cannot afford to stop working, that their homes do not cool, that their caregiving duties do not pause. As temperatures continue to rise because of human-caused climate change, experts warn that the burden will fall hardest on those with the fewest resources. Resilient cities, one researcher notes, cannot be built on exhausted and unprotected workers. For now, millions across Asia continue to make the only choice available to them: they work through the heat, and they hope their bodies hold.