The health impacts of climate change on precarious outdoor workers in urban megacities in Vietnam
In plain English
AI plain-English summaryOutdoor workers in Vietnam’s megacities—street vendors, construction labourers, waste pickers—face daily heat stress, flooding, and air pollution with no formal protections, and this project will document exactly how climate change is harming their health. The problem is a basic knowledge gap. These workers make up a huge share of the urban workforce in the global South, but researchers and policymakers have thin data on what they actually experience—how many hours they work in extreme heat, what illnesses they develop, whether they can afford to stop working when conditions become dangerous. Vietnam’s rapid urbanisation and large informal economy make the issue acute, but the same pattern holds across much of Asia and Africa. If the project succeeds, it will produce two concrete tools: a GIS-integrated smartphone app that workers themselves can use to report health exposures, and a policy toolkit for government agencies. The aim is to shift Vietnam’s climate adaptation planning from generic disaster response to something that accounts for the daily, cumulative risks faced by people who cannot work from home. The research is applied by design—it was co-developed with government agencies and worker associations, and the findings are meant to feed directly into regulation, urban planning, and social protection schemes.
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