Active Climate, Earth & Environment Public Health & Healthcare

The health impacts of climate change on precarious outdoor workers in urban megacities in Vietnam

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Outdoor 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.

View original technical description
Precarious outdoor workers in urban areas of the global South are one of the world’s most climate change exposed groups. The nature of their exposure is thinly understood and policies to address such exposure under-developed. This project explores the (in)visible vulnerabilities and multiple health exposures of such workers in Vietnam, a country experiencing rapid urbanisation and with a large informal sector. We address basic knowledge gaps through co- constructing a new evidence base utilising a multi-stakeholder approach. This will transform our understanding of the exposures and vulnerabilities of outdoor urban workers and Vietnamese policy makers’ ability to devise interventions attuned to the conditions and concerns of workers. Underpinned by an equal partnership with government agencies, representative associations and informal workers, we will: (1) undertake a systematic review of the literature; (2) survey three occupational groups to capture their exposure to climate-related health risks; (3) conduct in-depth interviews with informal outdoor workers to understand the health impacts of climate change; (4) adopt a participatory vulnerability analysis (PVA) approach to de-centre data collection; (5) develop a ‘Workers’ Health’ GIS-integrated App and a Policy Toolkit for Health-centric Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience; and (6) use this knowledge to co-produce knowledge for policy action.

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Researchers

Anh Vu (EPMC Awardee)Giang Nguyen (EPMC Awardee)Jonathan Rigg (EPMC Awardee)Loc Nguyen (EPMC Awardee)Sokratis Dinos (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Measuring the Impact of Heat and Heat Adaptation Strategies on the Health and Livelihoods of Women Working in the Informal Economy in India
Seasonal environmental hazards: a multi-disciplinary approach to the analysis of health risks in lower-income countries
Precarity, urbanisation and humanitarian resilience
Spatialising Climate Impacts on Health: A Focus on Vulnerable Settlements in Megacities of the Global South
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Past, Present and Future Flood Risk in Viet Nam

Original classification

Climate Impacts Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.