Australia is losing millions of dollars in terms of economic productivity because of heat and climate change

Guneet Bhatia in the International Business Times: A recent study has revealed that the global heat and increase in temperature has led to a loss of almost US$6.2 billion or A$7.92 billion in terms of productivity of the workers during the financial year 2013-14. In addition, the scientists have warned that the loss could even become worse as Earth continues to further become warm.

A team of international researchers conducted the study on a group of working Australian, aged between 18 and 65. Out of the 1,726 respondents, nearly two-third admitted that the heat has made them less productive in the previous year, while seven percent confessed that they had been absent from work at least for one day during the period. According to the calculation performed by the researchers to study the economic impact of heat, the absenteeism from work and decline in performance or low productivity costs around US$655 per person.

"This represents an annual economic burden of around US$6.2 billion for the Australian workforce. This amounts to 0.33 to 0.47% of Australia's GDP," said the research team.

According to the authors, the study findings "suggest that adaptation measures to reduce heat effects should be adopted widely if severe economic impacts from labour productivity loss are to be avoided if heat waves become as frequent as predicted." The study was particularly conducted during the warmest and the third warmest years in the Australian history—2013 and 2014, respectively...

Cockatoo Island in Sydney, shot by Greg O'Beirne, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license