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

Farmworkers feel the heat even when they leave the fields

Seed Daily via SPX: Hot weather may be the work environment for the 1.4 million farmworkers in the United States who harvest crops, but new research shows that these workers continue to experience excessive heat and humidity even after leaving the fields.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers conducted a study to evaluate the heat indexes in migrant farmworker housing and found that a majority of the workers don't get a break from the heat when they're off the clock.

Lead author Sara A. Quandt, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest Baptist, said the findings raise concerns about productivity and worker health.

"We found that a majority of the workers are not getting much respite from the heat in the evening," she said. "While we didn't measure direct health outcomes, the research raises concern about worker's health related to dehydration and sleep quality, which can, in turn, impact safety and productivity."...

Dorothea Lange photo of tents for black cotton pickers in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1940

US eyes pension funds to renew crumbling infrastructure

Katelyn Fosset in IPS: President Barack Obama doubled down on a new push for infrastructure investment in a major speech Friday, highlighting roads, ports and bridges that many say have suffered from decades of insufficient upkeep.

“When the American Society of [Civil] Engineers put out their 2013 report card on our national infrastructure, they gave it the best overall grade in 12 years … the bad news is we went from a D to a D+,” President Obama said, speaking at a port in Miami.

...The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) annual report the president referenced was released earlier this month and has spurred a debate over infrastructure and spending in Washington and beyond.

“We know that investing in infrastructure is essential to support healthy, vibrant communities. Infrastructure is also critical for long-term economic growth, increasing GDP, employment, household income, and exports. The reverse is also true – without prioritizing our nation’s infrastructure needs, deteriorating conditions can become a drag on the economy,” the report states. On Friday, President Obama outlined a new plan that, he said, would seek to attract private investment for public infrastructure, while also creating new bonds and offering more loans for similar projects.

A think-tank in Washington has one idea for leveraging private investment toward infrastructure: encourage the investment of labour union pension funds in infrastructure projects. “Couple [our poor state of infrastructure] with pension funds, which are long-term, patient investors, with stable, risk-adjusted returns, and this fits well with our fiduciary duty,” Dan Pedrotty, managing director of benefits and pensions at the American Federation of Teachers, said Thursday at the release of a report on the topic at the Center for American Progress (CAP)....

The Mianus River Bridge in Cos Cob, Connecticut, which failed back in the 1980s. US Department of the Interior photo

Hotter, wetter climate slashes labour capacity by 10%, study shows

The Guardian (UK) via Reuters: Earth's increasingly hot, wet climate has cut the amount of work people can do in the worst heat by about 10% in the past six decades, and that loss in labour capacity could double by mid-century, US government scientists reported on Sunday.

Because warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air, there is more absolute humidity in the atmosphere now than there used to be. And as anyone who has sweltered through a hot, muggy summer knows, it's more stressful to work through hot months when the humidity is high.

To calculate the stress of working in hotter, wetter conditions, experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at military and industrial guidelines already in place for heat stress, and set those guidelines against climate projections for how hot and humid it is likely to get over the next century.

Their findings were stark: "We project that heat stress-related labour capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate," said the lead author, John Dunne of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.

Work capability is already down to 90% during the most hot and humid periods, Dunne and his co-authors wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. Using a middle-of-the-road projection of future temperature and humidity, they estimate that could drop to 80% by 2050....

A stonemason from a 1448 illustration, Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung, Band 1. Nürnberg 1426–1549. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Amb. 317.2°