This story is from December 15, 2021

Working hours may change in Mumbai due to global warming: Study

The city may have to shift the working hours towards morning or evening if the current pollution or carbon emission trends and subsequent warming continues. According to a study published by Duke University in an international journal ‘Nature Communications’ the current temperatures are showing a loss of about 4-5 minutes per hour due to hot and humid weather in Mumbai. This means a loss of an hour during 12 working hours.
Working hours may change in Mumbai due to global warming: Study
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MUMBAI: The city may have to shift the working hours towards morning or evening if the current pollution or carbon emission trends and subsequent warming continues. According to a study published by Duke University in an international journal ‘Nature Communications’ the current temperatures are showing a loss of about 4-5 minutes per hour due to hot and humid weather in Mumbai. This means a loss of an hour during 12 working hours.
With the rise of global warming with one degree each, the same may double to 10 minutes each hour, paper warns.
The loss of per hour work hours is around 12 minutes in Ahmedabad while Chennai and Hyderabad are close to Mumbai.
The current temperature starts rising above 26 degrees Celsius at 12 noon onwards. Thus, every extra degree of global warming will cause greater and greater labour losses, and moving heavy labour to the cooler hours of the day will become less effective as the world warms, paper reveals.
“There are physiological limits to the heat/humidity combinations that humans can tolerate. On larger grounds, the world currently loses $280-311 billion per year due to workers struggling in hot, humid conditions, and if the world gets 2°C hotter than now (about 3°C above pre-industrial levels) those losses would rise to $1.6 trillion,” the study points out.
Global warming will cause labour losses most acutely in the tropics and subtropics but also increasingly impacting mid-latitudes, the paper says. Each degree of warming leads to exponential, not linear, losses in labour productivity. For example, the number of hours lost in the 12-hour workday increases from $101 billion hours per °C in the last 42 years to 197 billion hours per °C (+/-11 billion hours) with an additional 2°C of global warming, suggests the study.

This is the first study at the global scale assessing how effective it is to move heavy work to the cooler parts of the day as an adaptation to climate change. Currently, moving labour out of the hottest 3 hours of the day can recoup about 30% of productivity losses. However, this may cause other issues, for example due to poor sleep during increasingly hot, humid weather.
The possibility to adapt to climate change by moving some work to cooler hours reduces by about 2% with each extra degree of warming. Under an additional 2°C of future warming (total about 3°C above pre-industrial levels), more global labour would be lost in the coolest 12 hours of the day than is currently lost in the hottest 12 hours of the day. All of the findings are conservative, as they reflect conditions in the shade - conditions in full sun will be much worse.
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About the Author
Chittaranjan Tembhekar

An assistant editor (infrastructure) at The Times of India, Mumbai, Chittaranjan been covering institutions involved in providing urban infrastructure, power and telecom services for seven years.

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