Farmers Struggle with Climate Change
A farmer carries buckets to collect water as he walks on a dried-up pond on the outskirts of Yingtan, Jiangxi province November 3, 2009. Many Chinese wheat-growing provinces in the north seeded clouds over the weekend to help end a persistent drought and encourage the growth of winter wheat. Reuters/Stringer

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.

The lead author, Kerstin Zander of Charles Darwin University, says that climate change has a lot of impact on the productivity of the Australians who face extreme heat. Zander further said that even though the impact is major, only a few studies have done so far that have actually calculated the economic loss to the country due to heat wave. On the other hand, co-author Stephen Garnett revealed that during the study, the team found that the impact of heat on productivity of people working indoors was equivalent to the impact on the people working outdoors.

The study findings have been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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