TOPSHOT – Traffic warden Rai Rogers mans his street corner during an 8-hour shift under the hot sun … [+] in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 12, 2023, where temperatures reached 106 degrees amid an ongoing heatwave. More than 50 million Americans are set to bake under dangerously high temperatures this week, from California to Texas to Florida, as a heat wave builds across the southern United States. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
By Brian Castrucci
C-suite leaders must be able to see the big picture and to protect their company from whatever outside threats arise—like competition, supply-chain failures, or unpredictable market disruptors. It is time for business leaders and elected officials to add extreme weather to that list.
Any business leader who’s not sure if it belongs there just needs to head out into the summer heat. Extreme heat has come to Main Street, and it’s impacting Wall Street. Think of extreme heat as a rampant sickness that leads to racing hearts, muscle cramps, cold and clammy skin, nausea, vomiting, crippling fatigue, dizziness, headaches, and passing out…a sickness that drains worker productivity and decreases consumer purchasing power. Because it can do that and more.
Yes, it gets hot in August. And yes, there is air-conditioning. But not everywhere. Not outside, where millions of workers toil. How far off is a time when Disney World can’t open due to heat-related risks for outdoor workers and visitors? What happens when construction crews can’t work outside in the summer or labor costs increase because employees need increased breaks during intense heat?
A report last year from the Center for American Progress looked at the effects of extreme heat on the health care system—how very hot days sent people to emergency rooms and hospitals with dehydration, heat stroke, fainting, and other heat-related ailments. It examined insurance-claims data in Virginia, which has about 80 days of “heat events”—extreme temperatures and humidity lasting for a day or more—each summer. Extrapolating the Virginia findings nationwide, the report found that heat events would account for “almost 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions for heat-related or heat-adjacent illness, adding approximately $1 billion in health care costs each summer.”
Those are just the immediate, day-to-day effects. Any tally of climate-related health costs also must include respiratory illnesses from the smoke and soot of wildfires, a surging risk in many parts of our hotter planet. Ask anyone in the nine western states now battling this year’s bumper crop of wildfires about that. Or those of us in the East—or anywhere, really—who have nowhere to run from the haze.
Health care is just one sector affected by extreme heat. Extreme heat also has disrupted travel and tourism industries, contributed to declining food availability and increasing prices, and destabilized power grids struggling to keep us with demand.
The raging wildfires and hurricanes, rising ocean levels and temperatures, and vanishing species may all seem well beyond the scope of any one business or executive. While no business leader can immediately stop extreme weather, they can protect their employees and adapt to heat-related health risks by building climate resilience into every business plan.
I’m a member of the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health, which seeks to draw attention to this urgent challenge. We know the scale of the problem is huge, and yet we see too little action to match the danger. An estimated 65 million people—almost half the U.S. workforce—face climate-related health risks on the job. But according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 17% of CEOs have implemented strategies to protect their employees.
The Biden Administration took a good step last month to point employers in the right direction, proposing new safety rules that would require employers to monitor workers and give them water and rest breaks when the heat index reaches 80 degrees or higher.
But business leaders don’t have to wait to protect their workers. Here are some sensible things they can do without a federal mandate:
1. Learn about what makes a workplace dangerously hot. Jobs and working conditions vary widely, and the risks aren’t always obvious just from looking at a thermometer. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has lots of information on how to assess and reduce heat hazards.
2. Take practical scheduling steps to make every job safer. Allow more frequent and longer breaks. If possible, start shifts earlier or later in the day.
3. Make sure workers—especially new ones—have what they need to protect themselves: lightweight clothing as uniforms or the company dress code, ready access to shade, and plenty of water and cool energy drinks to stay hydrated.
4. Seek training for executives and employees to understand the signs and symptoms of heat-related stress and illness, and how to give first aid.
Business executives often use nature metaphors to describe the abstract forces that alter markets and economies, likening them to rattling earthquakes and crashing tidal waves or lightning shocks. With climate change, much of the danger is literally from the sun overhead and the heat all around us. The question is not whether CEOs are going to feel the heat of climate change, but when, and how soon they will be motivated to take action to address it.
