The Poverty Impacts of Labor Heat Stress in West Africa Under a Warming Climate

Abstract

This paper assesses the poverty implications of heat stress‐related labor capacity losses based on simulations using a global general equilibrium economic model. Compared with past studies, we use a more precise measurement of heat stress, assign labor capacity losses to specific labor types by sector, and employ an economic model that contains highly disaggregated economic sectors and regions. This model allows us to determine global and regional economic impacts that account for international dependencies. We focus attention on seven West African countries for which we determine the implied changes in real incomes of households near the poverty line. For these countries, we use household microsimulations to determine potential impacts on the poverty headcount. In our results, poverty impacts are heterogeneous across countries and earning sources‐based household strata. A key channel behind this heterogeneity is how loss of labor productivity affects the relative returns to factors of production. We find that unskilled agricultural wages could increase, as loss of productivity in the face of inelastic food demand induces increased labor demand in order to dampen agricultural output losses. In our experiments, even neglecting potential increases in mortality and morbidity, poverty increases range from 2.3% in Cameroon to up to 7.2%–9.2% in Ghana and Nigeria. In one of the seven countries considered, Guinea, poverty sees little change due to the mitigating effects of rising labor wages.

Changes in Land Cover and Management Affect Heat Stress and Labor Capacity

“…For example, the cost of human heat stress could increase regional cost of crop production by 10% or more in tropical regions (Orlov et al., 2021). Heat stress impacts on labor can also increase poverty in regions with a limited adaptive capacity (Saeed et al., 2022). While several studies investigated the heat stress impacts under different future warming scenarios, relatively little research has been done on quantifying the effects of LCLMC on heat stress, and productivity and capacity of labor.…”