The data, published in a report at the journal BioMed Central, found that just over 1 percent of all reported workplace injuries in the U.S. in the period studied (2023) were directly attributable to “heat exposure on days exceeding a heat index of 70°F.” Though the researchers admitted that most of the injuries were associated with “high-hazard” industries, not all of the injuries are related to direct exposure to extreme heat, as you may imagine, say, an outdoor-based worker may be under climate change conditions. The report notes that the results were “consistent across nearly all industry sectors, including those that are predominantly indoors,” and that “heat exposure has been associated with subtler impairments in physiological and cognitive performance.”
In other words, heat makes you clumsy and inattentive, and you might be more likely to, say, trip over an office chair you hadn’t noticed and injure yourself in much the same way as an outdoor worker may be more likely to drop a tool from a height onto a coworker when it was hot outside.
Speaking to NPR, the lead author of the study, Barrak Alamahad, a research scientist in environmental health at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, underlined this fact. He noted that when heat rises, even in the “safe” environment of an office, there are indeed notable “cognitive effects — hand-eye coordination, your attention, your memory, and even judgment or risk-taking or irritation.”
Interestingly, the team found that there was a link to government anti-heat efforts in the data. When it was hotter than 105°F, the odds of injury compared to the odds on a typical 80°F day increased by 16 percent in states without heat-related safety rules. Rates rose just 8 percent in states with regulations designed to protect workers from heat issues. When the temperature hit 110°F and higher, the odds of an injury increased 22 percent — that’s a significant amount — in states without occupational heat rules, compared to just 9 percent in states with rules. This suggests a “protective effect,” the report notes, while pointing out the data isn’t 100 percent accurate for this prediction.
The study also noted that some 28,000 injuries in 2023 were related to heat, according to OSHA data correlated with historic, geolocated weather data near the site of each injury. Overall the report suggests that there may be mechanisms for preventing heat-related issues, which could reduce the figures for injuries per year. That’s significant, because injuries do more than harm a worker’s health—they may take them out of commission for a while, directly impacting company productivity, or they may result in expensive medical bills, insurance fees or litigation against their employer.
What can you take away from this investigation for your own workforce’s safety?
Heat may be a much bigger problem for your workers than you realize. The report notes that even “moderate daily heat can subtly increase the risk of workplace injuries that are not thought of nor classified as ‘heat-related’.”
To prevent your workers from being injured, you can try technical solutions, like air conditioning for indoor facilities. But the researchers also note that you should carry out “occupational safety training” and that your company’s safety education process should “explicitly warn about the role of heat” in potential injuries. You can also plan for allowing workers rest, water and shade, and given them written heat plans—all of which could be “critical for safeguarding worker health, and reducing the ‘hidden’ economic costs of heat-related injuries.”
The other thing to note is that extreme heat events are on the rise, and climate change isn’t going away — so these sorts of injuries will likely be a growing factor in future workplace risks.