Extreme heat is stealing $57 billion a year from women who can least afford to lose it. That is the finding of a new report from Hera, the climate resilience group formerly called Climate Resilience for All, presented this week at London Climate Action Week 2026. Without action, the report warns, the losses will grow 44% by 2050.
Researchers studied four cities with different climates: Ahmedabad, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Monterrey, Mexico; and Freetown, Sierra Leone. In each, informal work dominates women’s employment. Up to 91% of working women hold informal jobs, compared with 83% of men. Many earn as little as $3 a day.
Informal workers have no contracts, no fixed hours and no legal protection. Street vendors, domestic workers and market traders bear the heat directly, with no safety net when it cuts their income or harms their health.
Women face heat differently than men, the report found. Pregnancy raises their physical risk. They earn less and own fewer assets. They carry a heavier load of unpaid care work. Social norms restrict their clothing and movement. And they face a higher risk of violence, with less access to cooling and healthcare.
The Math Hits Women Harder
Heat cuts women’s productivity by 3% to 11% across the four cities. Because women already earn less than men everywhere studied — by as much as 66% in Freetown — even small losses hit household budgets hard.
Heat also kills women at higher rates. Women make up 16% to 20% of heat deaths in the cities studied, the report found, due to physiology, pregnancy risk and weaker access to safe conditions.
Violence rises too. Each extra heatwave day pushes the annual domestic violence rate up nearly 1%. Monterrey will see 20 more heatwave days by 2050 — a 17% jump in domestic violence.
Women reinvest up to 90% of their income in their families. When heat cuts their pay, that spending disappears too. In Bangkok, heat-related losses cut women’s annual spending on their children by $500. In Ahmedabad, women lose 7% of their yearly income to heat.
The damage scales up. Bangkok’s heat losses shave 4% off the city’s GDP each year — roughly the size of the entire city government’s budget.
Gitaben Rawal, a headloader in Ahmedabad, is one of the workers behind these numbers. A video testimony included in the report shows how heat strains her both on the job and at home.
Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Hera, said the findings mirror what her organization sees daily. “The consequences are both devastating and do not stop with the individual,” she wrote in the report’s foreword.
Cheap Fixes, Big Returns
The report isn’t just about loss. It models solutions too. A package of low-cost measures — heat response plans, green space, cool roofs, labor protections and heat insurance — could cut heat deaths by more than 36% by 2050.
Heat Response Plans deliver the strongest returns: 12 to 90 times their cost in benefits. Cool roofs and labor protections also pay off in most cities studied.
In Delhi, where 1.7 million women work informally, a strong intervention package could generate $415.9 million in benefits by 2050, the report’s cost-benefit tool found. That tool covers more than 11,000 cities worldwide.
But solutions only work if they reach the people most at risk. Early warning systems need phones and literacy. Cooling centers assume free time and mobility. Labor laws rarely cover informal workers.
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