R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the School of Social Policy & Practice, discusses climate change and the impact of extreme heat on academic success and worker productivity.
4 min. read
Image: Monty Rakusen/getty images
On hot days, workers are much more likely to get hurt on the job. Trains are more likely to be delayed, flight cancellations and postponements increase, and labor productivity falls.
These are just some of the ways, says environmental and labor economist R. Jisung Park, that environmental factors like climate change impact economic opportunity.
“All these little drips of productivity loss and subtle burns here and there really add up and are some of the most important ways in which climate change affects not only cities, but also our economy more broadly,” Park says.
Park, an assistant professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice with a secondary appointment in the Wharton School, studies how extreme heat affects workers and labor market inequality, the consequences of natural disasters for human capital, and how workers and firms adapt to a changing environment.
Penn Today sat down with Park to discuss climate change and the impact of extreme heat on worker productivity and educational attainment.
Thinking about the relationship between climate change and rising sea levels, how does climate change affect big, coastal cities like Philadelphia?
An important distinction to draw is that a lot of the news coverage about climate change focuses on the rare disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, an extreme triple-digit heat wave, or 100-year floods.
I think it’s worth being very clear that a lot of the damage from climate change comes more from what I call subtle climate events or subtle climate hazards—like more days in the 90s.
Nobody is going to write about a 92° or 93° day, but there are many more of these days, and there’s a good deal of research—including some of my own—that shows that on hot days, significantly more workers are going to get hurt on the job: construction workers, telephone pole repairmen, people fixing railways for the Amtrak trains.
Are people aware of these effects?
My sense is that fewer people are aware of these effects than are aware of the headline disasters.
I think a lot of people still think of climate change as either the end of civilization—because of sea-level rise or because we’re going to run out of food—or they think it’s just a hoax. It’s a very black or white, binary picture.
But I think the research actually suggests that we’re very much in the gray area, and the things I mentioned, like a decrease in labor productivity and more workers getting hurt on the job, are in the gray area and actually really matter. They’re doing trillions of dollars’ worth of damage every year. I’m not sure how many people are aware of climate change in that way, and I think it’s important that they are.
Your research on heat and learning uses data from test scores to understand how the physical environment may affect educational achievement. What has your research found?
Every June, many public school students take really important exams like AP exams, Regents exams, and high-school exit exams.
Depending on the temperature on the day of your exam and depending on whether or not your home and your school have air conditioning, you may fail that exam.
I looked at more than four million test scores from New York City public schools, and it turns out that a student taking a given exam on a 90° day relative to, say, a 70° day, is roughly 10% less likely to pass the given subject. That’s not a small effect.
What effect does extreme heat have on workers?
Studies show how both hot and cold temperatures can negatively affect worker productivity, but hot temperatures also increase workplace accidents and injuries. When it’s very hot, there are heat illnesses, and outdoor workers are affected. That’s obvious.
The not-so-obvious part is that there are actually many more accidents and injuries that on paper don’t seem to have anything to do with heat—so more people falling off ladders, more workers getting hit by cranes, and more workers dropping big pieces of machinery on someone else. There are more of those kinds of injuries.
It also appears that workers get into more accidents and injuries on hot days even indoors. Why is that? We’re not sure, but there are a lot of workers, both in the U.S. and globally, who are potentially subtly but significantly affected.
What do you think are some solutions?
There are many potential solutions. But especially relevant for Penn, I think there’s an opportunity for us to test out and pilot different interventions, whether it’s planting more trees next to bus stations or giving workers wearable cooling devices or giving the elderly vouchers for a rideshare during a heatwave so they can get out of their hot house and get to a nearby cooling center.
We don’t really know how well these solutions work, but I think we could test them. I think that that would go a long way because so many cities in the world are facing similar challenges, and they’re all hungry for information.
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