800 women workers from the Self Employed Women's Association are partnering with Harvard to track how extreme heat reshapes their health, homes, and wages — day and night, across seasons.
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800 women workers in India's informal labor economy — all members of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) — are partnering with the South Asia Climate Adaptation Cluster at Harvard on a 13-month study tracking the impact of heat in the lived environments of the poor, at work and at home, on health, habitat, and wages.
Built on over 8 million person-hours of data, CommHATS is compiling one of the largest worker-led climate-health datasets globally. Early findings are expected to inform worker protections, thresholds for early warnings, and guidance on heat action plans and adaptation strategies.
The study is administered and supervised entirely by the workers themselves, through weekly site visits and frequent town halls. Research questions are co-developed by SEWA members seeking to inform individual, household, and collective adaptation.
Over 150,000 lines of built-for-purpose code support CommHATS data collection apps, pipelines, analytic tools, and reporting dashboards. The modular architecture keeps the toolkit replicable and open source.
CommHATS gives communities cutting-edge tools to test adaptive strategies — reflective cool roofs, shaded market stalls, parametric insurance — before they are deployed at scale.
Early findings suggest significant gaps between temperatures recorded by weather stations and satellites and the conditions people actually endure. The homes of the poor do not cool down overnight, and the physiological strain on the women persists for months. The impact of extreme heat on their wages is crippling.
CommHATS will directly inform policies that have, until now, been developed with little empirical grounding in the lives of informal workers. By tracking participants across all seasons and multiple years, the study can evaluate whether interventions actually work in the settings where they matter most.
Final results will bear on city-wide early warnings, worker protection thresholds, health protection measures, and the prioritization of contextually-relevant adaptation strategies.
Our flexible study design deploys across a range of settings with varying levels of data literacy and resource constraints. To learn more, get in touch.
rmeade@hsph.harvard.edu