Heat Stress and the Corporate Bottom Line

1. Executive summary

Most of us still treat heat as a weather story or a welfare issue. For Indian companies with factories, sites, warehouses, fleets or field teams, it is also a cost line. It is already large and growing, and climate disclosures now expect companies to report it. Here is what the evidence shows.

• The loss is already large. Heat exposure in India cost an estimated 247 billion potential labour hours in 2024, a record 419 hours per person and 124% more than in 1990–1999 [2]. The ILO projects that India will lose 5.8% of all working hours to heat stress in 2030, up from 4.3% in 1995 [3].
• Europe shows the bill even in a cooler climate. Allianz Research estimates that the 2026 summer heatwaves cost 30 European economies about €113 billion of output, around 0.46% of their combined GDP, mostly through slower work, longer breaks and missed work [31].
• It reaches the P&L through several channels at once: lower output per hour, more absence, heat illness and heat-related accidents, higher cooling and power demand, stressed equipment, and disrupted supply chains and informal labour. Heat also cuts children's learning and closes schools, affecting employees' families and the future workforce. In a national panel of Indian factories, annual plant output fell by about 2% per degree Celsius [5].
• Disclosure frameworks already cover it. IFRS S2 names heatwaves and effects on "employee health and safety" in its definition of physical risk [23]. TCFD lists workforce health, safety and absenteeism as a physical-risk impact [22]. BRSR Core requires third-party assessment or assurance of safety-incident data, including for contract workers [24]. Heat illness is best counted there as work-related ill health, not as an injury (Section 5) [43–50].
• Indian companies are acting on heat, but not yet putting a number on what it costs them. Not one of the Indian corporate disclosures cited in this paper quantifies heat's impact on the company's own workforce in hours, productivity or rupee cost. Vedanta Aluminium, Hindustan Zinc and Mahindra come closest [10–12]. A Singapore transport group shows it can be done with off-the-shelf data [14].
• A small metric set and a practical playbook close the gap. Count hot days and WBGT-hours per site, convert them to working hours lost with published response functions, price the hours, and track heat-illness cases and contract-worker coverage. Companies certified to ISO 45001 can run all of this inside their existing occupational health and safety system (Sections 5 and 6).
• Cricket got there before most companies did. Cricket's heat research and policies show the value of WBGT triggers, tiered stop-play rules, ventilated kit, acclimatisation and special care for the young. A batsman's day at the crease produces as much heat as running at about 8 km/h [56]. In Section 8, I take eight lessons from cricket and turn each one into something a company can do.

2. Why heat is a material business risk in India

The hazard is rising

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) treats a heatwave as possible when a plains station reaches at least 40 °C (30 °C in hilly regions, 37 °C at coastal stations), and declares one on departure from normal (4.5–6.4 °C) or an actual maximum of 45 °C or more [1]. In 2024, people in India were exposed to 19.8 heatwave days each on average, 6.6 of which would not have been expected without climate change [2]. They also faced 366 more hours than in 1990–1999 in which moderate outdoor activity carried a moderate or higher risk of heat stress, a record high [2]. Companies' own projections point the same way. Vedanta Aluminium projects 14–17 more days a year above 40 °C at its BALCO smelter by 2050 (SSP2-4.5 to SSP5-8.5), against a 2014 baseline [10]. And next year could be worse. In a sensitivity scenario, Allianz Research estimates that a very strong El Niño could cost India about US$50 billion (0.30% of GDP) in 2027 [31].

Temperature alone understates the risk: WBGT basics

Humidity, sun and wind change how much heat the body can shed. Occupational health therefore uses the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which combines air temperature, humidity, air movement and radiant heat and was designed for assessing work activity [3]. The ILO notes that at a WBGT of 33–34 °C a worker doing moderately intense work loses 50% of his or her work capacity [3]. In gridded labour-capacity data, humid coastal Chennai shows a higher baseline loss for moderate indoor work (4.15% a year) than Delhi (3.64%) [26]. A site plan built only on air temperature can miss the risk.

Who is most exposed

Exposure is highest where work is heavy, outdoors or in hot indoor spaces without cooling. ILO estimates for India (Figure 1) show agriculture and construction losing the most hours, with industry close behind by 2030 [3]. The Lancet Countdown attributes 66% of India's 2024 heat-related labour losses to agriculture and 20% to construction [2]. As many as 90% of workers in India work informally [3]. For a company, that means much of the exposed workforce in its value chain sits outside its payroll and its safety systems. In the OECD's informality database (developing and emerging economies), informal workers lost 2.4% of their working hours to heat in 2025, against 1.4% for formal workers; India's safety rules, though they recognise unorganised workers, are in practice designed for establishments with 10 or more workers [57].

3. How heat hits corporates

Labour productivity and hours lost. Heat slows work and forces longer breaks. The Lancet Countdown values India's potential income lost to reduced labour capacity at US$194 billion in 2024 [2]. In Indian factories (weaving, garments, steel), worker output falls on hot days, and a 15-year national panel of plants predicts annual output to fall by 2.1% if every day warms by 1 °C [5]. McKinsey estimated that effective outdoor working hours lost in India could rise by about 15% by 2030, putting about 2.5–4.5% of GDP (US$150–250 billion) at risk [6].

Health: heat illness, and accidents where heat plays a part. Heat causes cramps, exhaustion and heat stroke, a medical emergency [21, 50]. These are illnesses, best recorded as work-related ill health rather than injuries (Section 5 box) [45, 48]. Heat also raises accident risk. Globally, the ILO estimates that excessive heat causes 22.85 million occupational injuries and 18,970 deaths a year, and that over time heat stress can lead to serious heart, lung and kidney problems [4]. In Asia and the Pacific, 74.7% of the workforce is exposed to excessive heat [4]. Prevention works: Ahmedabad's Heat Action Plan is estimated to have avoided 2,380 deaths in the period after it was introduced [19].

Absenteeism and attrition. In the Indian factory study, absenteeism rose with same-day and previous-week temperatures. Climate control at work removed the productivity loss but not the absenteeism, presumably because workers stay exposed at home and outside [5]. We found no published Indian dataset linking heat to attrition; companies should track it rather than assume it is zero.

Students, families and the future workforce. Children are more vulnerable to heat than adults: infants and young children are less able to regulate their body temperature [37]. Heat also cuts learning. In a US study of 10 million students who retook the PSAT, without air conditioning each 1 °F hotter school year reduced that year's learning by 1% [34]. In India, across more than 4.5 million Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) tests, ten extra days above 29 °C in a year (compared with days at 15–17 °C) lowered children's maths and reading scores the following year by 0.03 and 0.02 standard deviations, partly through lost farm income; the rural job guarantee (NREGA) weakened the link [35]. UNICEF estimates that heatwaves disrupted schooling for about 171 million students worldwide in 2024, including about 54.8 million in India (a partial, state-level count), and notes that heat and poor hydration hinder children's ability to focus and retain information [36]. WHO notes that athletes are susceptible to exertional heat stress [38]. For most companies the closest link is their own employees, whose children's schools close or change timings in the heat. It also matters to education, edtech and sports businesses, to school-focused CSR, and to the skills of the future workforce. The NCB ACE case study (Section 7) looks at it through student cricket coaching.

Operations and assets. Cooling loads and power demand rise with heat. India's cooling demand is projected to grow to around eight times its 2017–18 level by 2037–38, and space cooling alone to account for 45% of peak electricity demand in 2050 [7]. Equipment suffers too: Vedanta Aluminium reports that prolonged heat affects equipment and lubricant performance and raises operating costs [10], and Singtel's modelling found that, without adaptation, heat-related failure could occur once every 1.4 years at its Singapore telephone exchanges by 2100 [9].

Supply chain and informal workforce. One global model attributes 12–43% of projected heat-related economic losses by 2060 to indirect effects cascading through supply chains [8]. For informal workers the hit is immediate: SEWA reported that extreme heat had cut the working hours of nearly all its women members, forcing them to stay home or take long breaks between 1 pm and 4 pm [18].

Regulation and disclosure. IFRS S2 defines physical risk to include heatwaves and "extreme temperature changes affecting the entity's premises, operations, supply chains, transportation needs and employee health and safety" [23]. TCFD lists "reduced revenue and higher costs from negative impacts on workforce (e.g., health, safety, absenteeism)" [22]. In India, BRSR Core covers safety-related incidents (lost-time injury frequency rate and fatalities) for employees and workers, including the contract workforce, and requires third-party assessment or assurance, which applies to the top 1,000 listed entities from FY2026–27; its value-chain disclosures are voluntary for the top 250 from FY2025–26 [24]. CEEW notes that Indian labour law has no legally binding, heat-specific occupational safety standard, and that BRSR does not uniformly require quantified physical-risk indicators [25]. BRSR's Principle 3 table of "safety related incidents" covers work-related ill health as well as injury but does not identify heat illness separately, so heat stays largely invisible in Indian disclosures (Section 5 box) [43, 44].

4. What leading companies are doing, and the gap

India

• Vedanta Aluminium tracks the annual count of days above 40 °C and maximum temperatures as a key risk indicator, with site projections to 2100. It has shifted schedules, built rest sheds with coolers, placed water stations every 200–300 m and issued heat-stress SOPs, and plans WBGT weather stations at all sites, heat-stress cover in insurance and business-partner contracts, and automation of the hottest processes [10].
• Hindustan Zinc names the right impact metric, "relative change in labour productivity due to heat stress" under NGFS scenarios for Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, and rates the workforce impact as high, but shows the results only as arrows, with no values [11].
• Mahindra Group has the most developed governance: heat action plans written into corporate Key Result Areas, SOPs based on site self-audits, and pilots of evaporative cooling jackets, vehicle canopy insulation and cooling shelters in Jaipur, Nagpur and Rudrapur [12]. Its whitepaper with Deloitte sets out a phased, four-pillar approach with board-level ownership (Section 6) [13].
• Others report actions rather than metrics: Tata Steel schedules work to limit direct-sun exposure between 12 noon and 3 pm, and L&T extends lunch breaks and keeps a doctor available full time [28]. ITC reports that a personal cooling vest for construction workers lowered temperature by about 6 °C in laboratory tests [29].
• Bharti Airtel and Nxtra by Airtel report heat measures mainly as awareness and site practice. Nxtra's FY25 sustainability report lists "heat stress prevention through water stations, ORS distribution, and tailored training" [51]; its EHS programme made Heat Stress the April 2025 safety "Topic of the Month" [53]; and its FY2025-26 report names "heat stress management" among occupational-health measures, with seasonal risks addressed "through targeted advisories, awareness campaigns, and preventive healthcare measures" [52]. During the 2024 heatwave, a senior Airtel executive told ETTelecom that Airtel had set up special teams to track field staff's health, issue heat-stroke advisories (including reminders to stay hydrated) and offer medical support [54]. Airtel's 2025-26 annual report notes that climate risks "pose health and safety risks to personnel" and sets temperature-related site design criteria, such as reflective roofs and external shading [55]. Both run internal campaigns to beat the heat.
• SEWA's parametric heat insurance is the clearest Indian case of a heat-day metric tied to money: it pays when a set number of consecutive days exceed a threshold temperature, with payouts based on daily income [17]. In 2024, 92% of the 50,000 women enrolled received payments [17].

Global

• ComfortDelGro (Singapore) quantified heat-stress productivity loss from Climate Impact Explorer labour-productivity data and its own labour costs. Labour productivity is its largest physical risk: 43–56% of total additional financial impact in a >3 °C scenario, reaching 55.5% by 2050 [14]. Its subsidiary SBS Transit projects a 15% rise in annual operating costs from heat-related productivity loss by 2050 in the same scenario [15].
• Even large global reporters find it hard. Olam Agri states that quantifying the effect of extreme temperatures on employee health and productivity "is still under consideration" [16].

Listening to field staff led to a real change: In our interactions at a large company with an extensive outdoor field workforce, field engineers described working through intense heatwaves in what was then a synthetic black uniform. Some staff developed extensive skin rashes and other heat-stress-induced health problems, and these became reasons for voluntary attrition. The observations were shared and acted on internally: the uniform was changed to a cooler, cotton-based fabric and heat shelters were put up.

5. Measuring it: a simple metric framework

Here are six metrics any multi-site company can start with in one reporting cycle. The first two describe the hazard, the next two its effect on working hours and money, and the last two the health outcome and the company's response. No source we found publishes day-count bands (what counts as "many" hot days), so each company must set and disclose its own.

6. Building resilience: a practical playbook

Run it through the ISO 45001 system

If your occupational health and safety (OH&S) management system is certified to ISO 45001:2018, you already have a system to manage heat in. The standard is built on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle [39], and heat is simply another OH&S hazard to run through it. Since the 2024 climate amendment, clause 4.1 requires an organisation to determine whether climate change is a relevant issue, and clause 4.2 notes that interested parties can have climate-related requirements [40].

Plan: identify heat as a hazard and assess the risk by task, site and season (6.1.2), consulting workers and contractor representatives (5.4).

Do: apply the hierarchy of controls (8.1.2): eliminate or automate hot tasks, then engineering controls (cooling, shade, ventilation), then administrative controls (work-rest cycles, timing, training), with PPE last, since PPE that is too hot or heavy is less likely to be worn [42]. Plan the emergency response to heat stroke (8.2) and set heat rules for contractors through procurement (8.1.4).

Check: monitor WBGT and heat-illness cases (9.1).

Act: investigate heat-illness cases, heat-related accidents and near misses, and correct the controls (10.2). ISO 14090 (adaptation principles) and ISO 14091 (climate vulnerability, impact and risk assessment) can support the company-wide view [41]. The table below maps each measure to its clause.

Each measure below comes from published guidance or company practice. Start with governance and measurement, so that the money goes where the hours are actually being lost. Section 8 adds lessons from sport.

Learnings from the Mahindra–Deloitte heat whitepaper

Mahindra Group and Deloitte South Asia's whitepaper, Corporate heat adaptation and mitigation strategies [13], was developed with a working group of industry, policy and research stakeholders. We found it a useful Indian corporate reference to read alongside the measures above.

7. Case study: NCB ACE cricket academies (Delhi)

A Delhi cricket academy in summer faces the corporate problem on a small scale. The work is outdoors, the schedules are fixed, coaching staff are paid by the hour or session, and revenue depends on attendance. It also links to the student evidence in Section 3: the trainees are students in age-group batches whose attendance, health and safety depend on how heat is managed. With NCB ACE Sports, we looked at its two cricket training academies, at Patel Nagar and Mayur Vihar in Delhi. The box reports what the head coach told us.

Companies are in the same position. Many already do sensible things in the heat because experience tells them to. A simple heat threshold and a record of heat-illness symptoms are what let them measure and report it (Section 5). Section 8 sets the case against the wider cricket research.

8. Lessons from sport: what cricket's heat playbook means for corporates

Cricket is a useful comparison for Indian companies: it is played outdoors through the hottest months, in protective clothing, on fixed schedules, with revenue riding on the result. Hit for Six, a BASIS (British Association for Sustainable Sport) report combining climate science from the Priestley International Centre for Climate with heat physiology from the University of Portsmouth's Extreme Environments Laboratory, sets out how heat affects players, officials, spectators and the game [56]. We turn its findings and the governance responses it records into company actions, and flag where a point is our own inference.

What the cricket research found

Eight lessons and the corporate actions they point to

The table pairs each lesson from cricket with a company action, linked to the Section 5 metrics and the Section 6 ISO 45001 clauses.

A tiered flag system companies can borrow

Lesson 2 is the most transferable: ACSM's flags link a measured reading to a pre-agreed action. The table shows the flags as reported in Hit for Six [56] beside an illustrative corporate version.

Cautions before borrowing sport's numbers

The report notes that specific WBGT guidelines for cricket are not widespread, and that its own 25 °C trigger for extra breaks and shorts comes from ACSM guidance for runners, with more work needed for cricket [56]. Athletes also differ from employees: they choose their effort, work for hours rather than shifts, and at elite level have physios and doctors on hand. Companies should copy the structure (measure, tier, pre-authorise, record) and take numeric limits from the occupational sources in this paper: the ILO capacity-loss relationships, Singapore's rest rules at WBGT 32 °C and 33 °C, and the NDMA guidance (Sections 5 and 6).

In practice, heat often comes with other problems: smog, thin crowds and water shortages. Sri Lanka's players wore smog masks during a Test in Delhi in December 2017, and the report recommends air-quality testing at grounds [56]. Delhi and Hyderabad franchise officials blamed heat for low attendance, and drought forced 13 Indian Premier League matches out of Maharashtra in 2016 [56]. Company equivalents are air quality on hot days, footfall and customer comfort in retail, hospitality and real estate, and water availability, which can decide where operations can run. The Mahindra–Deloitte whitepaper records similar effects in India: daily visitors to the Taj Mahal fell from 25,000–30,000 to about 12,000–15,000 in May 2024, and leading Rajasthan hotels saw occupancy of about 20–25% against about 50% a year earlier, with tariffs cut by 75–80% [13].

What this means for the NCB ACE academies

What Hit for Six says. Young players respond differently to heat and tolerate it less well, so extra facilities, guidance or rules should allow for that. At grassroots level, at any age, cooling and prompt medical attention may not be on hand as they are at elite level. Young players may also feel less able to refuse to play in hot or humid conditions, so the report recommends monitoring both conditions (WBGT) and their health [56]. This applies directly to NCB ACE, whose academies train children from the age of 6 onwards.

What the coach described (Section 7). Later summer timings (4–7 pm instead of 3–6 pm), mandatory ORS, chilled water, glucose and a banana for the 6–12 age batches, water breaks for batsmen, medium and fast bowlers and wicketkeepers, and extra water breaks in summer matches.

Our observations. The academy's age-banded hydration rules and move to cooler hours fit the report's concern for young players. They also provide shade or another way to cool down at each ground and a clear plan for suspected heat illness, including access to the nearest hospital, and parents' contact details at every session. Because young players may feel unable to refuse to play, the two next steps in Section 7 matter; a temperature or WBGT threshold for pausing play, set by the coach and not left to children or to parents' level of concern, and a light-touch record of heat-illness symptoms with first aid training.

Recommended actions for corporates

In order of priority, we recommend the following to be in place before the 2027 hot season (the report puts India's summer at April to June [56]):

• Move to WBGT and tiers. Install WBGT readings at the hottest and most humid sites and adopt a four-tier protocol with named stop-work authority (lessons 1 and 2).
• Redesign kit. Audit uniforms and PPE for heat, trial ventilated options with suppliers and add heat performance to specifications (lesson 3).
• Acclimatise and screen. Phase in exposure and run a no-blame fit-to-work check for new joiners, returners, transfers and contractors (lessons 4 and 5).
• Extend to the edges. Apply the same triggers, water, shade, first-aid cover and right to stop to contractor and tier-2 sites through contract clauses (lesson 7).
• Measure the cost of stopping and of not stopping. Track hours lost by tier, heat-illness cases and heat-related near misses (metrics 3 to 5), so that stopping work is budgeted for and supervisors are not blamed for it, and treat heat as a factor in safety-critical roles (lessons 6 and 8).

9. Conclusion and how EaselESG can help

Heat already costs Indian business working hours, output and health, and the cost will rise. The national evidence is strong and the methods are public; what is missing is measurement at site and workforce level, including contract workers. If you count hot hours, put a rupee value on them and act on what you find, you will invest better, and investors will find your disclosures more credible. Cricket shows how simple the system can be. Measure conditions at the body, agree tiered triggers in advance, and give people the authority to stop (Section 8). At EaselESG we help companies find research-backed ways to build climate resilience and develop impactful disclosures. We can help set up the heat metric set described here, build site heat plans within an ISO 45001 system, and bring the results into reporting.

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Prepared by EaselESG, the ESG practice of Easel Platform Services LLP. It is not investment, legal or medical advice.