Can Brazil beat the heat?
Plus, some news!
Welcome to Work Climate! As I’ll be studying for the bar, traveling, and moving over the next few months, I’ve decided to dispense with any pretense of regularity with this endeavor until at least September. I hope to still post here occasionally, however, as I’m sure there will be plenty more to learn about working in the era of the climate crisis as things heat up this summer.
In case this is my last post for a while, though, please indulge a few reflections on what this project has meant to me so far. I started this newsletter in late August 2023 while deciding whether to join California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA) as one of their candidates for post-grad fellowships. On September 1—after a lot of help from family, mentors, and friends—I accepted CRLA’s offer and published my first proper post about Texas’ attempts to stop cities from passing water break ordinances and other progressive measures. That was a really good day. (The “Death Star” law is in effect but bound up in litigation still, so has not yet been used, thankfully.)
Over the 9 months since then, I have tried to answer a dozen more questions:
Can international migrant labor programs advance climate justice?
Why is there no federal standard protecting workers from dangerous heat exposure?
How can we protect workers' rights in disaster recovery zones?
How can workers protect themselves from dangerous heat exposure?
These mini-essays are far from exemplars of beautiful prose, but they have led me into great conversations, taught me a ton, and even been read a few times. I’m grateful to anyone who has supported my pseudo-journalism <3
And there is so much more I want to learn about in this space alongside y’all, including bringing in more international perspectives, which I will attempt to do below. But first, some good news: my project with CRLA got funded! I’m thrilled and privileged to be a 2024 Equal Justice Works Fellow, sponsored by Vertex Foundation, which means I’ll be spending at least two years in Fresno, working to ameliorate the impacts of heat and other environmental stressors on agricultural workers in the Central Valley. This will be a big move from my various homes in the Bay and LA areas over the last decade, and there’s so much I have to learn about being a legal aid lawyer, but I am excited to give it my best :) Okay, thank you for bearing with me, let’s go to o tema do dia…
The heat challenges facing India have been well documented by Western media, nonprofits, and writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2020 “cli-fi” bestseller, The Ministry for the Future, opens with a horribly affecting description of mass death on the subcontinent. Such attention is deserved: Extreme heat in South Asia has become a virtually guaranteed annual catastrophe, with carbon-driven heat waves exposing millions to the risk of deadly heat stroke, crop failures, and long-term health impacts (every 1°C increase in average temperature measurably increases cardiovascular disease-related mortality). In Kolkata, for instance, it may soon be dangerous to spend even short periods of time outside during dozens of days per year.
The intensity of heat in countries like India means that local governments are often pressured into attending to the needs of vulnerable groups, especially children, laborers, and the elderly. Yet no region will be spared from confronting the impacts of the climate crisis, as highlighted in a 2019 report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), Working in a Warming World. And Brazil is one such country where climate adaptation plans lag behind the climate effects already being felt across its diverse territories.
According to ILO, Brazil is set to annually lose the productive equivalent of 849,900 jobs to heat by 2030, nearly double the rate of loss in 1995. What to make of metrics like this? I think it can be politically useful to frame heat losses in terms of economic productivity—i.e., as a problem even the hardest-hearted employers and bureaucrats should presumably care about—though that sort of framing can often come across as callous, too, such as with this response in an otherwise excellent interview from Stanford’s Woods Institute:
There is tons of work on heat and labor productivity. It’s pretty clear from the evidence that workers are less productive on really hot days. There is also a rich literature on health impacts from extreme temperature that finds higher mortality rates and worse morbidity outcomes under extreme conditions – obviously bad for economic production.
Most of Brazil’s extreme heat impacts are and will be felt in the tropical interior, where illegal mining and agribusiness are already devastating the Amazon and its communities, including Indigenous groups. But cities closer to the coasts are suffering, too—thanks to El Niño, 2023 was Brazil’s hottest year, and there is growing evidence that Black, elderly, and poor residents in urban heat islands are disproportionately harmed by rising temperatures.
Still, it isn’t clear how seriously Brazilian politicians will take this problem. Climate does not attract the same level of political attention in Brazil as it does in higher-emitting countries, in part because even the left-leaning administration of Lula da Silva benefits from the nationally-owned petroleum industry doing well. That may be changing, though, following devastating flooding in Rio Grande do Sul last month; this is admittedly unscientific, but I have noticed Brazilian media publishing far more stories about the impacts of fossil fuel pollution in the weeks since that deadly disaster began unfolding.
Whether there will be more focus on heat impacts in particular is even more difficult to predict, despite a heat-related tragedy in Brazil that made international headlines in November. Ana Clara Benevides, 23, died at a Taylor Swift concert in Rio due to sweltering temperatures and a lack of available water at the venue. She had taken her first flight to see her favorite artist and passed out during a performance of a massively popular song: Cruel Summer.
One of the most frustrating and promising things about preventing more deaths like Ana Clara’s is how easy it is to do so. Concert organizers, employers, and politicians don’t need to believe in the greenhouse effect to understand that hot days can hurt their attendees, workers, and constituents. They just need to believe it’s worth their time to guarantee adequate rest, shade, and water. Soon enough, it will be my job (!) to work with the good people at CRLA and in allied organizations to help make that happen in California agriculture, using whatever legal, educational, and political skills are at our disposal. Hopefully, I can share here some of what we will learn. Until then (or whenever I get bored of bar prepping), much love and stay cool.
Thank you for your past, present, and future commitment to acting locally while thinking globally.