title: Potential escalation of heat-related working costs with climate and socioeconomic changes in China.
abstract: Global climate change will increase the frequency of hot temperatures, impairing health and productivity for millions of working people and raising labor costs. In mainland China, high-temperature subsidies (HTSs) are allocated to employees for each working day in extremely hot environments, but the potential heat-related increase in labor cost has not been evaluated so far. Here, we estimate the potential HTS cost in current and future climates under different scenarios of socioeconomic development and radiative forcing (Representative Concentration Pathway), taking uncertainties from the climate model structure and bias correction into account. On average, the total HTS in China is estimated at 38.6 billion yuan/y (US $6.22 billion/y) over the 1979-2005 period, which is equivalent to 0.2% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Assuming that the HTS standards (per employee per hot day) remain unchanged throughout the 21st century, the total HTS may reach 250 billion yuan/y in the 2030s and 1,000 billion yuan/y in 2100. We further show that, without specific adaptation, the increased HTS cost is mainly determined by population growth until the 2030s and climate change after the mid-21st century because of increasingly frequent hot weather. Accounting for the likely possibility that HTS standards follow the wages, the share of GDP devoted to HTS could become as high as 3% at the end of 21st century.
authors.affiliation: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), 75005 Paris, France; LOCEAN, UMR 7159, Unité mixte Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD)-Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN), Sorbonne Universités, 75005 Paris, France; yan.zhao@locean-ipsl.upmc.fr.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), 75005 Paris, France; LOCEAN, UMR 7159, Unité mixte Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD)-Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN), Sorbonne Universités, 75005 Paris, France;
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sultan
authors.affiliation: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), 75005 Paris, France; LSCE, UMR 1572, Unité mixte Joint Unit of Commissariat à l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA)-CNRS-Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin (UVSQ), 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vautard
authors.affiliation: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), 75005 Paris, France; LSCE, UMR 1572, Unité mixte Joint Unit of Commissariat à l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA)-CNRS-Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin (UVSQ), 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;
authors.forename: Pascale
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Braconnot
authors.affiliation: Nansen-Zhu International Research Centre, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China;
authors.forename: Huijun J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), 75005 Paris, France; METIS, UMR 7619, Unité mixte UPMC-CNRS-Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), Sorbonne Universités, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Agnes
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ducharne
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D057231:Climate Change / Q000191:economics*; D059066:Gross Domestic Product; D005102:Health Expenditures; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D016272:Occupational Health / Q000191:economics* / Q000639:trends; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: ANOVA; CMIP5; GDP; climate change; high-temperature subsidies