Climate Change and Heat Stress Impacts: Does Seasonality of Labor Matter?

Agriculture is an economic activity that is highly dependent on weather, and is thus a seasonal operation. Climate change results in substantial increases in average temperatures and changes of precipitation patterns. However, in most countries of the world, agricultural production technologies are still characterized by high labor intensity. According to recent research the impact of heat stress on labor productivity is an important and understudied channel of how climate change will impact agricultural production and rural livelihoods. This particularly holds for low-income countries, where agriculture is labor intensive and where adaptation responses, e.g., the use of air-conditioned tractor cabins, are largely uneconomic and unavailable. We hypothesize that the literature assessing the impacts of heat stress on agricultural labor productivity has itself neglected another important factor, the role of seasonal fluctuations in the demand for agricultural labor. Given that the impacts of heat stress are not constant throughout the year, i.e., they are seasonal, implies that the labor productivity in certain seasons is subject to a higher heat stress shock than in others.