Harvard Business Review estimated that four in 10 nonelderly workers are in occupations at increased risk for climate-related health impacts. The climate crisis has already taken employee lives in extreme heat waves and reduced workforce engagement during wildfires due to poor air quality and even eco-anxiety, a condition marked by fear and hopelessness in the face of environmental doom.

As the effects of climate change take hold, multilayered risks lie ahead — for instance, multiple studies have shown that worker attention and general cognitive performance declines dramatically after even short-term exposure to wildfire smoke or extreme heat.

The impact of climate change on employee health will be enormous; one estimate found that the direct health costs alone of climate change already far exceed $800 billion per year in the U.S, according to an article entitled @The Hidden Costs of Climate Change on the Workforce that was published by Harvard Business Review.

The threat will also impact corporate finances, from higher healthcare-coverage costs borne by employers, including from asthma, mental health, and chronic conditions; performance and engagement costs given climate-driven health declines, lower employee engagement, and reduced productivity; injury and disability costs; and reduced labor availability.

Climate events such as extreme heat already cost an estimated 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. and 490 billion hours globally on an annual basis.

Organizations’ most valuable assets — their people — face mounting climate-related risks to their physical and mental health from wildfires, extreme heat, hurricanes, flooding, emerging diseases, and more.

Companies need to understands where their workforce is most vulnerable. Ways to approach a climate change and health audit can vary depending on the company and sector. Broadly, it might involve several steps, including mapping out risks and specifying how far-reaching they are; deciding which tools to use to track risks over time; identifying areas where risks may be more subtle; developing and deploying Early-Warning Systems; learning from and partnering with the public sector; adapting frameworks; learning from data, pilots, and case studies; creating partnerships; don’t overlook mental health, and being transparent about the climate risk.

Companies — particularly larger ones — are already using tools such as climate-risk analytics, which have been developed by insurers, consultancies, and investors to assess potential losses, and heat mapping to help identify climate risks to physical assets over time. These can be expanded to include employee data.

Companies can track factors such as employee attitudes, well-being, commitment levels, and overall health and safety statistics from pulse surveys, well-being check-in scores, higher-tech sentiment analysis, and health and benefits data.

The importance of timely information cannot be overstated when it comes to climate change and employee health. Preventing an issue is far more effective than treating its consequences.

For companies with a complex global footprint, this type of response may be especially challenging with multiple simultaneous climate health risks, such as overlapping extreme heat and wildfires during the summer, or if companies have locations in both hemispheres, wildfire season in Australia at the same time as flooding season in Europe, for example.

To address this, organizations should consider repurposing their pandemic command center and cross-function teaming to address a new frontier of health-risk response. Companies can tap into security, HR, communications, and other teams to lead the charge on early-warning systems — as long as there is a clear owner responsible for both monitoring these systems and deploying solutions.

Companies will, however, need to be vigilant about data privacy. This is especially true where geolocation and health data is concerned, given the potential for data privacy issues over time.

Firms should approach the ethical collection and use of data in early-warning systems with the same rigor required for any other employee-monitoring program.

Key principles like transparency, voluntary opt-in where appropriate, data minimization, and robust security protocols are essential to build trust and ensure the responsible use of employee information.

While a few private-sector organizations are ahead in identifying and reducing climate risks for employee health, leading organizations generally come from the public sector. There are strong opportunities for the private sector to leverage these insights.

Several of the resources that the public sector has developed to help communities prepare for climate risks can be adapted by employers.

Before you adopt an employee health strategy, you will want to collect and assess information about how it will help employees while also being fiscally responsible. Plus, you may need this type of data to convince company stakeholders that investing in employee health as it relates to climate risk is a good return on investment.

Harvard Business Review noted that leaders need to tackle workforce psychological stress, including climate anxiety, as a major pillar of corporate climate response. More than two-thirds of Americans experience some climate or eco-anxiety — and younger workers are at higher risk. A recent survey of 16-to-25-year-olds found that a staggering 45% report interruption to their daily lives due to worries about climate.

The impact of employee mental health struggles on businesses is significant, manifesting in decreased productivity, reduced efficiency, and increased health-related costs. As such, companies must approach the topic of climate-driven mental health challenges with care and comprehensiveness.

Leaders need to openly communicate the potential health and well-being impacts of climate change to their employees.

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