Oppressive Heat: Heat Stress, Debt Bondage and British Overseas Investment in Cambodian Construction

As global temperatures rise, extreme temperatures claim more lives around the world than any other natural hazard, making heat stress a key priority under climate change. Nevertheless, a key obstacle to understanding heat stress is the complexity of measuring it. The thermal experience of climate change is shaped not only by a person's physical location, but also their social position. The jobs we do, the roles we play in society, the conditions we work in, and our freedom within those roles, all shape our exposure to the changing climate.

Aiming to reframe the narrative of heat stress under climate change around the lived experience of labour regimes and working relations, the Oppressive Heat project will assemble a novel, exploratory suite of conceptual and methodological tools to explore the dynamic workplace geography of thermal exposure under climate change. Incorporating CORE thermal sensors, Rapid Ethnographic Assessment, and multi-sited socioeconomic analysis to Cambodia, one of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries and also a key site of labour exploitation and modern slavery, it will generate vital context-specific data directed towards UK and Cambodian OSH policy, whilst also opening up a vital high-impact field of scholarship on the health dimensions of labour exploitation under climate change.