‘It’s so stressful’: Bangkok women workers trapped by unrelenting heat
By Laurie Goering
Renee Revika, a motorcycle delivery driver in Bangkok, faces plenty of challenges in her work, including epic rush-hour traffic jams, impatient customers and pay low enough that she is often on her bike 14 hours or more a day to pay her bills.
Now she’s facing an added pressure, one that makes her increasing worried for her mental and physical health: extreme heat.
As climate change drives hotter temperatures around the planet, daytime highs in always steamy Bangkok now peak between 32 and 35 degrees Celsius (90-95 degrees Fahrenheit) every month of the year.
For Revika, the worsening heat can bring pounding headaches, irate customers and sweat pouring under her mandatory green jacket, helmet, arm pads and face mask.
“The temperature might be 35 degrees, but because Bangkok doesn’t have much shade and there are a lot of buildings and exhaust the temperature can actually be 40C or even more,” she said, noting that places to rest in the shade or in air conditioning are few.
Besides struggling with her own exhaustion, “the heat makes some customers really mad,” she added. “They yell at me, insult me. It makes it really stressful.”
At times, “it’s so stressful I just want to crash and die,” she said.
Heat is the deadliest of climate-driven weather impacts, claiming about one life a minute globally, according to the most recent Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, released in November 2025.
Over the last five years, nearly 85 percent of life-threatening heatwave days wouldn’t have happened without climate change, researchers said.
Heat is also increasingly affecting the ability of workers like Revika to do their jobs. In 2024, the potential work hours lost to extreme heat globally were the equivalent of $1 trillion in lost economic benefit, researchers noted.
“These are not future projections. They are a daily reality,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), told reporters.
An earlier report, released in August 2025 by WHO, the International Labour Organization and the World Meteorological Organization, said 4.4 billion workers around the world are now exposed to excessive heat, running risks from collapse to permanent kidney damage as they try to do their jobs.
“Climate change is reshaping the world of work. Without bold, coordinated action, heat stress will become one of the most devastating occupational hazards of our time,” warned Joaquim Pintado Nunes, chief of occupational safety, health and the working environment for the International Labour Organization (ILO).
high cost, high stress
Revika, the Bangkok motorcycle driver, said that the psychological impacts of heat can be as wearing as the physical ones, both for her and her clients.
She remembers one recent hot day when a customer, sitting behind her on her bike in heavy traffic, banged his helmet against hers and shifted his weight wildly, threatening to knock them over if he didn’t get to his destination more quickly. She was terrified.
“The heat can make someone really mad,” she said later. “I have to handle the way my customers respond to the heat as well as the way I do. Some are kind - but some are not.”
Even going home at the end of the day can offer little relief. When Revika arrives there, exhausted, “I barely want to talk to my family. It makes family relationships worse,” she said. Her husband is also a motorcycle delivery rider, and also affected by worsening heat.
For many workers, more sweltering days also mean rising costs.
Netnapa Phummala, who sews at home to earn a living in Bangkok, said increasingly intense heat has led to her sewing machines overheating and breaking more often, forcing her to make repairs. After one machine exploded in intense heat, she finally invested in an air conditioner to try to keep her equipment working.
The cooler air has made sewing more comfortable and safer on unbearably steamy days, she said - but her electricity bills have tripled in the hottest periods of the year.
The air conditioner also “makes a loud noise and it’s made me have a lot of disputes with my neighbours,” admitted the 47-year-old, who lives in a small house with her seven children in one of Bangkok’s many informal settlements.
She worries the expensive but aging device may not last much longer - it has begun making worrying noises - and so she has begun reverting to using fans as much as possible.
rising nighttime temperatures
Shifting work into cooler hours of the day can help some workers deal with intense daytime heat, experts say. But many women - including Phummala and Revika - say they have little opportunity to do that because of childcare responsibilities, a lack of customers at night, already holding second evening jobs or worries about their safety.
Around the world, night-time temperatures are also rising faster than daytime temperatures, scientists say, meaning work in the evening can also be draining and sleep harder to manage. Increasingly, workers are missing out on a night’s rest and heading back to their jobs already hot and tired.
Somyong Ramieddee, who sleeps on a thin mattress in the loft of her tin-roofed home in Bangkok’s Khlong Toei district, said nighttime heat now leaves her with itchy body rashes, making sleep a struggle.
To try to stay cool the 61-year-old pours containers of water over her body and runs fans when she has the money - but her job cooking and selling homemade food, traded through the front window of her tiny home in a packed slum area, often leaves the one-room wooden structure sweltering.
“This is the coolest part of the house,” she says, sitting on a wooden box near the home’s door and trying to catch a breeze from the alleyway as her pet cats wind around her legs.
She is not particularly worried about climate change bringing increasingly extreme heat. “It’s normal that the weather is hot here,” she says.
But Marina Romanello, the executive director of the 2025 Lancet Countdown, predicted that fast-worsening extreme heat “is going to put huge stress on already stressed health services” as more people seek help for heat-related illnesses.
Heat adaptation measures - such as giving workers more water breaks, providing them cool places to rest, installing more shade structures and planting more trees - could help reduce the costs and the risks, but funding is in short supply for such changes, she said.
That is leaving more workers like Revika and Phummala facing increasingly dangerous temperatures with little relief, a risk for their incomes and health.
As efforts to shift away from fossil fuels falter and the planet heats up, “the warnings we’ve all heard for decades have become facts and reality for all of us. Inaction is costing lives every day,” warned Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister.
“These are not just statistics. They are the stories of families, communities and futures lost.”