News
Announcements, news and other shorter pieces about our research project.
VCOSS Feeling the Heat Report
This month the Victorian Council of Social Services released a new report highlighting how people experiencing disadvantage are particularly at risk with heat stress. Extreme heat kills more Australians than any other form of natural disaster, and for some it makes...
High heat presents additional challenge for care workers
Workers in aged care face a raft of challenges in the provision of quality care, including understaffing, time pressures, and high turnover of staff. As COVID-19 made clear, care workers also perform essential work that places them at the frontline of public health...
Heat stress during the COVID-19 pandemic
The outbreak of COVID-19 in Australia resulted in rapid, sweeping changes to daily life and work. Some of these changes were temporary while others, such as the use of face masks in certain settings and social distancing measures, remain partially in place. Workers in...
Joint Report with Centre for Future Work
We have released a new report with the Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work, looking at the impacts of heat stress on workers in Australia. Prepared by UTS researchers as part of the Too Hot to Work Project, the report outlines why working in climate...
Sweltering Cities
A new project, Sweltering Cities, has just launched. With a focus on Western Sydney, the initiative is working with some of the hottest urban communities in Australia. Western Sydney has been described as an urban heat island, and last summer temperatures were close...
CJRC & United Workers Union Research Project
Our new project with the United Workers Union (UWU) (2020-2021) investigates climatic heat stress, bushfire smoke, and the experience of members of the United Workers Union across Australia. The project will interview and survey workers across a range of industries,...
Heat in the Streets: Final Report
From January to September 2019, UTS researchers completed a project looking at how outdoor workers in the City of Sydney area were experiencing high heat and heat stress. The project was funded through a City of Sydney Council Innovation Grant. The project focused on...
Construction workers in a climate precarious world
Project members Elizabeth Humphrys and Freya Newman have published an academic article in the Critical Sociology journal, titled ‘Construction Workers in a Climate Precarious World’. The article focuses on climatic heat stress as a matter of occupational health...
Bushfire smoke hazard linked to climate change, Sydney and Canberra
No one in Australia could have missed the dangerous pollution levels in Sydney and Canberra as a result of the recent bushfires. The Bureau of Meteorology, TIME Magazine and three former Fire Chiefs have all drawn the link between the bushfires, extreme weather events...
Heat stress and on-demand workers
In July 2019, the research team on the Heat in the Streets project, funded by a City of Sydney innovation grant, made a submission to the Victorian Government’s inquiry into the on-demand workforce. We reported some early analysis of the experience of food and...