Too Hot to Ignore: Extreme Heat in Garment Supply Chains
June 2026
Extreme heat is fast becoming one of the most serious threats to worker safety and supply chain resilience in the global apparel industry. Global apparel brands can no longer treat it as a peripheral environmental issue—they must start managing heat as an occupational health and safety issue and a core supply chain risk.
Across South and Southeast Asia, rising temperatures and humidity are already disrupting factory output, reducing productivity, damaging product quality, harming worker health and driving up absenteeism. These are not future projections. They are current operating realities documented in factories supplying some of the world’s best-known clothing brands.
This report draws on original field research conducted across major garment-producing regions in India to show how extreme heat disrupts manufacturing in four key ways: it threatens worker health and safety; drives higher absenteeism; reduces productivity as workers slow their pace under physical strain; and undermines product quality through power outages, higher defect rates, and delivery delays.
These findings point to a deeper governance failure in global garment supply chains that threatens their supply chain resilience. Responsibility for protecting workers is largely pushed onto suppliers, even as brands’ purchasing practices—tight margins, short lead times, and volatile order volumes—limit suppliers’ ability to invest in cooling or infrastructure upgrades. Addressing heat risk requires a shift toward shared responsibility across the value chain, one that aligns brand expectations, purchasing practices, and financing with the real costs of climate adaptation.
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
- For global brands and buyers: Formally recognize extreme heat as a supply chain hazard and an occupational health and safety risk; require suppliers to measure and report temperature and humidity data; establish enforceable heat policies with clear thresholds; adopt a shared responsibility approach in which the costs of climate adaptation are shared rather than absorbed by suppliers alone; and reform purchasing practices by incorporating contingency planning that allows flexibility when extreme heat disrupts production.
- For suppliers and manufacturers: Implement immediate protective measures for workers, adopt a staged approach to heat mitigation, and ensure workers have a meaningful voice in how heat risks are identified and managed. Protect wages during periods of reduced output due to extreme heat.
- For governments and regulators: Establish binding workplace temperature thresholds and enforceable work-rest guidance, extend heat action plans to cover industrial workplaces, and formally recognize heat stress as an occupational illness within social protection frameworks.
- For industry bodies and multistakeholder initiatives: Develop harmonized guidance on heat mitigation, facilitate shared data systems across the sector, and embed heat-risk requirements into governance and accreditation frameworks.
Global LaborRelated
See all
Conscience Incorporated
In his new book Conscience Incorporated, Michael Posner, director of the Center for Business and Human Rights, offers practical strategies and bold reforms to help businesses align profitability with ethical responsibility.
Setting Higher Standards: How Governments Can Regulate Corporate Human Rights Performance
Our report, released three months after the landmark CSDDD entered into force, provides a roadmap for regulators and companies navigating a new era of corporate human rights responsibility.
A Broken Partnership: How Clothing Brands Exploit Suppliers and Harm Workers –And What Can Be Done About It
Ten years after the Rana Plaza factory collapse, a new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights calls for a reformed collaborative approach to the outsourced manufacturing of apparel—one that does not create unfair economic pressure on factory owners, who all too often respond to such exploitation by reducing wages and benefits for their poor employees.