The International Accord Moves to Treat Heat as a Workplace Safety Risk
December 19, 2025
The International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry last week announced that it will formally treat heat as a workplace safety risk and develop a Protocol on Heat Stress to address the growing threat that extreme heat poses to garment workers’ health and safety.
The decision follows a joint letter coordinated by Climate Rights International and signed by 45 organizations worldwide, urging the Accord’s Steering Committee to recognize heat stress as the fifth safety pillar of the Accord. This move sets an important precedent by bringing climate-driven heat risks explicitly within the scope of a supply-chain safety agreement in the garment sector.
The International Accord is an agreement between global clothing brands, retailers and trade unions, created in the aftermath of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 workers. The Accord aims to improve garment factory safety in Bangladesh and Pakistan via independent inspections, worker training and a complaints mechanism. Today, the Accord reports that it covers more than 3 million workers across little over 1,600 factories in Bangladesh and 400 factories in Pakistan. The 282 brand signatories to the Accord include Adidas, ASOS, BESTSELLER, H&M Group, Inditex and PVH. To date, the Accord’s scope has been limited to conventional physical safety risks related to buildings, fire, structural integrity and boilers.
Yet extreme heat and humidity are rapidly emerging as some of the most dangerous occupational health and safety risks facing workers. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 70% of the global working population, around 2.4 billion workers, are exposed to extreme heat every year, contributing to approximately 23 million non-fatal injuries and nearly 19,000 deaths annually. While heat risks are often associated with outdoor work, they are increasingly severe in indoor manufacturing environments such as garment factories, where poor ventilation, heat-emitting machinery, and dense production floors intensify temperatures.
South and Southeast Asia dominate global garment manufacturing and are among the regions most vulnerable to climate-driven extreme heat. In 2019, Asia accounted for 55% of global garment and textile exports and employed approximately 60 million workers. At the same time, approximately 75% of the workforce in the Asia-Pacific region is exposed to extreme heat each year. In April 2024, Bangladesh experienced an extreme heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 40°C (104°F) in six districts, conditions likely to have exposed garment workers to serious heat stress risks. By embedding a Heat Stress Protocol into the Accord, factories within its scope in Bangladesh and Pakistan will be required to recognize extreme heat as a safety hazard and to take concrete, enforceable steps to help their suppliers to reduce the risks it poses to workers.
Our field research in September of this year to India underscores why this shift matters. In interviews with factory managers, we found that many global brands had never asked their suppliers whether heat is affecting production or what steps, if any, are being taken to protect workers. Nor have brands asked suppliers to measure temperatures inside factories. Brands’ lack of awareness and inquiry translates into a lack of concrete incentives for suppliers to make longer-term, rather than reactionary, investments into cooling solutions.
The new Protocol opens the door to pressing brands to devote greater attention to keeping workers safe under extreme heat conditions. Under the 2023 Accord, brands are urged to fund factory safety programs and to negotiate commercial terms with suppliers that make required safety remediation financially feasible, rather than leaving the costs solely with factories.
Despite these expectations of shared funding, the financial burden of implementation still falls primarily on suppliers. Without addressing this imbalance, the sustainability and long-term impact of safety reforms remain at risk.
This imbalance is not new. When the 2013 Accord was originally signed, suppliers were not listed as formal signatories. Although this has partially shifted with the inclusion of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) in the RSC, a genuine shared responsibility model requires a broader coalition of actors, including global brands and foreign governments and philanthropies, to provide needed financial and technical support to address structural safety challenges across the industry, such as upgrading electrical infrastructure and supporting purpose-built, climate-resilient factories. What’s more, only half Bangladesh’s 3,320 garment facilities are currently covered by the Accord, and not all major brands sourcing from the country are signatories, leaving many workers outside its protections.
The Accord’s new Heat Stress Protocol is a significant step forward in recognizing climate-related health and safety risks in garment supply chains. By treating heat as a formal workplace hazard, the Protocol places the issue firmly on the agenda for global fashion brands, including those sourcing beyond Bangladesh and Pakistan. But to effectively manage heat on top of other health and safety concerns related to fire and building safety, a genuinely shared model of responsibility needs to be firmly institutionalized in the Accord and in other mutli-stakeholder initiatives.
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