Low-cost fixes can ease heat stress for garment workers

24/10/2025 0 Comments read Climate Change, Gender, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 24.10.2025 (SciDev.Net): Simple, low-cost interventions could help reduce heat stress for the millions of people who work in garment factories in Bangladesh, where extreme temperatures make conditions unbearable, according to Australian researchers.

Climate change-led extreme heat and humidity is putting the health and earnings of garment workers in Bangladesh and other low- and middle-income countries at increasing risk, say researchers of a study led by the University of Sydney. Their study published in The Lancet Planetary Health on Monday (20 October), reveals how simple, affordable, low-carbon interventions could reduce heat stress and protect workers’ productivity and earnings in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector.

The industry employs over 4 million people in the country, about 60 per cent of them women, according to the International Labour Organization. Fahima Akter Beauty, a 24-year-old single mother from Ashulia suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, has been working for three years in a factory that manufactures knitwear. She feels it is getting hotter and the heat makes her stressed and restless, leading to poor concentration, headaches and drowsiness.

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Empowering communities to become groundwater-wise

24/10/2024 1 Comment read Climate Change, Environment & Development, Gender, Health & Science

From Left: Mamta, Varda Devi, Tulsi Devi Bhatt, Rukmini Devi, Hira Bai, Chanda Choubisa in Hinta Village in Udaipur District of Rajasthan (India). Photo Credit: ©Neena Bhandari

The writer received a Special Mention for the article at the 2025 Crawford Fund Food Security Journalism Award

By Neena Bhandari

Hinta and Dharta Villages (Rajasthan), 24.10.2024 (Loss and Damage Research Observatory): Tulsi Devi Bhatt, draped in an embellished purple sari and a full sleeve red kurti (top), navigates her way through the wheat fields in Hinta village in the western Indian state of Rajasthan’s Udaipur district. She is on her weekly mission to measure water level in the dug wells – the quantity of water is critical for the food security and livelihood of her community.

Hinta is part of the two multi-village, hard rock aquifer watersheds – the 6400-hectare Dharta watershed in Rajasthan and 5000-hectare Meghraj watershed in Gujarat, where MARVI – Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater Use through Village-level Intervention – project has been instrumental in enhancing groundwater recharge and availability.

Spearheaded by the Western Sydney University in Australia, working in collaboration with seven other partners in India and elsewhere, the MARVI project is aimed at empowering farmers like Tulsi with the knowledge and tools necessary for sustainable and equitable groundwater management in their villages.

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“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” says Yvonne Pinto, incoming IRRI Chief

29/02/2024 0 Comments read Gender, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 28.02.2024 (IPS): Growing up on a small farming station in Holetta (Ethiopia), Yvonne Pinto would accompany her agriculturist father to the farm, where she would spend her time cross-fertilizing plants. Her tiny fingers making the task easier, as she would marvel at the end product of a prospective new and higher yielding variety. These formative years laid the foundation for her career in agricultural science.

Ethiopia in the late 1970s and 1980s was ravaged by a terrible famine, drought, civil war, and international conflict. It became clear to Pinto from the outset that such exigencies could rapidly deteriorate everyday life and the absence of food could decimate a population. These events instilled in her a deep appreciation for the role agriculture and food systems play in human survival.

“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” says Pinto, the incoming Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). A second-generation Kenyan by birth, she feels privileged to have been brought up in Ethiopia, a country that was never colonized and where she felt fortunate to grow up as an equal, a rare experience then.

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