In a garment factory in Gazipur in the second week of May 2026, the fans stopped. Not because they broke down — because the power did. The factory, one of hundreds in the industrial belt ringing Dhaka, was too small to run generators through a prolonged outage. Workers at sewing stations that had previously produced 10,000 garment pieces in a ten-hour shift were producing 8,000. The temperature inside the factory was tracking the 37°C ambient reading outside, with humidity compounding the heat index further. Mahmud Hasan Khan, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, confirmed the pattern in April: production across the sector had declined by around 20% during peak heat and power disruption combined.
This is not an edge case. It is a description of what is happening across Bangladesh’s industrial geography right now, in the month this issue publishes, in a country that lost $24 billion in income last year from heat-related labour incapacity alone — a figure equivalent to approximately 5% of GDP, according to the Lancet Countdown’s 2025 data sheet. The year before, the same calculation produced $21 billion. The trajectory is consistent, annual, and accelerating. What is not consistent is the urgency with which Bangladesh’s business community, policymakers, and international buyers are treating a risk that has already reached this scale.
The heatwave of 2026 is operating through two channels simultaneously. The first is the direct channel: extreme heat reduces the number of hours workers can safely and productively work, increases absenteeism, generates healthcare costs, and depresses output across every sector that relies on human labour outdoors or in inadequately cooled facilities. The second is the compound channel: the Hormuz-related energy crisis has cut gas supply to power plants, producing load shedding of seven to ten hours a day in rural areas and two to three hours in urban ones — removing the fans, coolers, and lighting that make factory work tolerable in peak summer heat. Both are happening at once. Neither has a quick resolution.
What the temperature record shows
Since 1980, Bangladesh’s maximum temperature has risen by 1.1°C. The figure sounds modest until it is read alongside the companion statistic: the ‘feels like’ temperature — the heat index that accounts for humidity — has surged by 4.5°C over the same period. Bangladesh is a high-humidity country. The heat index, not the thermometer reading, is what determines whether a worker can sustain physical effort, whether a sewing machine operator can maintain concentration, and whether a construction worker can complete a full day’s shift without collapsing. A 4.5°C rise in felt temperature over four decades is not a marginal change. It is the difference between uncomfortable and dangerous across a significant portion of the working day in summer months.
The 2024 heatwave established records that meteorologists described as unprecedented in the modern measurement period. Bangladesh experienced its longest consecutive heatwave since records began in 1948 — 26 days without break, according to Muhammad Abul Kalam Mallik of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department. Temperatures reached 43.8°C in Jashore. Schools closed nationwide. At least 15 people died from heatstroke. And the pattern, as the World Weather Attribution study confirmed, was not simply weather variation — it was 44 extra days of extreme heat attributable to human-caused climate change in a single year. Dhaka ranks among the world’s cities experiencing the most significant increases in temperature, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development.
The World Bank’s September 2025 report, An Unsustainable Life: The Impact of Heat on Health and the Economy of Bangladesh, drawn from analysis of temperature and humidity trends from 1976 to 2023 and a household survey of more than 16,000 people, documents the downstream consequences of that temperature trajectory. Heat-related illness — diarrhoea, persistent cough, respiratory disease, fatigue — has increased across the population. Mental health consequences, including depression and anxiety associated with heat stress and displacement, are documented. Healthcare spending at the household level has risen, diverting income from consumption and savings. The costs are not concentrated in any single sector or demographic. They are distributed across the economy in ways that aggregate data consistently underestimates.
How heat moves through the economy — sector by sector
The garment industry is the most visible exposure point, because it employs 4.2 million workers in concentrated industrial clusters around Dhaka, Gazipur, and Narayanganj, and because its output is directly traceable to international buyers whose compliance frameworks are theoretically designed to monitor working conditions. Two thirds of RMG workers report that factory heat levels have increased and are affecting their health and performance, according to a Business & Human Rights Resource Centre report. The 6% production decline documented in heat-spike periods understates the compound effect when power cuts remove cooling simultaneously.
Agriculture absorbs the largest share of heat-related labour loss in absolute terms — 63.5% of potential hours lost nationally, and 54% of associated income losses, according to the Lancet Countdown data. Agricultural workers have no cooling facilities, no heat-stress frameworks, and no income replacement for hours not worked. The Boro rice season, which runs through April and May, overlaps directly with the peak heat period. A farmer who cannot work the afternoon shift — when temperatures make outdoor labour genuinely dangerous — does not recover those hours. The crop is either harvested by others, harvested late, or partially lost. None of those outcomes are captured in aggregate GDP figures in real time, but all of them reduce household income in rural Bangladesh.
For informal workers — construction labourers, rickshaw pullers, day labourers, street vendors — the economic cost of heat is almost entirely invisible in formal data. These workers operate without contracts, without sick pay, and without any framework that compensates them for heat-related incapacity. A construction worker who cannot work from noon to three in the afternoon on a 40°C day loses a quarter of a ten-hour shift’s earning. Multiplied across millions of informal workers across eight months of elevated temperatures, that loss is structurally significant — it simply does not appear in the statistics that policymakers read.
SMEs compound the problem in a specific way. A small manufacturer without climate-controlled facilities loses productive hours during peak afternoon heat and pays higher energy bills as cooling demand rises — a double squeeze that larger factories with generator capacity and climate-controlled floors can partially absorb. Supply chain delays from SMEs cascade upward to larger buyers and exporters, creating schedule slippage that the heat itself never appears as the cause of in delivery records.
The compound crisis: when heat and power cuts arrive together
The specific danger of May 2026 is not heat alone. It is the convergence of peak summer temperatures with an energy crisis that has reduced grid supply across most of the country, removing the cooling infrastructure that partially mitigates heat impact in factories and offices. The Hormuz-related gas supply disruption has cut fuel imports, reducing generation capacity at gas-fired power plants. Rural areas are experiencing seven to ten hours of load shedding daily. Urban areas outside Dhaka are getting two to three hours. Factories that depend on grid power for fans, cooling, and lighting are operating in conditions that make heat stress not merely uncomfortable but operationally dangerous.
Zahangir Alam, an independent fashion sector consultant, described the practical consequence in Thomson Reuters Foundation reporting from 20 May 2026: for many smaller garment manufacturers, running generators through a prolonged power cut is too expensive, so they minimise the use of fans and cooling equipment. Workers at those factories are operating in 37°C ambient heat with high humidity and no mechanical cooling.
The timing matters. This is the hottest period of the year, arriving simultaneously with an energy crisis and a geopolitical disruption to fuel supply that the government has described as structural rather than temporary. The State Minister for Power acknowledged in parliament in April that the crisis is not a short-term issue but the result of accumulated decisions. Factories that were already managing the annual heat cycle are doing so this year without the power that makes management possible.
Rules that cover water. Nothing that covers heat.
Bangladesh’s labour regulations cover ventilation, drinking water, and first aid in factories. They do not cover heat. There is no mandatory threshold temperature at which workers must be given rest breaks. There is no recognition of heat fatigue or heat stress as compensable workplace health risks. There is no audit framework for heat management in factory compliance systems — meaning the international buyers whose sourcing decisions govern which factories survive have no mechanism to assess or require heat protection for the workers making their products.
A February 2026 report by Stand.earth, Oxfam, and the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity found that five major global brands have acknowledged the need to adapt their supply chains to climate impacts — but that almost no funding has reached workers to help them cope with heat stress. The gap is specific and consequential: brands buying garments from Bangladesh have not added heat management to their factory audit frameworks. That means a factory operating in 40°C ambient heat with inadequate cooling appears compliant in sourcing systems, while the production delays and quality risks that heat creates remain invisible in the risk reports those systems generate.
Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute quantified what that gap will cost if left unaddressed: the failure to reduce heat in factories and in flooding around them could cost the apparel industry $65 billion in earnings and approximately one million potential jobs in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Vietnam combined by 2030. The figure is a projection across a seven-year horizon, but its logic is already visible in the production data of May 2026. A sector that loses 20% of output during peak heat and power disruption, with no framework to manage that loss and no buyer compliance requirement driving investment in solutions, is carrying a risk that compounds annually.
What a credible response requires
A credible business response operates at three levels.
At the factory level, the minimum requirement is a heat-stress threshold — a specified wet-bulb temperature at which mandatory rest breaks kick in, with access to oral rehydration salts and a cool recovery space. Heat fatigue needs to be recognised as a legitimate reason for reduced output, not treated as a discipline or attendance problem. None of this currently exists in Bangladesh’s labour framework.
At the buyer level, heat management needs to enter factory audit systems as a supply chain compliance variable. Brands that source from factories in Dhaka and Gazipur need to accept that those factories cannot sustain the same output schedules as factories in temperate climates without investment in cooling infrastructure — and that the sourcing margins they offer need to accommodate that investment. A buyer that audits a factory for fire exits and chemical handling but not for heat stress is auditing for yesterday’s risks.
At the policy level, labour regulations need to be amended to treat heat as a workplace health risk with the same legal standing as ventilation and drinking water, which means not just writing the rule but building the inspection capacity to enforce it. The rule without the inspection is a statement, not a standard.
