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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how informal workers in Delhi understand the health risks of extreme heat and air pollution as embedded in contexts of work, urban mobility, and social networks. It argues for emerging climate-health frameworks to engage with such subjective experiences of climatic vulnerability.

Paper long abstract

Urban health impacts of climate change are embedded in everyday environments of work, mobility, and urban precarity. In Delhi, informal workers understand their experiences of extreme heat and air pollution as embedded in overlapping material, social, and subjective relations of work. Drawing on qualitative research with such workers, this paper explores how climate-related vulnerabilities are produced, experienced, and negotiated through relations of class and work within the city.

The analysis unfolds by first situating workers within the urban landscape. Various contexts of informality and mobility are foregrounded to understand the uneven distribution of environmental risks and health impacts. The paper then examines how workers’ networks and social relations mediate their capacity to cope with environmental stressors, revealing how political-economic inequalities are reproduced through informal systems of support, exclusion, and varying capacities to endure. Lastly, the paper attends to work as an embodied and self-making experience, showing how workers understand, normalise, and morally frame environmental exposure, and any resultant health impacts, as integral to their labour and class position.

The paper traces how workers respond to environmental stress through adjustment, endurance, and collective reasoning. Accordingly, it argues for an expansion of climate-health frameworks to accommodate such subjective experiences of the environment, navigated through idioms of work, responsibility, and necessity. In trying to understand local agency within its structural constraints, this paper contributes to debates on climate justice, health equity, and development studies, and demonstrates how health impacts of climate change are lived, contested, and navigated from below in the Global South.