- Projektnummer: F2594
- Projektdurchführung: Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA)
- Status: Laufendes Projekt
- Geplantes Ende: 2028-10-31
Projektbeschreibung:
The impacts of climate change are creating challenges for occupational safety and health. Rising temperatures are causing greater physical strains and more heat stress. The higher levels of UV radiation to which workers are exposed increase the risk of adverse skin and eye health effects, including cancer. In addition, extreme weather events like heatwaves and low ozone events are occurring ever more frequently. These and other consequences of climate change are not only affecting traditional outdoor work, but also activities that have tended to receive less attention up until now, at kindergartens and schools for instance.
The implementation of suitable measures on the basis of a competently conducted risk assessment is decisive for employees’ safety and health. The strains imposed simultaneously by factors such as heat and UV radiation as well as the alterations brought about in environmental factors by climate change require existing concepts of measures to be reassessed from a multifactorial perspective informed by projections of future climate developments. Meanwhile the potential offered by innovative technologies is very far from being exhausted.
This project is compiling information about concepts of measures applied all over the world. These concepts will then be assessed to explore how easily they can be combined among each other and how transferable they are to German conditions. The project will also examine the extent to which methods for assessing the heat stress of workers due to hot weather can be adapted to take account of longer periods of summer heat. It will be checked whether practically oriented risk assessment approaches can be devised. The influence of particular climatic variables both on individuals’ exposure to UV radiation and on activity-specific strain is being investigated, among other things, in a field study, which will also consider the deployment of innovative technologies, such as assistance systems or sensors, as one strand in a multifactorial concept of measures.