Abstract: 'Climate change has increased heat exposure in many parts of the tropics, negatively impacting outdoor worker productivity and health. Although it is known that tropical deforestation causes local warming, the extent to which this warming affects people across the tropics is unknown. Here, we combine worker health guidelines with satellite, reanalysis, and population data to investigate how increases in local temperatures associated with recent deforestation (2003-2018) affects outdoor working conditions across low-latitude countries, and how future global climate change will magnify heat exposure for people in deforested areas. We find that the local warming associated with just 15 years of deforestation has caused losses in safe thermal working conditions for 2.8 million outdoor workers. We also show recent large-scale forest loss caused particularly large impacts on populations in locations such as the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Par��. Future global warming and additional forest loss will magnify these impacts.'

{"references": ["Hansen et al. (2013) forest cover data: doi.org/10.1126/science.1244693", "Dinerstein et al. (2017) biome information: doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix014", "NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Ocean Ecology Laboratory, Ocean Biology Processing Group. Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Aqua"]}

All data are in netcdf format. Note that the Hansen et al. tree cover, loss, and gain data latitude dimension is flipped relative to the remainder of the datasets. Associated scripts to load and plot data at: github.com/LukeAParsons/deforestation_heatexposure