Building health and safety into climate action: from afterthought to foresight

IOSH and RAND Europe have a shared interest in the association between climate change and work and have collaborated on a number of climate-related projects since 2025. In this article, Dr Mario Battaglini, RAND Europe Research Leader, and Dr Christopher Davis, IOSH Thought Leadership Manager, consider the indirect effects of climate action on OSH, the function and benefits of foresight, and an ongoing European study that brings these together.

In 2025, IOSH published The Heat is On, a white paper outlining the direct impacts of climate change on the workplace and highlighting how the occupational safety and health (OSH) community might respond. It detailed how climate change is already harming workers and argued that policy, regulation, and workplace processes have not kept pace.

As Dr Paul Schulte observed in his foreword, the elimination of hazards at the top of the hierarchy of controls is challenging with climate change, because addressing the root cause of climate-related OSH harm requires climate action itself. But climate action will bring its own challenges to navigate and, given the volatility the world is experiencing, the trajectory of such policies is unlikely to be smooth. Faced with an uncertain future and a rapidly heating world, foresight offers one way to ensure the OSH impacts of climate action are not overlooked.

Climate-driven and transition-driven migration may create mobile workforces with less voice and more precarious conditions. Policy timelines risk outpacing protections, new technologies could introduce unfamiliar hazards, and workforce displacement may compound these pressures.

These indirect effects could happen simultaneously, compound each other, and interact with direct climate exposures, potentially amplifying risks.

Yet these same dynamics may also open up opportunities. Climate-related investments can drive OSH improvement when safety is embedded from the outset. New technologies can eliminate hazardous tasks when developed with safety by design and digital tools can empower workers through better monitoring and risk management. Structured upskilling with integrated OSH content can turn workforce change into an opportunity to raise baseline competence. Decarbonisation could itself reduce traditional hazards, such as noise, vibration, and fumes exposure, through electric alternatives to diesel. And where transitions are governed through meaningful social partners’ involvement at different governance levels, OSH may improve.

Understandably, there is uncertainty about how climate action – and climate change more generally – will unfold in the coming years. Consequently, the ability to understand, anticipate, and plan for multiple future scenarios becomes hugely important.

What is the aim of foresight?

Mitigating risks and realising opportunities demands foresight: a systematic way (part methodology, part mindset) of navigating complexity and turning it into actionable insight. This is especially useful in a world that is volatile and uncertain.

Yet the default approach to OSH in European enterprises is too often reactive and disconnected from the organisational structures and institutional frameworks that shape healthy and safe workplaces. As The Heat is On urges, OSH must be woven into climate policy, be it through multilateral agreements or individual workplace measures. 

This starts by anticipating what may lie ahead.

The value of this exercise lies not only in the content of the scenarios themselves but in the foresight mindset required to generate and think through them – critical thinking that forces structured consideration of how multiple factors may unfold and interact over time.

Phase Two, currently underway, translates the four general scenarios into sector-specific applications: construction, health and care, and food manufacturing. This part of the study will identify the factors most relevant to these sectors before exploring how they may evolve.

To track trajectories, sector stakeholders will identify early warning signals that can be monitored over time. For instance, construction vacancies for green retrofit roles that specify no OSH competencies or healthcare facilities introducing sustainable cleaning products without prior exposure assessments would indicate a lack of consideration for workers’ health and safety. 

This process enables sectoral stakeholders to understand potential disruptions and to determine proactive actions. Together, these steps will produce a sector-specific monitoring framework, a tool that helps track the direction of change and act ahead of it, intervening early when faced with changing hazards and making evidence-based decisions before harm materialises.

From afterthought to forethought