Living with extreme weather: Health vulnerabilities and everyday adaptations of informal outdoor workers in urban Vietnam

Abstract

Climate change has intensified health risks for informal outdoor workers in the Global South, whose exposure to extreme weather is compounded by systemic marginalisation, economic precarity, and limited access to healthcare. Yet dominant climate–health research and adaptation policies remain shaped by technocratic, model-driven approaches that obscure the situated experiences and adaptive repertoires of those most affected. Drawing on co-constructed, multi-sited research with street vendors, porters, construction workers and motorbike-taxi riders in four major Vietnamese cities, this paper examines how workers actively interpret and respond to climate-health threats through embodied environmental knowledge, community-based information networks and daily negotiations shaped by economic precarity.

Findings reveal a nexus of three interlinked dynamics: (1) occupation-and body-specific forms of environmental literacy that structure situated adaptation; (2) informal knowledge networks that operate as critical infrastructures for climate resilience and health communication; and (3) everyday negotiations of health risks amidst structural exclusions from formal services. These insights challenge dominant framings of vulnerability and demonstrate the epistemic and practical value of worker-generated knowledge in understanding climate-health risk. We argue that co-constructed research is essential for making visible the relational, embodied and structurally constrained adaptations that remain outside formal assessments, and that such grounded knowledge must inform socially just and context-sensitive climate-health interventions. The paper contributes to climate-health debates by demonstrating how co-constructed methodologies can unsettle epistemic hierarchies and support adaptation governance that begins from, and remains accountable to, the lived realities of informal workers.

Read the full open-access paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802600124X

Citation: Vu, A.N., Nguyen, L.D. and Rigg, J., 2026. Living with extreme weather: Health vulnerabilities and everyday adaptations of informal outdoor workers in urban Vietnam. Global Environmental Change, available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103235