Climate change, health and outdoor workers in urban Vietnam: linking vulnerability, extreme weather and policy

In 2016 I joined the University of Bristol faculty and established the Bristol Climate Dynamics group. Before joining Bristol I undertook 4 years of postdoctoral research in the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics (AOPP), having already completed a PhD in the University of Reading’s Meteorology department. At Bristol, I hold the Met Office Chair in Climate Hazards, and coordinate the partnership between our two institutes. My research interests are focussed around weather and climate extremes, and how they impact society. I look into the future at climate projections, but also into the past, at climate attribution. My research starts with atmospheric circulation patterns, especially those relating to extreme weather, and ends with impacts. I have a strong focus on climate and health, for instance the health hazards from, heatwaves, flooding, or tropical cyclones. I also like to dabble in the atmospheres of other planets, especially Mars.

Fortunate Machingura, PhD, is the chairperson of the 1st Climate and Health Africa Conference, fostering connections between academic and policy interests at the intersection of climate and health in Africa. She is a social anthropologist with a focus on climate health and policy and lectures in the Department of International Public Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Additionally, she leads the Climate, Environment, and Health Department at the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research (CeSHHAR) in Zimbabwe.

Michael Parker is Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford. He leads a programme of cross-disciplinary research focused on the identification and analysis of ethical problems presented by advances in genomics, data science, and global health. He has particular theoretical and methodological interests in moral disagreement and value pluralism. Much of this work takes place in the context of multidisciplinary collaborations. These include: the Global Health Bioethics Network; the Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaboration (GLIDE); ANTITHESES: the Discovery Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities Research; the Genethics Forum; and Oxford Ethics and Humanities. An important strand of Michael's research is characterised by a commitment to engaging with the opportunities and challenges arising from the integration of ethics research into large-scale biomedical science and healthcare innovations. As such, it often involves collaborative partnerships with scientists. Some examples of include: the Oxford Pandemic Sciences Institute, the Malaria Genomics Epidemiology Network, the Wellcome Africa and Asia Programmes, the Oxford Big Data Institute, UK Biobank, and the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Sherman Tai is a Senior Researcher at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). He is working on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust Climate Impacts Award entitled 'The health impacts of climate change on precarious outdoor workers in urban megacities in Vietnam' (2023-2026). He conducted a systematic review to identify research gaps and is analysing a survey (n ≈ 400) using linear and logistic regression to explore the social determinants of climate-related health risks among workers. He also contributed to the evaluation of Bankee, an educational intervention in Kuwait aimed at improving primary school pupils' financial literacy. He led on the quantitative pre-post outcomes evaluation to assess pupils' "distance-travelled" before and after the intervention by comparing baseline and endline surveys (n ≈ 1200); and is currently designing and validating a survey of teachers to be used in future evaluations.

Prior to joining NatCen, Sherman was an Associate at PwC Hong Kong. He holds an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and a BSocSci in Government from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He spent a year at the University of Warwick as an exchange student in Politics and International Studies.

Nguyen Khanh Le is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Southeast Asia and Taiwan Studies at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She works as a research staff at the SocialLife Research Institute, where she coordinates the Life Story Lab and serves as a Project Assistant for the project "Developing a GIS-Integrated Worker Health Application to Connect Precarious Outdoor Workers with the Application in Urban Megacities in Vietnam." Her research interests include gender, migration, community development, and the dynamics of labor mobility between Taiwan and Vietnam

Vo Thi Thuy An is currently a research staff at the Institute for Social Life Research (SocialLife Institute) and serves as the coordinator of the SocialLife Policy Research Lab (PoliLab), SocialLife Institute. She graduated with a degree in International Relations from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City. Her research interests focus on theories of welfare state models and social mobility theory, particularly emphasizing intergenerational mobility in Vietnam.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Duc Loc is an anthropologist and sociologist, currently serving as President of the Social Life Research Institute and a lecturer at Ho Chi Minh City Open University. Throughout his career, he has worked on critical social issues in Vietnam, focusing on disadvantaged groups, labor and the Catholic community. His expertise encompasses practical aspects of social life, using research, surveys, policy advice and social forecasting for positive change. He has led several high impact projects on labor rights, migration, social welfare and Catholic community dynamics, demonstrating his commitment to social improvement. Driven by a passion for improving lives, his extensive research portfolio underscores his commitment to making a difference. His contributions in both social science research and policy-making, embodying his unwavering commitment to a better society.

Dr. Dorothy Ngajilo is an Occupational Medicine Specialist working with the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Occupational and Workplace Health Programme. She is responsible for supporting WHO technical work in occupational health, including development and implementation of occupational health and safety programmes for health workers in different countries. Prior to joining WHO, Dr. Ngajilo worked in the Ministry of Health of her native country, Tanzania, as an Occupational Medicine Physician and a technical advisor to the Tanzanian Workers Compensation Fund (WCF) and the Occupational Health and Safety Authority (OSHA), providing technical support on all matters related to occupational health and safety. Dr. Ngajilo is a medical doctor with Occupational Medicine specialty training from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is also a Fellow of the College of Public Health Medicine (Occupational Medicine) of South Africa.

Sokratis is Director of Health Policy at NatCen. He is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has been responsible for the design and management of research projects, including national surveys, qualitative studies and systematic reviews and evaluations in the field of gambling harm, health risk profiles and epidemiology. 

He has managed the design of national evaluation projects related to the effectiveness of mental health, social services, and policy initiatives in the UK. This includes an evaluation of the Credit Card Ban for Gambling in Great Britain and evaluation of the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise Covid-19 Emergency Funding Package on behalf of DCMS. 

Sokratis also led a project to improve understanding of how patterns of online play relate to the potential for gambling harm. This involved the collection of account-based data from several gambling operators. He led the chapter on mental health inequalities in the DHSC’s White Paper and has also reviewed large grants for ESRC and NIHR as well as academic publications for several journals.

Debbie is the Head of NatCen’s Methodology and Innovation Hub, specialising in survey design. As a methodologist, she has extensive expertise in survey design, questionnaire development, question testing, and survey measurement. She has contributed to some of the UK's most high-profile surveys, delivering evidence-based design recommendations for a wide range of clients. 

Dr Anh Vu is a political ecologist and interdisciplinary scholar with over two decades of experience at the forefront of both development practice and academic research. Anh currently leads a £1.3 million Wellcome Trust-funded research project examining the health impacts of climate change on precarious outdoor workers in major cities across Vietnam. She is Research Director/ Climate Change at NatCen International, National Centre for Social Research (UK). Her research focuses on three key areas that address critical climate challenges: the climate-health nexus, the political economy of climate change, and the sustainability of delta social-ecological systems. She has collaborated extensively with major multilateral and bilateral institutions (e.g., UNDP, UN Statistics Division, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) while also providing expert consultancy to governments, and inter/national NGOs (e.g., Asia Development Alliance, Oxfam, Transparency International, Global Philanthropy Indices, Management and Sustainable Development Institute). Her scholarly work is widely published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals such as World Development, Sustainability Science, Contemporary Politics, Community Development, VOLUNTAS, World Development Perspectives, and International Development Planning and Review. In particular, her two decades of research on civil society and authoritarianism has been acclaimed by Southeast Asian scholars for making "high-order" contributions to the field."

Jonathan Rigg is professor of human geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. He was formerly Director of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Asia Research Institute (ARI). He has been working on livelihoods, vulnerability, agrarian and urban transitions, environmental change, and migration in Asia since the early 1980s, and has undertaken fieldwork in Laos, Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka, as well as in Vietnam.