The Impact of Climate Change on Cognitive Performance among Workers: A Systematic Literature Review

Due to climate change and global warming, attention-demanding tasks, continuous performance tasks, choice reaction time and vigilance tasks have become less efficient, which can, directly and indirectly affect cognitive performance, specifically among workers exposed to hot-dry and hot-wet environments. This systematic study was done by reviewing research studies on the impact of climate change on cognitive performance and gathering physiological responses that can increase vulnerability to climate-related cognitive performance among workers. In this study, a total of 3487 articles from experienced worker population (men = 574; women = 94) in various real-world environmental and experimental climate conditions were searched. Climate change causes the most significant decrease in cognitive performance, especially in attention-demanding tasks. Decreasing vigilance performance in hot seasons is one of the outcomes of global warming. The effect of high temperature and heat stress on cognitive performance correlated with changes in physical parameters (air temperature, relative humidity (RH), etc.) and physiological parameters (core-body and skin temperature, heart, breathing, and sweating rate, etc.). It is required to develop more studies, especially in various real-world environments, and develop a framework to strengthen workers’ awareness for considering the impact of climate change on cognitive performance among workers. The present study results can be used to inform policy-makers with physiological parameters and upper limit values for occupational exposure to thermal stress.