Every day, countless mopeds criss-cross the congested city of Hanoi, in Vietnam, with commuters traveling to work or motorbike taxis dropping off everything from parcels to cooked food and clients. One of them is Phong, 42, who starts his shift at 5 a.m. to beat the rush hour, navigating the dense swarm of mopeds and drives for over 12 hours a day with little rest. But an unprecedented heat wave that engulfed his country in the past two months has made Phong’s job even more arduous.
If global warming continues to increase to 2 degrees Celsius , such humid heat waves could occur ten times more often, according to the study. And if emissions continue to increase at the same pace, the next two decades could already see 30 more deaths per million from heat in Thailand, and 130 more deaths per million by the end of the century, according to the UN’s Human Climate Horizons projections.