An international research team led by Meng Bo has clarified the relationship between workers' heat exposure and global supply chains. Their interdisciplinary findings have been published in Nature Communications (Impact Factor: 14.7), a sister journal of Nature.

Meng Li, Bo Meng*, Yong Geng*, Fan Tong, Yuning Gao, Norihiko Yamano, Sunghun Lim, Joaquim Guilhoto, Kimiko Uno & Xiaohong Chen, “Inequitable distribution of risks associated with occupational heat exposure driven by trade,” Nature Communications 16: 537, Jan, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-55483-5

This study combines high-resolution global climate model, socio-economic and demographic information, and a global multi-regional input-output model to quantitatively assess the risk of workers involved in international trade activities being exposed to extreme heat.

Key findings include:

• - Heat exposure for trade-related workers increased by approximately 90% between 1995 and 2020.
• - Low- and lower-middle-income countries account for over 70% of global labor heat exposure.
• - The current international division of labor exacerbates the inequality of heat exposure between developed and developing countries.

These findings are expected to provide valuable insights for achieving future Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ensuring climate justice in global supply chains.

Another co-authored paper by Meng Bo has been published in Scientific Data, a sister journal of Nature. This study estimates China's time-series product-level carbon emissions using a Supply-Use table that considers product sectors, rather than the traditional industry sectors’ estimation methods. This approach significantly improves the accuracy and consistency of the results.

Xinbei Li, Yu Liu, Jing Zhang, Meifang Zhou, Bo Meng, “China’s product-level CO2 emissions dataset aligned with national input-output tables from 1997 to 2020,” Scientific Data 12: 30, Jan, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04366-5