TEMPERATURES ARE RISING again. In the first-ever women-run cashew processing factory in Pooneryn, 20 women wear face-masks, hair nets and aprons over their clothes as they sort, shell, dry and bottle cashews. Vanni Cashew, in Sri Lanka’s war-affected Northern Province, employs women with disabilities or those from female-headed households. The women wear three pairs of gloves, one layered on top of another, to protect their hands from exposure to cashew-nut shell liquid – a reddish-brown substance that, similar to poison ivy, causes skin irritation and peeling. The doors and windows are sealed or netted to prevent the moist coastal air from impacting cashew texture, and to keep the product free of insects and germs. To maintain certification, the women do not deviate from these conditions. They sweat it out for almost seven hours a day, taking the stacked gloves off only during their lunch break and sometimes when they pause for tea.
The heat might soon start eating into the bottom line at Vanni Cashew. Industrial fans and air conditioning are too costly, and a single fan with flimsy plastic blades provides little respite during the hotter months, when the atmospheric temperature routinely exceeds 30 degrees Celsius. At least two employees, unable to bear the stifling indoor heat, have switched to office administration or other work. “Last year, it was so hot the women had to take leave for three or four days until the temperatures became bearable again,” said the manager, Francis Jasmine Jemilla, noting that the women were able to make up for lost time using flexible hours. The workers, who also have caregiving duties at home, have no choice but to forgo work if they suffer from heat exposure, or if heat-related illness strikes a family-member. Last year a heat rash spread across my entire hand,” Jemilla told me. When this happens, the women must take time off from work again. “I used to think of the sun as a friend,” Jemilla said. “But now I’m not so sure.”
According to the World Meteorological Organisation, 2024 was the hottest year on record, and temperatures are only set to increase. In Sri Lanka, extreme heat last year prompted headlines like “Inside an Oven” and forced schools to suspend outdoor sports activities.
A R Warnasooriya, the director of climate-change studies at Sri Lanka’s department of meteorology, said that while the country does not experience heat waves, its flat regions and dry zone – which include the northern, north-central, eastern and southeastern plains – are prone to extreme heat. The 24 weather stations collecting meteorological data across the country every three hours, she added, generally record elevated temperatures in the months of March and April.
By May last year, there were reports that at least seven people had died of extreme heat in the Northern Province.By the end of the century, Sri Lanka’s North is projected to experience wet-bulb temperatures approaching 35 degrees Celsius – a dangerous point beyond which the human body is unable to cool itself. However, little research or media coverage has looked at the lived experiences of workers, particularly women, bearing the brunt of heat in these areas.
Just 22 kilometres southwest of Vanni Cashew, off the coast of Valaipadu, women farm seaweed for export to India. They belong to one of many coastal communities across the Northern Province – including in Kilinochchi, Mannar, Jaffna and Mullaitivu – involved in this fast-growing global industry. Seaweed is a carbon-sequestering consumable, can be a pharmaceutical source and is used as animal feed that does not require any fertiliser for its cultivation.
In Valaipadu, shallow-water seaweed farming has attracted both married women and war widows from the nearby coastal village. According to the Centre for Women’s Development in Jaffna, Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war left the Northern Province – where the fighting was heaviest – with approximately 55,000 female-headed households and 46,000 war widows. Many are still recovering from the economic and psychological costs of the war. “After Mullivaikal, only half the residents came back,” the seaweed farmer Maria Prashanthani said, referring to a brutal offensive at the end of the war in 2009, when over 40,000 civilians were killed within just five months.
Seaweed aquaculture, reputed for its role in empowering women, has offered many in the area an opportunity to rebuild their lives, at least financially. “Most of the women in this village are poor, so the income from seaweed farming was a boon,” said Amala Junastina, who has been farming seaweed since she completed her schooling in 2013. Prashanthani, who has been working for five years, has saved up enough to purchase a motorcycle. Both women have used their earnings to educate and provide for their children – a form of reinvestment typical of employed women, according to studies from countries like Mexico and China.
Last February, however, increasing marine temperatures destroyed about 80 percent of seaweed yields. “In 2023, we exported 174,000 metric tonnes of dried seaweed to India,” Prashanthani said. “But in 2024, our harvest was far less.” The growing seaweed is draped on ropes, or “monolines”, suspended from floating plastic bottles and enclosed by nets to keep away fish. It was once grown close to the shore, which made planting, maintenance and harvesting convenient. But as temperatures rose, farmers were forced to move their enclosures to the cooler and deeper waters farther out to reduce the risk of burnt seaweed and a disease called epiphytism. When the women farmers notice colour changes characteristic of epiphytism, they remove entire lines of seaweed they can no longer harvest and leave the ropes out to dry. “Otherwise,” Junastina said, “one line touches another and everything becomes infected.”
Junastina said extreme heat can also cause fever, headaches, body exhaustion and fainting. She recalled one seaweed farmer fainting and falling into the water. Since the women do not always feel safe alone in the deep water, they now swim out to farms in groups of three or four. But not all the women can swim in deeper waters, Prashanthani told me. She also described how increasing temperatures have pushed many women out of the business.
Marine heat is compounded by other events – strong winds, floods, as well as short and intense rainfall – linked to the broader climate crisis. When a heavy wind blows, monolines can get entangled. “We bring the lines onto shore, disentangle them, clean them, attach them to bottles… Do you know how long that takes?” Junastina asked. “And after we do all that, there’ll be another wind, more rains, or extreme heat. How many times can a person go through such loss? That’s why so many women here are depressed.”
Prashanthani described how floods last January washed away all her seeds and hundreds of lines of seaweed. It took over a month for the women to finally collect enough seedlings to start farming again. There were 300 or 400 women producing seaweed in the area last year, Prashanthani said, but their number has dwindled to less than 100. “When we make losses, the women lose not just resources but motivation too,” she said.
Overlapping climate vulnerabilities affect the cashew industry as well, where climate-induced losses over the last decade have forced Sri Lanka to start importing cashew. According to Jemilla, the factory manager, five years ago cashews were harvested and sold in April, but now that season has shifted to May. Production involves procuring cashew from farmers, Jemilla said, after which the “nut” is separated from the cashew apple and de-shelled. The nuts are easily damaged by rains or floods, which can cause fungus growth and disrupt drying. Vanni Cashew works directly with 200 cashew farmers, and indirectly with 750 farmers from Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar, Vavuniya and Jaffna. If the cashews do not meet specific inspection criteria – for example, if they are underweight or discoloured – they are not purchased. “For farmers it’s a very disheartening time,” Jemilla said. “They spend months growing cashews, only to find they can’t sell them.”
While some farmers receive government relief for crop failures during floods, in the case of seaweed farmers, Prashanthani told me, this does not apply as they are not officially considered ‘farmers’. Despite the clear emancipatory potential of seaweed aquaculture, women in the industry face severe regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles. When crops fail, for example, they find it challenging to procure the seeds required to regrow their seaweed. “Lenders send us from one place to another to get signatures,” said Junastina, describing the near-impossible process of securing loans to cover the cost of seedlings, nets and other essential inputs.
“We earn dollars for the country, don’t we?” Prashanthani said. “Why can’t we have the same respect and treatment as male farmers?”
Barriers to formal female employment in the North, such as those listed by Prashanthani and Junastina, are high. Sri Lanka had the world’s 14th largest gender gap in labour-force participation in 2023, and in the North that gap is even larger than the country’s average. Female labour participation in the Northern Province was only about 25 percent in 2023, much lower than the country-wide rate of 31 percent. Heat-related income losses are likely to compound pre-existing gender and geographical disparities. Indeed, the impacts of extreme heat routinely go beyond those captured in official statistics.
IN ILLUPPAIKADAVAI, on Sri Lanka’s Northern coast, Mahadevi complained that her entire household felt “feverish” in March 2024. “Our throats hurt and we couldn’t speak because of the phlegm,” she said. A farmer’s wife, Mahadevi said she was incapacitated longer than the others, unable to perform her usual domestic work. Some Tamil houses in the region have features to mitigate heat: sloped roofs, shaded interiors, internal courtyards and – like Mahadevi’s home – a thinnai, or verandah. Even so, heat from wood-burning stoves can leave kitchens roasting. A recent study by the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center found that extreme heat increases the time women must work to perform the same volumes of paid and unpaid work. Since caring for family members struck by heat-related illness is often a woman’s duty, heat imposes a dual burden on women and increases time poverty, reducing the time women have for leisure, paid work or their own care.
Women are less likely to seek hospital care than men when exhibiting symptoms, confirmed C S Jamunanantha, a doctor and the deputy director of the Jaffna Teaching Hospital. Due to childcare and familial duties, they typically arrive for treatment only at more advanced stages of illness. While acknowledging that the climate crisis has exacerbated the incidence of dengue, respiratory illnesses and chronic kidney disease, Jamunanantha cautioned against raising “panic” over heat waves.
Despite media reports that seven people died during heat waves in Jaffna last year, Jamunanantha, after examining the records, said that these reports were “a mistake”. Inoka Suraweera, an official at Sri Lanka’s ministry of health, said that “attributing death to heat isn’t straightforward,” and noted that “heat” rarely goes onto a death certificate or medical record as cause of death. This makes heat-related mortality particularly hard to quantify.
Suraweera, who is helping Sri Lanka design a heat-health action plan as an activity under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, noted that cramps, rashes, heat syncope (dizziness or fainting) and heat stroke could be caused by exposure to extreme heat. Women are physiologically more vulnerable to extreme heat than men, she added, and pregnant women are particularly at risk. Suraweera, who is also a consultant community physician specialising in environmental and occupational health, said that women who work outdoors without adequate bathroom facilities might not drink water to avoid urination. This, she said, can increase dehydration and heat-related complications. Some research has also looked beyond physiological symptoms to show how extreme heat can impact psychological health, increasing irritation, aggression and depression.
In recent years, the department of meteorology, in consultation with the health ministry, has started to issue heat advisories using a heat index, which combines measures of air temperature and relative humidity to indicate how prevailing heat feels or is perceived. The government can also run awareness campaigns on television and radio, Suraweera said, stressing that it was also critical for employees and employers to take responsibility. The preparation of the heat-health action plan, which was disrupted by Covid-19, may take another year or two to complete. In the interim, Suraweera said, training staff to give first aid and to recognise the early symptoms of heat-related illness is critical. She also advises employers to provide workers with protective gear, toilet facilities, hydration options, and access to water for body baths or to sprinkle on the body. “People might think these are small things,” she said, “but this preparation can save lives.”
While studies on the health impacts of extreme heat are constantly evolving, the semantics of heating and cooling are a fixture of Tamil culture. Sangam-era Tamil poetry evokes the palai, a hot desert environment, to depict separation and mental suffering; foods are thought to either heat or cool the body on consumption; and female bodies are believed to generate heat during menstruation. And while thinking about heat is embedded in Tamil idioms and proverbs, in traditional architecture, in poetry, in ideas about bodies and food, Southasian women and their experiences of heat are rarely centered in empirical studies.
In his essay “What not to Wear”, Bharat Venkat, the director of the Heat Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, traces the study of clothing insulation to thermal researchers trying to fortify American soldiers against heat stroke and frostbite during the Second World War. It was the business suit – not women’s pantyhose and certainly not the saree – that became the unit for measuring thermal insulation, even if the suit represented a small segment – white, white-collar, and male – of the American population.
Studies on heat have only recently started to take into account its interactions with air pollution and humidity, two phenomena that characterise life in many tropical countries in the Global South. Even though the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is considered the global leader in numerical weather predictions, Sri Lanka’s meteorology department said there are limitations to relying exclusively on ECMWF models in the local context. ECMWF forecasting is not reliable during Sri Lanka’s inter-monsoon season, Warnasooriya said. And, because it is adapted for mid-latitude countries, ECMWF modelling does not capture important phenomena in equatorial countries. To forecast the weather, the meteorology department combines different numerical weather models with satellite imagery, observations from agro-metric and meteorological stations, and the climatological features of each area.
The ways we scientifically document extreme heat today – and our attempts to adapt to it – do not typically revolve around women navigating it in a saree or a niqab. It is unclear, therefore, whether such women are actually protected from heat in the clothes they usually wear, and whether Sri Lanka’s regulation that female public-sector employees wear a saree (men may wear either national dress or trousers and a shirt) is unfair to women in conditions of extreme heat. Women wearing sarees can always choose lighter colours and heat-friendly fabrics, Suraweera noted, echoing a 2016 study by the scholar Madhavi Indraganti that found the saree is “all weather gear” or a versatile and adaptable mode of dress.
To this gender-sensitive analysis of clothing, Suraweera added that women are sometimes less constrained by cultural beliefs and gender norms than men. Women can wear brimmed hats and use umbrellas to reduce heat exposure, she noted, but men may expose themselves more to extreme heat if they consider these accessories effeminate and avoid them. Alcohol consumption – far more popular among men than women in the North – is also associated with greater morbidity and mortality risk during high heat. Regardless of these norms, it is evident to Suraweera that heat disproportionately impacts women.
Heat also disproportionately impacts those from marginalised communities, especially when they work outdoors and informally. In the Northern Province, the informal employment rate is about 75 percent, and several communities face religious discrimination, landlessness or generational caste oppression.
In the introduction to her exhibition ‘Unequal Heat: Climate, gender and caste in South Asia’, the Dalit photojournalist Bhumika Saraswati wrote that heat is “a metaphor for simmering rage, born from generations of subjugation.” Although women from oppressed castes are crucial to our food systems and the prevailing ecological balance, she argued, they remain underrepresented in climate discourse.
IN SRI LANKA’S Tamil-speaking North, the upper echelons of political, professional and bureaucratic life are still dominated by members of the numerically significant Vellalar caste. The women selling karavadu, or dried fish, in Pesalai are an example of an underrepresented community.
Gabrielle Elisabeth has been producing dried fish for 35 years, while Jesuthasan Rajeshwaray Parananthu has been doing the same work for nearly three decades. They are part of a tight-knit Catholic community along the coast of Pesalai that repairs nets, cuts fish, cleans crabs and produces and sells dried fish. About 15 years ago, there were 200 to 300 women in the dried-fish business, Elisabeth said, but now there are fewer. One problem they face is a reduced catch. The main reason for this is bottom trawling, she said, a method of fishing that can destroy coral on the ocean floor and wreck marine ecosystems, eventually depleting fish stocks. The second is increased water temperatures.
“Fifteen years ago, we knew which fish species would arrive with which winds and in which period,” Elisabeth said. “whether kumbala, pechalai, or seraya … The fish would arrive by the boatload, we had enough work to keep us occupied from morning until evening and enough earnings to cover our children’s expenses.” But now, especially with rising inflation after Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, this is no longer the case.
Elisabeth described the heat this year and last year as “unbearable”. “It hits our body, it rises from the sand,” she said. “And sometimes we can’t stay in our houses.” She added that the houses along the coast are small, with low ceilings. Even if she covers her roof with thatch – a natural insulator – her home is sometimes still too hot. Those without fans in their homes go outside to sit by the sea. “The heat makes us feel sick,” she said, and entire homes feel “feverish”. When family members fall sick, they are taken to government hospitals. “We are terrified about whether the hospitals will actually protect our families or not,” Elisabeth said, citing bans on medicine imports and the out-migration of doctors as a result of the economic crisis.
With dried-fish, as in other industries, unexpected rainfall can damage the financial prospects of producers. “If the fish gets wet, then it’s of no use to us,” Rajeshwaray said. “We might as well just put it back in the sea.” Four or five years ago, heavy flooding caused well-water and sewage water to mix in Pesalai. “Because of that we couldn’t drink or wash,” Elizabeth said, noting that some residents were even displaced from their ancestral homes.
For workers in salterns, managing high temperatures is also part of the job. National Salt Limited employs 73 permanent staff in Mannar and Elephant Pass, and up to 250 temporary staff, with a publicly stated mission of providing employment to vulnerable communities. Its workers, many of them women, clean the salt pans, and during harvest periods, collect and transport salt. The progress of the salt production process is determined by sunshine, wind and rainfall, the saltern manager, Gayantha Thilakarathna, said. The hotter it is, the faster water evaporates. “The women work outside under very, very harsh sunlight and hot wind,” he said. “Actually it’s very difficult work.” When asked whether his workers face any health impacts, Thilakarathna mentioned how the sharp edges of the salt crystals and the hot water in the salt pans could be dangerous, and explained that the women wear boots to protect themselves. He was not aware of any health impacts apart from these.
The women working in Mannar’s 163 acres of salterns usually wake up at 4 am, sign in at 6.30 am and work from 7 am to 2.30 pm. During the warmer months, they start up to four hours earlier, at 3 am, so they can avoid the extreme heat at midday. Asamta Vijeny and Kumar Augustinammah, who have been working at the salterns for 14 years, are two of the 23 permanent staff members in Mannar’s salterns. “This year and last year it was much hotter than before,” Vijeny said. To manage the heat, Vijeny said, the women take breaks between work and drink a lot of water. On particularly hot days, they wear long-sleeved dresses, hats and scarves.
“Sometimes we find it difficult to see,” Augustinammah noted, possibly referring to the impacts of heat. Vijeny said that some women find red patches on their skin, for which they use a cream. “When it’s very hot, we become exhausted and can feel light-headed or faintish,” she said. If someone faints, she is taken to a nearby tent, revived with water and asked to rest. If she is still unable to work, she is given leave. This happens once a year or so, Vijeny said, usually to staff transporting the salt, who are temporary workers and not used to the work. If they are in a really bad state they are sent to the hospital, and the permanent staff must complete their work.
Most of the workers in Mannar’s salt pans are women, while the management is mostly men. “When we have our periods it can be difficult,” Vijeny said. “The officers here are all gents, aren’t they? So we can’t always tell them that we have this issue. Sometimes we’ll say it’s a little difficult to carry the weight and ask for different work. If they are educated, they’ll understand and let us do different work. We always work as much as we can.”
In the 19th century, salterns were sites of bonded labour and places where convicts were sent to do hard labour as punishment. Despite the punishing labour conditions at the salterns today, the women cannot afford to forgo the income it provides. Sometimes they only get 10 to 15 days of work per month. If it rains, seasonal workers return home without wages. “Without salt, we don’t get work,” Vijeny said, speaking to the broader lack of economic opportunity for women in the North. “So we come here and make a fuss until they give us work.”
Salterns are being touted in Sri Lanka’s war-affected North and East as ways to provide jobs for youth and increase the country’s salt production. But, like in the seaweed, cashew and dried-fish industries, unpredictable or intensive rainfall fuelled by the climate crisis can devastate output. After heavy rainfall or poor management in 2023 and 2024 caused a 40-percent decline in output and a country-wide salt shortage, Sri Lanka imported 30,000 metric tonnes of salt from India. Although Mannar’s saltern has an annual production target of 6000 metric tonnes, its production since 2021 has been around half of that. “We’d be able to increase output if we’re able to predict rainfall amounts more accurately and earlier,” Thilakarathna said, noting that they receive data from the meteorological department “to some extent” but primarily rely on websites like weather.com or accuweather.com.
The lack of confidence in the meteorological department’s data and forecasts was echoed by others – especially after it failed to predict a storm that killed 29 people in 2011 and one that killed over 200 people in 2017. Warnasooriya said that since the department mainly works at a national and district level, it does not evaluate how it is perceived by the public or monitor how its forecasts are used.
Despite the potential health risks they face from extreme heat, few women in the North are aware of the government’s heat-health action plan or have read the guidelines on avoiding heat-stroke issued by the ministry of health. Still, good policy – like recent proposals around flexible working hours and government-issued heat advisories – can help workers adapt. Sensitive policy is critical as Sri Lanka attempts to diversify its exports and improve female labour participation in attempts to grow itself out of the economic crisis.
For the women in the Northern Province processing cashews, growing seaweed, drying fish, harvesting salt, and propping up families and industries with unpaid care and domestic labour, giving up work in the face of extreme heat is an unaffordable luxury. “Without this industry, we’ll have to drink kanji again,” Maria Prashanthani, the seaweed farmer, said. Kanji, a rice and water gruel, was often all there was to eat for those gathered in the Vanni in the violent last phases of the war. Amala Junastina added, “But even for kanji you need resources, don’t you?”
This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.
Amita Arudpragasam is a writer, researcher and independent policy analyst from Sri Lanka.
Photo: Amita Arudpragasam. Seaweed farmers Maria Prashanthani and Amala Junastina at work in Valaipadu, Pooneryn. Women working in food production across Sri Lanka’s Northern Province bear the brunt of extreme heat, from lower harvests cutting into their income to health effects like cramps, heat syncope, headaches and rashes.
