Mapping the Heat: Integrating Temperature Data into the Supply Chain

In recent years, India has experienced increasingly severe and prolonged heat events, including record-breaking heat in several regions.

For millions of workers in its garment and textile sector, many of whom work in factories with limited cooling or ventilation, rising temperatures have become a daily occupational hazard.

This dashboard, developed by HeatWatch Foundation in collaboration with Open Supply Hub, makes heat-related risks visible at the facility level for the first time in India’s textile supply chains.

The Context 

HeatWatch has been building a growing body of evidence on how extreme heat is reshaping working conditions across India. In February 2026, in collaboration with textile worker unions and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, HeatWatch published Breaking Point: Heat and the Garment Floor. Drawing on direct worker testimonies, the report documents how rising temperatures affect the health, productivity, wages and livelihoods of textile workers.

That ground-level research revealed a critical gap. While worker testimony showed the human impact of heat, there was no way to understand the scale, intensity and distribution of heat exposure across India’s textile sector, or to track how this exposure changes over time and across geographies. It was also difficult to see which buyers, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and other supply chain actors were connected to the facilities facing the greatest heat risks, and therefore who could play a role in supporting solutions.

What was missing was a macro-level view: one that was longitudinal, spatial, and connected to the specific facilities where workers are employed, as well as their broader supply chain network.

What this collaboration built

The dashboard was developed to connect this worker-led evidence with facility-level supply chain and climate data. It brings together three datasets to map heat stress risk across India’s textile supply chains:

• Open Supply Hub data, including textile factory locations and the various actors connected to those facilities, including brands sourcing from them.
• Temperature data from the India Meteorological Department, showing historical and current heat trends across regions.
• Humidity data from Open-Meteo, which helps capture how humidity can intensify heat stress beyond temperature alone.

The dashboard also includes worker stories collected by the HeatWatch team from different parts of India. These accounts show how heat is experienced across regions and types of textile production, helping ground the data in the realities of factory work.

Who this resource is for

• Brands and buyers can use it to identify suppliers and sourcing regions in India facing high heat exposure, and use that evidence to strengthen due diligence, supplier engagement and investments in worker protection.
• Suppliers and factory management can use it to understand facility-level heat risks, plan workplace adaptations, and seek financial or technical support from buyers, lenders or government schemes to improve workplace heat protections.
• Governments and policymakers can use it to identify high-risk industrial clusters and strengthen heat-related labour protections, occupational health standards, workplace inspections and regional heat action plans.
• Trade unions, researchers and civil society organisations can use it to identify where workers may be most exposed, build evidence for advocacy, and work with other actors to strengthen protections for workers.

Watch the launch webinar recording

To learn more about the dashboard, the data behind it, and how HeatWatch and Open Supply Hub developed this resource, you can watch the launch webinar recording.