PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Planetary Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1657267
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironmental Challenges and Public Health Inequality: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptive BehaviorsView all articles
Negotiating Household Heat: Thermal Labor, Energy Justice, and Women’s Health in Nepal’s Madhesh Province
Provisionally accepted
- 1Sustainable Prosperity Initiative Nepal, Baneshwor-31, Kathmandu, Nepal
- 2Clean Cooking Alliance, Washington, United States
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Introduction: Household cooking with solid fuels exposes women to prolonged indoor heat levels; yet, this exposure remains largely absent from climate-health analyses. This perspective article introduces the concept of thermal labor—the physiological strain, time cost, and health risks associated with performing domestic work under chronically elevated kitchen temperatures—and argues that such exposure constitutes an overlooked driver of gendered health inequities in Nepal’s Madhesh Province. Methods: Evidence was synthesized from national temperature records, caste disaggregated census data, spot measurements conducted by the Nepal Health Research Council, and illustrative intervention studies. The policy context was examined through Nepal’s Nationally Determined Contribution, the Clean Cooking Alliance Nepal Country Action Plan, and the National Disaster Risk Legislation. Results: The synthesis suggests accelerated warming in Nepal’s lowlands and caste-linked reliance on biomass fuels, which results in daily indoor heat exposures. Prior studies associate such exposures with appetite suppression and reduced dietary diversity. When considered alongside the socioeconomic profile of Dalit households, these established pathways indicate a heightened but under-documented risk for this group. Discussion: Positioning thermal labor as a measurable health determinant broadens the clean cooking agenda to encompass heat mitigation, nutrition, and gender equity. A balanced approach is proposed: sentinel kitchen heat surveillance within existing household surveys; thermal performance criteria in stove procurement standards; and integrating heat indicators into clean cooking and disaster risk frameworks. These steps would convert domestic heat from an invisible stressor into a tractable public health target, illustrating how a single intervention pathway can advance climate, energy, and equity goals.
Keywords: Climate Change, Heat stress, Cooking, biomass, adverse effects, Women's Health, health equity, policy
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ghimire, Manandhar, Karki and Bajracharya. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Animesh Ghimire, Sustainable Prosperity Initiative Nepal, Baneshwor-31, Kathmandu, Nepal
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