Disability-Inclusive Climate Action, Research and Development

In a new Personal View published in The Lancet Planetary Health, HPOD Senior Associate Penelope J.S. Stein, HPOD Executive Director Michael Ashley Stein, and members of the Global Disability Climate Justice working group urge researchers and policymakers around the world to explore disability-inclusive climate solutions that meaningfully center on the experiences and knowledge of people with disabilities. This interdisciplinary working group, formed at a disability climate justice conference organized by HPOD in 2022, comprises researchers and activists with and without disabilities from over a dozen countries who share a common concern that disability inclusion across all climate mitigation and adaptation activities constitutes both a moral and legal imperative. To help researchers and policymakers to close the disability climate justice gaps observed across international, national, and local initiatives aimed at addressing the global climate emergency, the Personal View sets forth an array of actionable, multisectoral guidelines for advancing disability climate justice.  

First, the View urges local policymakers to build the capacity of people with disabilities and their representative organisations through advocacy, climate justice, and disaster risk reduction training; ensure the availability of climate information that is accessible and easy to read; and focus on disability-inclusive climate action priorities identified by people with disabilities and their representative organizations. For their part, national-level policymakers should adopt a twin-track approach that mainstreams disability and uses targeted disability initiatives, generate and use data disaggregated by disability, ensure post-climate disaster reconstruction is accessible, and more broadly, transform societal structures so that they promote disability climate justice, including within disaster risk reduction, health care, employment, and city planning. Internationally, policymakers should facilitate the meaningful participation of organisations of people with disabilities in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change processes and decision making, such as by recognizing a disability constituency, and rapidly direct climate funding to disability-inclusive climate action, particularly by and with organisations of people with disabilities.

The View also outlines several priorities for disability-inclusive climate research. First, research activities should employ participatory and intersectional methodologies to address existential threats that disparately affect people with disabilities by focusing on the intersection of disability and climate change relating to natural disasters, hot weather, disaster risk reduction, the mental health of people with disabilities in climate emergencies, food security, and water, sanitation, and hygiene. Also, researchers should investigate the inclusivity of technological advances regarding early warning systems, water solutions, food production, and assistive devices, as well as innovate data collection approaches that ensure that disaster risk reduction, humanitarian initiatives, and climate responses, including climate-resilient development and relocation activities, are disability-inclusive. Further, researchers should seek to facilitate storytelling and collect testimonials of climate harms from people with disabilities in order to document the nature and extent of loss and damage. Researchers should also explore the impacts of strategic climate litigation on the disability-inclusivity of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. Finally, researchers should rigorously assess the effectiveness of climate policies at ensuring equity for people with disabilities with data disaggregated by disability and pertinent categories and identify good practices for enabling disability-inclusive action, such as providing disability-inclusive climate training, especially in communities that are greatly affected by climate change.

Finally, the View sets forth cross-cutting principles to ensure that climate research and action activities are disability-inclusive. These include: recognizing that people with disabilities are experts on their own lives with experience as change agents; valuing the diverse experiences and forms of knowledge across groups of people with disabilities, including Indigenous people with disabilities and other frequently marginalised subgroups, including people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities; enabling organisations of people with disabilities and researchers with disabilities alike to participate in the development, design, and implementation of climate knowledge and solutions; and ensuring that disability perspectives from low-income countries and small island states are represented in global decision-making and policy formation.