Activities
By creating a range of different listening and sharing spaces, we’re aiming to place disabled people at the forefront of climate adaptation policy and practice.
We will do this by focusing on three interlinked activities.
1. Experiences
2. Rights
3. Change
1. Experiences
We will be working with participants in three urban centres to understand how people with varied histories and experiences of disability are adapting to the climate crisis.
Cities are important sites of innovation and change, and our case study sites will be Dublin in Ireland, and Glasgow and Bristol in the UK.
In each location, people can share their stories in several ways: by taking part in interviews with researchers, joining creative writing sessions, or working with the research team and an artist to create a community mural.
For those who do not live in one of our focus cities, we’ve also launched a series of online conversations focused on disability and climate.
2. Rights
We will be analysing how disability and climate have been considered in both policy and law, hoping to identify areas for positive change.
People often suggest that we need to respond to climate disruption as individuals – to use the car less, to cycle more, or eat less meat. These actions can be important, but can also cause guilt when people cannot make such changes. Moving beyond a focus on individual change, there is a need for political change that addresses the deeper causes of the climate crisis and its uneven effects across different people and places.
We will be analysing key policy and legal documents, and speaking to a number of climate and disability decision-makers to explore how disabled people can contribute to climate law and policy frameworks.
3. Change
We are aiming to understand how to create disability-inclusive cities in the world now and as it changes.
Through a series of events that create a range of different listening and sharing spaces, we hope to place the rights, knowledge and experiences of disabled people at the forefront of climate adaptation research, policy and practice.
Our work will identify the processes that marginalise disabled people from climate adaptation, and counter these trends by including disabled people and their experiences in conversations that place their skills and needs at the heart of new practices.
“ Disabled people are disproportionately exposed to climate risks and typically framed as climate victims.
In this project, we recognise disabled people as knowledgeable agents of change. ”
– Dr Sarah Bell
