Disability & Climate: Beyond Vulnerability

By Sarah Bell, Emma Geen and Rebecca Yeo

Without rapid policy change, the climate crisis will cause increasingly unpredictable, harmful environments for everyone. It is already preventing people from meeting their needs and impacting on mental and physical health.

Climate change itself is disabling. Disabled people are currently 2-4 times more likely to die or be injured in extreme weather events. Yet, the people who know best how to live in and navigate a disabling world - Disabled people - remain largely excluded from climate action and policy, just as from many other areas of policy.

If considered at all, Disabled people are typically framed as one of several ‘climate vulnerable’ groups. There is little recognition of the wide-ranging expertise and knowledge that Disabled people can bring to the climate movement and climate action.

The disproportionate impact of the climate crisis on Disabled people is in part due to specific impairment needs, but it is also due to being disproportionately among the poorest in societies in the UK and internationally.

In our recent ‘Disability & Climate: In Conversation With’ event, Professor Julia Watts Belser discussed how the ‘slow devastation of chronic crisis’ means that many Disabled people cannot put food on the table now, let alone set aside extra food for emergencies, like storms or floods.

Lives are being lost as a result of the exclusion of Disabled people from climate action. This week, evidence from UK-based Deaf and Disabled people to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities highlighted “worsening attitudes towards Deaf and Disabled people and a devaluation of the worth of our lives” and the ongoing issue of “political and public debate blaming the ‘clinically vulnerable’ for adverse economic impacts”.

Ellen Clifford, co-ordinator for the Coalition on UK monitoring under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, observed that both of the main political parties in Westminster “are happy to punish Disabled people in order to get elected”. In this context, the lack of meaningful involvement of Disabled people in climate policy and practice is perhaps not surprising. But this does not mean that the situation is unchangeable.

There is growing public awareness of the urgent need for action to address climate harm. If climate vulnerability is understood as the inevitable or direct result of impairment, then the lives of Disabled people are either framed as disposable, or the ‘common sense’ solution becomes to change or ‘fix’ the individual. Neither of these forms of action address the causes of climate change, the inequalities of its impacts, or the reality that all humans are vulnerable.

To create a just response to the climate crisis, the insights of Disabled people must be at the forefront. Disabled people need to be recognised as ‘agents of change’ within collective climate action not (in the words of scholar Karen O’Brien), ‘objects to be changed’.

Disability culture

The outcomes of climate action depend on the goals and values that underpin it. Efforts to climate proof current patterns of economic growth will not achieve global goals of wellbeing, justice, equity or poverty reduction.

Capitalist economies – economies that burnout people and the planet in the pursuit of endless economic growth – both drive climate crisis and devalue Disabled people. The social model of disability was originally explicitly anti-capitalist. It critiqued how this pursuit of profit harms, excludes and discards bodies that are not deemed ‘productive’ in capitalist terms.

To climate proof our existing patterns of economic growth is to take for granted the myth that an extractive future is the only future. It is to accept certain people and places as ‘expected’ or ‘acceptable’ losses in the face of climate crisis.

To climate proof our existing patterns of economic growth is to forget that other futures are possible.

Disability culture shows us that alternative futures are both possible and desirable.

In the words of the late and brilliant Judith Heumann, disability culture ‘has learned to value the humanity in all people’. Disability culture values abundance, not in monetary terms but in terms of community and kinship; creating support networks and showing up for each other.

People are disabled by inequalities in the ways that society is organised. Similarly, the climate crisis is caused by political and economic systems that fail to value people before profit.

With disability comes experience of living within environments that are rarely made for Disabled people. This requires creativity, resourcefulness and adaptability; qualities that are essential to adaptive capacity in the context of climate disruption.

With disability also comes experience of living within limits; embodied limits that tell the body when to slow down and rest, but also external limits imposed on Disabled bodies through a lack of understanding or respect.

As our everyday environments shift in the face of climate change, we all need to learn how to live within planetary limits. But, as discussed by Julia Watts Belser, we also need to impose new limits elsewhere, “to rein in industrial negligence, runaway capitalism and corporate greed” that drive climate disruption.

To reposition those limits requires collective action. The Disabled people’s movement has many years of experience of collective action, mobilising to imagine alternative worlds that leave no one behind. This expertise is desperately needed in climate action.

Imagining alternative worlds through climate action

When life is already dominated by crisis, it can feel too much to also engage with the climate emergency. But climate action might just be our best opportunity to create safe, fair, liveable and inclusive communities.

Investments are being made to decarbonise our communities to reduce carbon emissions. Investments are also being made to protect communities from harm in the face of increasing extreme weather events.

If (re)designed and implemented in genuine collaboration with Disabled people, these investments could also make our homes and communities accessible, safe, clean and fair. It is essential, however, to create enabling political, social and environmental conditions to support such participation and collaboration.

As emphasised by Julia Watts Belser in the closing words of our recent ‘Disability & Climate: In Conversation With’ event:

“We deserve a place on this Earth. It matters to me that disabled people are in the world… We matter, we deserve to be here. I love us so furiously. I want us to help each other make it through”.