Our Work
Disability-Inclusive Climate Action
Lessons from the Historic 2022 Flooding in Bangladesh
United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Task Team’s coordinated appeal identifies 1.5 million target beneficiaries for post-disaster relief, but estimates that only 1.5% of them had disabilities, well below estimates by the World Health Organization.
As demonstrated by the exclusion of an Israeli delegate with disabilities from the COP26 proceedings, “[d]isability has largely been excluded from international climate change negotiations as well as national-level discharge of climate-related measures."1 The absence of disability from high-level discussions about climate action can have real consequences for people with disabilities impacted by climate change-induced natural disasters. Disaster recovery efforts often exclude persons with disabilities, who are disproportionately poor and live in disaster-prone areas, and therefore are at greater risk of natural disasters.
Take, for instance, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination Task Team’s (HCTT) coordinated appeal in response to flash flooding in Bangladesh’s Sunamganj and Sylhet districts, located on the country’s northeast border with India. In June, this area experienced the greatest amount of rainfall recorded in the last 122 years, submerging over 90% of Sunamganj and 80% of Sylhet. The HCTT estimated that 7.2 million people were affected by these floods. Of them, it identified just over 1.5 million people to be targeted by its relief efforts. Although the HCTT repeatedly mentions persons with disabilities as among its priority groups, the HCTT identified only 22,869, or 1.5%, of its target beneficiaries as persons with disabilities.
The HCTT’s estimate likely undercounts by an order of magnitude the number of persons with disabilities among its target beneficiaries. In their landmark 2011 World Report on Disability, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank estimated that approximately 15% of any given population has disability. Part of the problem likely lies with data collected by Bangladesh authorities, who have historically undercounted persons with disabilities. For example, Bangladesh’s most recent national census, conducted in 2011, reported that only 1.4% of its population had disability. Similarly, a more recent survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) has found only 2.4% of the population has disability.
The kinds of questions used to count persons with disabilities matters. Thus, one way that Bangladesh can more accurately count its population of persons with disabilities is by adopting questions recommended by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics.2 Recently, in its first-ever National Survey on Persons with Disabilities, based on a sample of 36,000 respondents, the BBS reported that 2.8% of them have disability according to the Government of Bangladesh’s definition, compared to 7.14% when it applied Washington Group questions.3 Earlier this month, concerned by “the lack of accurate, comprehensive, quality, timely and reliable data on persons with disabilities,” the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) urged Bangladesh to incorporate the Washington Group questions in future censuses.
In addition to the kinds of questions are asked is the matter of who is asking the questions. Thus, another solution is to involve disabled people’s organizations (DPOs) in data collection efforts. Surveyors with disabilities are likely more motivated to count persons with disabilities than their non-disabled counterparts. Unsurprisingly, surveys of persons with disabilities conducted by organizations of persons with disabilities in Bangladesh have reported higher disability prevalence than Bangladesh’s census. The BBS has acknowledged as much, citing civil society surveys that have turned up rates of 8.8% and 7.8% in its 2015 monograph on disability prevalence in Bangladesh. In order to correct this discrepancy, beyond adopting Washington Group questions, the CRPD Committee has also urged the Government of Bangladesh “to meaningfully consult with and include representative organisations of persons with disabilities” in its future data collection activities.
My recent experience providing post-disaster relief to flood-affected persons with disabilities in Bangladesh’s Sunamganj and Sylhet districts underscored the importance of disability-inclusive climate action. Having previously collaborated with Bangladesh Protibandhi Unnayan Sangstha (BPUS), a DPO based in Bangladesh’s Barisal district, to activate district-level disability rights implementation mechanisms, I teamed up with BPUS and local DPOs working in those districts to deliver over 6,000 kg of dry goods to 350 persons with disabilities who have largely been overlooked by other relief efforts. Many of the persons with disabilities that I spoke with during our relief distribution events claimed that they had not received any post-disaster relief since the June floodwaters began to recede.
Their firsthand testimonies of exclusion belie the numerous frameworks mandating disability-inclusive climate action. For example, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction avers, “Persons with disabilities and their organizations are critical in the assessment of disaster risks and in designing and implementing plans” for risk reduction and recovery. Also, the Dhaka Declaration 2015+ called upon governments, regional entities, private sector and other stakeholders to ensure collection disability-disaggregated data and to remove barriers to disaster risk reduction and recovery faced by persons with disabilities. Similarly, the 2013 Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act specifies that persons with disabilities should be included “on a priority basis” in all post-disaster relief efforts. Yet, as several DPO leaders shared with me, despite the existence of disaster risk management committees at various levels of Bangladesh government, and despite legal and policy mandates to prioritize persons with disabilities, as the recent flooding in Sunamganj and Sylhet have shown me, in practice many persons with disabilities are still left behind.
Hopefully, over time, climate change experts will shine a light on this ongoing marginalization of persons with disabilities. For example, Ian Fry, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights to human rights in the context of climate change, recently visited Bangladesh to study the impact of climate change. While he highlighted the important concerns of climate change-affected women and indigenous groups, he did not address the unique and aggravated climate risks faced by persons with disabilities. In the future, unless climate change experts and international monitors make concerted efforts to include the voices of persons with disabilities, climate action risks remaining yet another site for disability exclusion.
