Our Work
Disability, Human Rights, and Climate Justice
The urgent need for disability-inclusive climate action
Climate change disproportionately affects persons with disabilities and exacerbates inequalities that urge for climate action initiatives to follow a disability human rights approach.
To date, "[d]isability has largely been excluded from international climate change negotiations as well as national-level discharge of climate-related measures," as HPOD's Senior Associate Penelope J.S. Stein and Executive Director Michael Ashley Stein write in their article "Disability, Human Rights, and Climate Justice". They detail how a disability human rights approach should inform climate action, particularly, why disability-inclusive climate justice requires empowering persons with disabilities to participate directly in the policy- and decision-making processes surrounding climate mitigation and adaption measures, as well as their subsequent implementation.
The authors had previously signaled in their related Lancet piece that the disproportionate effects of climate change on persons with disabilities only exacerbate existing inequalities in access to health-care services, education, employment, or adequate housing, not to mention the intersecting forms of multiple discrimination that arise from belonging to specific groups including women, Indigenous people, children, racial minorities, and older people. Only a disability human rights approach to climate mitigation and adaptation measures will avoid perpetuating these inequalities.
As diverse communities around the world grapple with the effects of climate change, the global community should be looking for solutions from diverse places. Indeed, members of the Global South like Ecuador have much to teach the Global North about disability-inclusive climate action. As described in HPOD's Executive Director Michael Ashley Stein and HPOD associate Jonathan Lazar's co-edited volume, Accessible Technology and the Developing World, Ecuador has deployed technological advances to ensure its disaster risk management is inclusive of persons with disabilities.1 For example, in 2011 Ecuador used global positioning system technology to ensure that hundreds of persons with severe physical and intellectual disabilities inhabiting the country’s 86 coastal parishes were evacuated in response to a tsunami emergency warning alert and safely re-located them into shelters. Ecuador has complemented its use of advanced technology with a series of institutional, educational, and informational activities to strengthen communities in climate change-affected areas.