People with Disabilities Taking Action on Climate Change

HPOD's most recent human rights publication is a primer for persons with disabilities around the world interested in both better understanding climate change and taking climate action. Written in easy read format, with graphics designed by Derek Heard, a proud autistic graphic artist and disability justice advocate based in Albany, Georgia, this handbook aims to harness the potential of all persons with disabilities, including self-advocates with intellectual disabilities, to contribute to efforts to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Persons with disabilities are disproportionately affected by climate change, yet they are often ignored by policy-makers and implementers alike in national- and local-level climate adaptation laws, policies, and programs. Similarly, climate change actors too often view persons with disabilities only as an especially vulnerable group, rather than a source of climate adaptation solutions. These dynamics apply equally, if not more so, to persons with intellectual disabilities, who are rarely considered agents of impactful climate action and thus sidelined from mainstream climate activism. 

An innovative partnership in Ecuador is striving to flip the script on the marginalization of persons with intellectual disabilities from climate action. In Ecuador, the National Federation of Mothers and Fathers of People with Intellectual Disability (FEPAPDEM) is partnering with an inclusive employer, Rights Chocolate, and the Ecuadorian Association of Self Advocacy with Intellectual Disabilities (AECADI) to demonstrate how persons with intellectual disabilities can contribute to combating the effects of climate change. Sponsored by USAID, FEPAPDEM and its partners are already translating and adapting HPOD's publication to help train self-advocates to become change-agents.

In the spirit of "nothing about us without us," it is critical that persons with disabilities, including intellectual disabilities, are mobilized and supported to contribute to confronting the global climate emergency, to ensure the shared prosperity of all.