{"id":2819,"date":"2025-11-26T16:12:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T16:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=2819"},"modified":"2025-12-01T15:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T15:02:08","slug":"climate-adaptation-is-failing-disabled-people-and-its-no-accident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2025\/11\/26\/climate-adaptation-is-failing-disabled-people-and-its-no-accident\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate adaptation is failing Disabled people \u2013 and it\u2019s no accident"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hollye Kirkcaldy<\/a> is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath exploring disability and climate adaptation. In this blog post, she writes about the inclusion of Disabled people and their knowledge in climate adaptation policy.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the UK registers another year of increasingly disruptive flooding<\/a> and record-breaking heat<\/a>, policymakers regularly emphasise the need to protect the \u2018most vulnerable\u2019<\/a> from these climate change impacts. Disabled people[1]<\/a> are usually placed within this category. They are, after all, up to four times more likely to die or suffer serious harm<\/a> during extreme weather events. For example, heatwaves pose serious risks to people with chronic respiratory conditions,<\/a> while power outages can be life-threatening<\/a> for those who rely on ventilators, powered wheelchairs or medical refrigeration.<\/p>\n

Yet, despite these realities, Disabled people remain largely absent from the climate adaptation strategies designed to protect them<\/a>. The question is no longer whether Disabled people are at higher risk from climate change. The question that now demands an answer is why they and their knowledge remain so marginal to climate adaptation policy.<\/p>\n

Their absence is not accidental. It is the consequence of the deliberate decisions taken within climate governance to define vulnerability and decide whose knowledge is credible.<\/p>\n

Disability and inherent vulnerability<\/strong><\/h2>\n

At the heart of this problem is a deceptively simple yet misplaced idea: that Disabled people are \u2018vulnerable\u2019 by nature. This framing is commonplace in climate adaptation, appearing in public health guidance<\/a>, national adaptation strategies<\/a> and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But disability and vulnerability are not inherent individual traits. They are socially produced<\/a>. Disabled people do not automatically become vulnerable because they use a wheelchair, because they are autistic or because they have a chronic illness. They become vulnerable when systems fail to account for them<\/a>. A heatwave becomes dangerous when cooling advice<\/a> assumes you can simply open windows or visit an air-conditioned public space. A storm becomes deadly<\/a> when evacuation transport lacks wheelchair lifts. Disabled people are more exposed to climate hazards because systems are not designed with their needs in mind.<\/p>\n

But when policy treats disability as individual deficit<\/a>, these structural issues disappear from view. The emphasis shifts to protecting individuals, and that shift has important implications for how Disabled people and their knowledge are valued.<\/p>\n

Epistemic injustice: when experience is treated as unreliable<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The devaluing of certain knowledge and credibility is known as epistemic injustice<\/a> \u2013 the wrong done to somebody in their capacity as a knower. Disabled people experience epistemic injustice in climate adaptation in two forms. Firstly, their accounts are given less weight because of who they are<\/a>. Put simply, disability is stigmatised and equated with lower social value. In climate adaptation, Disabled people\u2019s coping strategies or risk assessments are seen as subjective, not credible, evidence.<\/p>\n

Secondly, policy frameworks are structured such that there is no space or accepted language to express Disabled people\u2019s experiences<\/a>. Their realities of socially generated disability cannot be articulated within the privileged, ableist adaptation frameworks, and are therefore excluded.<\/p>\n

And this produces a vicious cycle. Disabled people are cast as passively vulnerable, their lived experiences are devalued, and they are subsequently excluded from the very processes that would enable them to challenge that framing.<\/p>\n

The God Trick: how policy mistakes its own perspective for objective truth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

These patterns persist because of what feminist theorist Donna Haraway called the \u2018God Trick\u2019<\/a>: the belief that climate decision-makers see the world from an all-seeing position (a \u2018view-from-nowhere') with an entirely objective perspective.<\/p>\n

In practice, of course, no knowledge is a \u2018view-from-nowhere'. What gets hailed as objective is actually shaped by the experiences and social position of those producing it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In adaptation, this matters. The authority to define what \u2018counts\u2019 as credible knowledge is concentrated among a narrow group of privileged elites<\/a>: modellers, economists, government officials and external consultants, to name but a few. International development uses the term \u2018elite capture<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 the diversion of funds and resources by a powerful minority to serve their own interests. What we see here is a form of elite capture which doesn\u2019t involve control of funds by an ableist minority; it involves the control of the boundaries of legitimate knowledge.<\/p>\n

Technical climate tools such as Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)<\/a> are a good example. IAMs guide major climate action decisions globally through scenario modelling, aggregating the social complexities of a diverse population into simplified cost-driven inputs<\/a> and ableist assumptions: fully functioning markets, normative populations and behaviours driven by economic logic. Anything that cannot be expressed in these terms, including Disabled people and their knowledge, is effectively excluded from the analysis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The God Trick gives the illusion of neutral truth; elite capture decides just whose truth really counts.<\/p>\n

What genuine inclusion demands<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Meaningful inclusion is not a matter of simply adding a Disabled person to a committee as a token gesture. It requires a shift in the foundations of adaptation governance.<\/p>\n

Conceptually, adaptation must move away from a biomedical understanding of disability which views the individual as the problem. Vulnerability emerges through the interaction of impairment with an inaccessible social environment, and this social-relational model of disability must sit at the very heart of climate policy.<\/p>\n

Methodologically, lived experience must be treated as valid evidence<\/a>. This means creating research methods capable of including people usually excluded by standard consultation formats, particularly those with cognitive or intellectual disabilities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Institutionally, Disabled people\u2019s knowledge must shape the very definitions of risk, resilience and adaptive capacity, or policy just reinforces those societal inequalities that lead to that misplaced vulnerability categorisation in the first place. Inclusive climate adaptation that works for Disabled people will, by definition, work better for everyone else<\/a>: older adults, families with young children and anyone whose needs fall outside the assumed norm. For example, the benefits of neighbourhood networks designed to support Disabled people during heatwaves naturally extend to anyone living alone who might be at risk. Cooling centres accessible to wheelchairs are also therefore accessible to parents with pushchairs.<\/p>\n

Disabled people should not be an afterthought in the climate crisis. They are central to understanding how climate risks are produced, and how societies can adapt accordingly. The challenge now is whether climate governance can recognise them as such.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> I use the identity-first term \u2018Disabled people\u2019 in this piece to reflect the social model of disability.<\/a><\/p>\n

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All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollye Kirkcaldy is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath exploring disability and climate adaptation. In this blog post, she writes about the inclusion of Disabled people and their knowledge in climate adaptation policy. As the UK registers another...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1948,"featured_media":2820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[144,114,145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-energy-and-environmental-policy","category-sustainability"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2025\/11\/Blog-Images-2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1948"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}