In this month’s guest blog, Dr Sarah Bell shines the light on an essential topic, the interface of climate resilience and disability. Dr Bell is a senior lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH). Since 2019, Dr Bell has been co-designing an interdisciplinary research programme to explore opportunities to highlight disability rights and knowledge in climate adaptation scholarship, academia and practice.
Climate change poses significant risks to human life and livelihoods in ways that are compounding and creating new forms of social inequality. Disabled people – including 16% of the global population and 24% of the UK population – are particularly at risk of adverse climate impacts. Globally, disabled people are 2-4 times more likely to die or be injured in heatwaves, hurricanes and floods.
In part, these risks are due to the damaging impacts of extreme weather events on existing health conditions. In part, they are due to the cumulative influence of austerity and declining welfare support, which have undermined people’s capacity to cope in the current climate, let alone prepare for future risks. But these risks are exacerbated further by eco-ableism; whereby some of the actions promoted to address the climate emergency are creating new challenges for disabled people.
When not framed out of discussions about climate change, disabled people are often framed solely as one of several ‘climate vulnerable’ groups, with little reflection on the social, political and economic systems that create vulnerability. This is not to say that vulnerability does not exist. It does. But vulnerability is created by our society, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
The single story of vulnerability also overlooks the rich knowledge and skills of disabled people within climate action. Climate change is disabling; it is making our world more uncertain, more unpredictable, more harmful. Yet the people who know what it means to navigate a disabling world – disabled people – are so often left out of this work.
Without denying the existence of vulnerability, this single story of ‘disability as vulnerability’ flattens a rich diversity of lived experience and closes down collaborative opportunities to imagine climate-resilient and socially-just worlds.
Sensing Climate is a five-year research project, led by the University of Exeter, and funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Leverhulme Trust. It foregrounds the role and importance of disability knowledges in developing adaptive responses to increasingly unpredictable and challenging environments.
It is a collaborative programme of interdisciplinary research, encompassing international, UK national law and policy reviews and in-depth city case studies in Bristol and Glasgow (UK) and Dublin (Ireland). It includes qualitative and arts-based research activities across the three case study cities as well as policy roundtables at city and national levels.
A recurrent issue being shared by disabled participants across the study is a concern about gaps in emergency preparedness and resilience planning with and for disabled people. Advice for how to prepare for extreme weather events often places responsibility on individuals to do so, or suggests that neighbours will be on hand to provide support in an emergency. Yet, as discussed by our participants, many disabled people cannot afford to create a grab bag or gather emergency supplies, and do not have a neighbour they could turn to for help in an emergency, nor a personal assistant or caregiver who would be on hand at home to help. Many had a sense that no-one would even know they were there, let alone how to support them safely in the event of a storm or flood.
As commented by one participant:
“To deal with the complexity and difficulty of human life we need to serve those who need it most first… You need to think about people who are on machines to keep them alive all the time which means you have to be prepared for that which means you have to know how many people, roughly where they are, how quickly you can get all the support in place and you need to test it regularly to make sure it’s all actually there. Like, you don’t send a fire engine out not having tested it and giving it an MOT and all that kind of thing, do you?”
Underlying many of the concerns raised, has been a sense that the lives of disabled people are not seen as important. For example, one participant explained:
“There’s something about how people view disabled people’s lives, and their value and their worth. And how in “natural disasters”, or in floods, or in heatwaves… and cold snaps over winter … it’s normally disabled and elderly people that will die in those situations. And people are like ‘oh, well you know, that was going to happen anyway, they’re disabled, and they’re old’. I feel like there’s that kind of attitude generally in society, of if a disabled person or if an elderly person dies it doesn’t really matter as much as if a younger person or a non-disabled person died… it feels like in terms of the climate emergency it’s just another thing where disabled people are not considered as valuable, full human beings”
Within the project, we have been working closely with Dr Emma Geen (Climate and Disability Programme Associate to the Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership’s Community Climate Action (CCA) project) to develop a series of guidance notes, including for example:
- Our recently launched ‘Crip Up Climate Conversations’ guidance series, which aims to broaden the ways in which disabled people are framed within (or framed out of) climate action, and to support people in creating respectful, safe and inclusive opportunities for disabled communities to shape this work.
- Resources for local authorities and third sector organisations working on different dimensions of climate action to understand disability priorities in the areas of emergency preparedness, transport, housing, energy, green jobs, nature, food and waste, along with two cross-cutting resources around co-production and inclusive engagement. These will be launched in Spring 2026.
If you would like to find out more about the project, the resources or the specific work around emergency preparedness and community resilience, do get in touch with the project lead, Sarah Bell (sarah.bell@exeter.ac.uk).
About the Author
Dr Sarah Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH), part of Exeter University. Her research interests include geographies of health and wellbeing, disability-inclusive climate action and more-than-human therapeutic landscape experiences.