The Environmental Injustice of Inaccessibility

My brother has fallen victim to the often overstated phenomenon of “range anxiety” that often deters consumers from purchasing electric vehicles. Rather than a Tesla battery, though, he is concerned with his electric wheelchair. While he’s usually considering a lap around the neighborhood rather than a cross-country road trip, his experience living with a disability is connected to the larger need for the inclusion of disabled communities in the environmental justice movement. Persons with disabilities face insufficient resources and representation that make them more vulnerable to climate hazards, including unpredictable grid failures, natural disasters, and climate-induced health conditions. This is a largely under-researched and low-priority issue for both environmental and disability-focused organizations.

Across a diverse spectrum of disabilities, there are numerous cases of environmental issues intensifying and being intensified by pre-existing socioeconomic disparities. Many disabilities, like my brother’s condition, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), leave individuals immunocompromised. The #1 cause of death amongst those living with DMD is cardiopulmonary diseases. The top environmental public health concerns are respiratory and cardiovascular diseases resulting from air pollution. It’s also significantly more difficult for people with physical or cognitive disabilities to adapt to a widespread blackout, evacuate during a flood, or recover financially after a disaster. One Harvard Law School study found that “Persons with disabilities are two to four times more likely to die or be injured in climate emergencies” and “59% of deaf evacuees do not return home.” Factors that contribute to this heightened risk include a lack of accessible infrastructure, healthcare, and shelter. Additionally, multiple reports have highlighted poverty, discrimination, and stigma as primary components of disproportionate climate vulnerability.

Issues at the intersection of disabilities and climate have been acknowledged as a concern by The Paris Agreement, IPCC, and UNCRPD. However, a significant information gap remains regarding the impacts of climate change of disabled communities, particularly in materials available to the public and affected groups. Disabled communities are also largely excluded from climate change research itself. This means that a significant portion of the context is missing from environmental analysis, and a substantial part of the population is ill-prepared to address urgent climate issues. The existing research on climate vulnerability among disabled populations is fairly narrow and regionally concentrated areas with major differences to the US in terms of government, healthcare, physical environments, and social systems that shape disability policy and lived experience. Additionally, most of the available work focuses on Disaster Risk Reduction, which is essential, but fails to cover a wide array of disability-related climate issues. Enhancing data collection, providing climate literacy resources, soliciting new perspectives, and developing disability-centric environmental education curricula can help address the information gap that contributes to inequity.

Another huge part of climate justice is achieving equitable representation. Having a voice at the table is not only pivotal to ensuring fully informed decision-making, but also to the awareness of the represented communities. A community not included in a discussion and not represented by a movement cannot engage and contribute to sustainable progress, and the disabled community is severely underrepresented. Within the environmental justice movement, there is a unique opportunity to redesign advocacy frameworks to include this historically marginalized group. Just as environmental justice advocacy often draws on civil rights law to protect frontline communities, the movement can utilize disability and healthcare laws to obtain more equitable, climate-specific policies to support and protect disabled populations. Progress can be made by building on existing environmental justice programs and implementing constituencies for people with disabilities within those spaces.

The word “disability” is an overly general umbrella term that can obscure the wide range of experiences, hardships, and needs within a diverse community. However, it is a start for building visibility and accountability in public, private, and nonprofit climate discussions. Achieving true climate justice for disabled communities needs a more solution-oriented approach than current research has adopted so far to address the identified problem areas of poverty, accessibility, stigma, and representation. This could take the form of a disability census, the development of evacuation plans that account for various conditions in areas with high climate risk, and tackling even more foundational disability inequities like poverty. Going forward, disability and environmental organizations should collaborate to develop specific climate resilience targets and metrics for analyzing environmental disability data.

My brother’s mobility concerns reflect the broader reality that disabled people are navigating climate risks with little support or recognition. That oversight weakens the entire environmental justice movement. Until disabled communities are factored into how we prepare for and respond to the climate crisis, systems will continue to fail a large portion of the population.

Words by Lydia Farr, RCC Stanback Fellow