From massive floods, to sweeping hurricanes, to raging wildfires, climate disasters seem constant. Last November, the United Nation’s climate conference, COP 27, grabbed global headlines when countries reached a historic deal to compensate vulnerable countries for loss and damage from climate change. It’s easy to see the scale of that loss and damage. Lives are lost, cultural sites disappear, and infrastructure like roads and bridges are destroyed.
But other aspects of climate change and its impact remain hidden from view. For people with disabilities, climate disasters can mean being abandoned by family and friends. And accessibility barriers can mean people with disabilities lack equal access to basic needs, like food and shelter.
People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority. And disability doesn’t discriminate – anyone can acquire a disability at any time, no matter who they are or where they live. Creating inclusive disaster and climate response benefits all of us.
To explain how climate disasters impact people with disabilities, and how response systems can be improved, we have Professor Michael Ashely Stein.
Dr. Stein is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on disability law and policy and was active in the drafting of the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Show Notes:
From massive floods, to sweeping hurricanes, to raging wildfires, climate disasters seem constant. Last November, the United Nation’s climate conference, COP 27, grabbed global headlines when countries reached a historic deal to compensate vulnerable countries for loss and damage from climate change. It’s easy to see the scale of that loss and damage. Lives are lost, cultural sites disappear, and infrastructure like roads and bridges are destroyed.
But other aspects of climate change and its impact remain hidden from view. For people with disabilities, climate disasters can mean being abandoned by family and friends. And accessibility barriers can mean people with disabilities lack equal access to basic needs, like food and shelter.
People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority. And disability doesn’t discriminate – anyone can acquire a disability at any time, no matter who they are or where they live. Creating inclusive disaster and climate response benefits all of us.
To explain how climate disasters impact people with disabilities, and how response systems can be improved, we have Professor Michael Ashely Stein.
Dr. Stein is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on disability law and policy and was active in the drafting of the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Show Notes:
Paras Shah: From massive floods, to sweeping hurricanes, to raging wildfires, climate disasters seem constant. Last November, the U.N.’s climate conference, COP27, grabbed global headlines when countries reached a historic deal to compensate vulnerable communities for loss and damage from climate change. It’s easy to see the scale of that loss and damage. Lives are lost, cultural sites disappear, and infrastructure like roads and bridges are destroyed.
But other aspects of climate change and its impacts remain hidden from view. For people with disabilities, climate disasters can mean being abandoned by family and friends. And accessibility barriers can mean people with disabilities lack equal access to basic needs like food and shelter.
People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority. And disability doesn’t discriminate – anyone can acquire a disability at any time, no matter who they are or where they live. Creating inclusive disaster and climate response benefits all of us.
This is the Just Security podcast. I’m your host Paras Shah.
To explain how climate disasters impact people with disabilities, and how response systems can be improved, we have Professor Michael Ashely Stein.
Dr. Stein is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on disability law and policy and was active in the drafting of the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Hey, Professor Stein, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to the show.
Michael Stein: Thank you for having me, Paras.
Paras: To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about how climate impacts people with disabilities?
Michael: Well, climate impacts people with disabilities the same way that it impacts other people, both immediate responses and slow onset. But the impact upon persons with disabilities is disparately larger. In the case of immediate onset, such as natural disasters and floods, people with disabilities have greater challenges as far as fleeing or moving, and states have not been providing accessibility within their climate adaptation planning.
As far as the slow onset of climate change, people with disabilities – according to the small amount of research that we have, and there has not been enough research – are desperately impacted as well. So for example, the death rate among persons with psychosocial disabilities is three to four times higher than of individuals without psychosocial disabilities.
In 2022, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, noticed that people with disabilities are barely recognized in climate change planning. And in 2022, 81% of countries did not even reference disability in their nationally determined contributions. And in articles, you know, we did a survey of six over 1,600 of them, climate adaptation response articles, and only one percent considered disability. So basically, what we have is this entire section of the world 15% – 1.3 billion people – not even recognized as being part of the agenda.
Paras: In your opinion, what are some of the reasons why disability is so overlooked?
Michael: Well, disability is a work in progress as far as being included in global society and included in global law and programming. We had a huge shift with the adaptation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. And the big picture is that we've seen humongous progress in various aspects of international law and programming. We have seen that the Sphere Project, for example, and the Red Cross have started to put in disability-included responses to natural disasters. We've seen that finally, the Security Council mentions disability in post conflict.
But at the same time, we see that there's some areas in which disability just seems not to be recognized yet as being relevant to the agenda. That is the case with climate. Although we have seen over the last few years, some progress, the IPCC’s annual report, its last one, actually references disability, 2022 report for the first time, there was a contingency of people with disabilities at COP27, although they were basically given a room and side session and spoke to each other, rather than to the general population. So some progress but not nearly enough.
There are other areas in which we've seen no progress at all. So the developing business and human rights treaty doesn't even conceive of disability as being part of the agenda. It's a work in progress, again, areas of dramatic improvement, since the CRPD was passed in 2006, and areas in which we're still seeing lots of areas for improvement.
Paras: What role does stigma play in the responses that we’re seeing?
Michael: I don't know that I'm willing to lay it all at the feet of ableism. I think a lot of it has to do with a conceptual misperception that disability is simply not relevant to or ought to be included within the agenda. It's what we refer to as malignant neglect as opposed to intentional exclusion. We saw this for many years in the HIV-AIDS area, where UNAIDS did not include people with disabilities, and PEPFAR didn't include people with disabilities. We saw it in the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals, in which the word disability never appears. I don't think it's an intentional exclusion. I do believe that it requires a shift in attitude and understanding that people with disabilities are part of the world – in fact, a significant proportion of the world – and that they or we, if you like, do belong within all programming and all aspects of international development.
Paras: One thing I often think about with the UN disability rights treaty is the social model of disability. And the social model says it's not inherently a person's disability or their physical impairment that disables. It's not the fact that someone is blind or uses a wheelchair, it’s that in combination with the environment. The fact that there aren’t books in Braille or wheelchairs or easy to understand materials or sign language that actually disable.
Michael: Most of the international disability rights community adheres very strongly to the social model of disability – the idea that it is how we construct the environment, rather than the inherent limitations or challenges of disability, that cause exclusion. Many of us from the scholarly community or from the advocacy community actually believe that it's not the social model, but rather a human rights model. That is what animates the CRPD. It's not simply enough to draw a line in the sand and say, no more exclusion. No more discrimination. It's also important to lessen the quality gap between the disability community and the non-disability community. So I would argue that actually, it's a human rights model that needs to be injected.
Paras: And when we think about climate disasters, what are some of the steps that states should take to better improve their response plans?
Michael: As far as climate is concerned, what we have is the exclusion of people with disabilities for no reason other than simply not considering them to be part of the agenda. What is necessary in order to change things for climate change is a recognition of the rights of people with disabilities, just like the right of all other people, to participate in programming and policies that affect their lives. The CRPD itself is about participatory justice. And the CRPD has provisions in it that not only require governments to consult with people with disabilities, but even to the extent of funding and building their capacity so that they can interact with it. Therefore, people with disabilities need to be involved in the creation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. They must lead by setting priorities, by sharing their needs, and by doing things such as leading disability inclusive climate research, of which there is very little.
It requires a recognition of disability intersectionality. Disability is a cross cutting issue and it relates not only to disability, but to gender and age, ethnicity, geography, migration, religion, sex, and other attributes. And we need to recognize that disability intersectionality means that the forms and impacts of discrimination have multiple effects, including, by the way, if we just want to pull one out, gender. We need to incorporate gender as a disability issue, the impact upon women and girls with disabilities who are socially charged with caregiving duties is immense. Consider the idea of if you are a woman or a girl with a disability, and you have been charged with being the person who creates food security or food for your family – how can you carry water from long distances? What is required to do that? What is the impact of climate change upon water and sanitation and hygiene? All these intersectional areas need to be front and center and need to be included as priorities, and they need to participate on the basis of their various identity statuses.
Paras: What exactly does the CRPD actually require states to do when it comes to climate disasters and other situations of risk?
Michael: CRPD Article 11 is a wonderful article, and yet it's only two sentences long. It's this marvelous opportunity to connect disability-related needs programming law and policy to the international law, international humanitarian law and other international regimes. And that's all it says. And it's two lines. And it's been an amazingly interesting and wonderful endeavor to see how various advocates, including my colleagues at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, have connected Article 11 to other areas.
So Article 11 means that states must include people with disabilities in all programming and responses to natural disasters. That ranges from accessible evacuation to accessible shelters to accessible places of sheltering to accessible refugee and internally displaced camps. If we were to go around the world, you would see a real variety of good and bad practices, ranging, you know, from the Bihari refugees who are in Bangladesh now for about the third or fourth decade. And we did a study of them and their camp is not accessible, and blind people fall into open sewage and other places, to the refugee camp in Jordan, the Zaatari camp, which includes inclusive education for children with disabilities in the camps. So natural disasters are included, armed conflict is included as the Security Council recently recognized in its resolution that we need to be thoughtful about the disabling and the increased disabling of populations relating to armed conflict. And one would argue that asylum and refugee claims would also come into effect under Article 11.
Paras: What does an accessible warning system or an accessible refugee camp look like?
Michael: Here's some good and bad examples. I was in New Orleans in Mississippi the week after hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and I inspected psychiatric hospitals in both. In one, there was no planning regarding getting people with psychosocial disabilities out of lockdown. And in that hospital, people died. In the other hospital, they remained and they were alive, but they were off their medications. That's not what's called inclusive natural disaster responses. And though, you know, the Bush administration, months beforehand, had issued directives to all state and local governments to be inclusive in their responses.
Emergency alert systems ought to be inclusive, and yet they still are not. Some of my former students I was very proud of sued New York City and the Bloomberg administration for failing to have accessible early warning signals in advance of Hurricane Sandy. This was after they should have learned from previous hurricanes on how to do that.
Paras: Where do you think we go from here? What are the next steps that states and donors should take?
Michael: On climate change we have, at the beginning, a lack of basic, good data. So to begin with, we lack good data. During the recent floodings in Bangladesh, the UN official numbers more or less estimated the population of people with disabilities at 90% under what academics and DPOs – disabled people's organizations – estimated them to be and our director of advocacy initiatives, Hezzy Smith, was in Bangladesh following and could identify tens of thousands of people with disabilities that the UN did not. So in the first cut, we need to have more accurate data.
On the second cut, we need to have people with disabilities included in developing responses to climate change, both the quick onset – like natural disasters – and the slow onset, such as increased heat, which affects various people with disabilities, including those who have issues with thermoregulation, like those with multiple sclerosis, differently. So we're lacking the research on how slow onset climate change affects people with disabilities. We're lacking the research as to what the measures are and what the extent is of loss and damages. Loss and damage is an area that is quantitatively done in order to assess how to proceed. I am aware of zero studies about people with disabilities, climate change, and loss of damages.
Going forward, if we're being creative, we should think about the role of social protection measures – especially in low and middle income countries and even high income countries – about people with disabilities. How should we anticipate the loss of equity of housing? How should we anticipate the loss of assistive devices? What happens after a natural disaster when there is no more social safety net and there's no place to go to receive health care and access emergency services? We need to think about cash transfers before anticipated climate emergencies. We need to think about making reconstruction accessible. So a classic example of that is Haiti where everyone in the world, including celebrities, like Sean Penn, flew down after the earthquake. But then they reconstructed Port-au-Prince in an inaccessible manner, leaving the newly disabled and the preexisting disabled socially farther excluded than they were before the disaster.
Paras: You've given us a lot to think about, and so much of this starts by asking these questions and putting this issue of inclusion on people's radars. Professor Stein, thanks so much for joining the show.
Michael: Thank you for having me.
Paras: The Just Security Podcast is produced in partnership with NYU’s American Journalism Online Program. AJO trains students to become world class journalists, no matter where they live, or work. Find out more about AJO and how you can apply in our show notes.
This episode is hosted by me, Paras Shah, with co-production and editing by Tiffany Chang, Michelle Eigenheer, and Allison Mollenkamp. Our music is the song, “The Parade” by Hey Pluto.
Special thanks to Clara Apt and Michael Ashley Stein. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.