Beyond the Single Story of Climate Vulnerability: Centring Disabled People and Their Knowledges in “Care-Full” Climate Action

Abstract

Health. Disability. Vulnerability. These words are often used when discussing the risks of climate disruption. These discussions warn of the potential for climate impacts to “undermine 50 years of gains in public health” (as stated by the Lancet Countdown on Climate Change). Increasingly, such discussions also acknowledge climate injustice, examining who will benefit or lose out from climate change, how and why. The embodied vulnerability of disabled people is often assumed within such discussions, with less consideration of the social, economic or political conditions that create this vulnerability. By bringing disability justice and disability studies into correspondence with care, environmental and climate justice scholarship, this reflective paper challenges the master narratives that blur differentiated experiences of disability and climate impacts into a single story of inevitable vulnerability. Recognising disabled people as knowers, makers and agents of change, it calls for transformative climate action, underpinned by values of solidarity, mutuality and care.