Promoting disability justice to reduce climate-induced disaster injustices

Promoting disability justice to reduce climate-induced disaster injustices

Climate change has accelerated the range, prevalence, and severity of climate-related disasters globally and had a significant impact on most aspects of human health and wellbeing. Climate change is a crisis multiplier and cannot be isolated from the compounding negative consequences created by other vulnerabilities (Levy et al., 2024). The impacts of climate-induced disaster are therefore more severe and complex for people with disability for whom the impacts are compounded by poverty, discrimination and stigma (Spurway & Griffiths, 2016). People with disability are more likely to die due to a disaster (Villenevue, 2022) and experience higher levels of post-event mortality due to health complications arising from insufficient recovery resources (Pledl, 2021). However, the tendency to attribute vulnerability solely to disability overlooks the complex structural contribution of sociopolitical factors such as education, employment status, and poverty to disadvantage and create vulnerability (Lindsay et al., 2022).
This briefing paper reflects on prior research in the Solomon Islands (King et al., 2019) to explore how disability justice and climate justice can be integrated to reduce climate-induced disaster injustices.