Climate Change and Disability: Between Vulnerability and Adaptation

August 2024

Disabled people are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. While many people’s physical or mental disabilities generate distinct vulnerabilities to heat waves, wildfires, droughts, or storm surges, these vulnerabilities are magnified by inaccessible infrastructure and ableist policies and social norms. Many people with disabilities are left behind in disaster planning and excluded from climate policymaking. As the climate crisis intensifies, many disability rights organizations, writers, and community leaders continue to fight for the “right to be rescued” during disasters. Disabled people have led the way in developing individual and collective efforts to adapt to climate change and affirm the value of all human and nonhuman life.

As Julia Watts Belser, Project Director of the Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, summarizes: “Disabled people bear witness to the risks and realities of climate change. We face the violence of climate crisis more intensely. But we also bring crucial insights for navigating climate disruption, for living with and adapting to a changing world.”

In the two Teaching with the News lessons below—one short and self-contained, and another more comprehensive and comparative—students learn about the concepts of “vulnerability” and “adaptation” as they apply to disabled people’s lives and the global climate crisis. Students then reflect on the kinds of knowledge and experience disabled people bring to issues around disaster planning and climate change policy.

Recommended Reading

Though these lessons can be completed as a stand-alone activity. The Choices’ curriculum unit Climate Change and Questions of Justice provides a more comprehensive introduction to the topic of climate change and the concepts of environmental justice and climate justice.

For more guidance on disability history, see Choices’ Resource Guide: Disability History and Studies.

Objectives

In these lessons, students will:

• Engage in active reading, analyze one or more primary sources, and participate in group discussion.
• Examine the personal account of one or more individuals with disabilities who have experienced climate change-related natural disasters.
• Learn about the concepts of “vulnerability” and “adaptation” as they apply to disabled people’s lives and the global climate crisis.
• Reflect on the kinds of knowledge and experience disabled people bring to issues around disaster planning and climate change policy.

Resources

• Slideshow: Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Ableism
• Graphic Organizer: Single Interview
• Graphic Organizer: Multiple Interviews

In the Classroom—Single Interview Lesson

Note: The Single Interview Lesson is a short, self-contained examination of the relationship between disability and climate change that is more accessible for a broad range of students.

1. Review Climate Change: Prior to beginning the main part of the lesson, you may wish to show the following videos to introduce and review climate change and some of its effects before moving on to the main activity. Particularly, ensure students understand the concepts of “vulnerability” and “adaptation” as they apply to climate change, as well as the definition of “ableism.” You may wish to use Slideshow: Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Ableism to review these terms.

• What is climate change? (Professors Tim Herbert and Naveeda Khan)
• Who is most vulnerable to climate change? (Professor J. Timmons Roberts)
• What are mitigation and adaptation? (Professor J. Timmons Roberts)

For more Choices Program videos about climate change, see our complete Climate Change and Questions of Justice video collection. For more pedagogical support around disability history, see our Resource Guide: Disability History and Studies.

2. Introduce the Personal Account: Project the webpage Germán Parodi—”Disability after Disaster: Reflections from a Disabled First Responder” and read the short biography aloud. Then, ask students to identify 1 to 2 specific details from Parodi’s biography that they think might be significant. Why might those details be important to consider when thinking about the experiences and knowledge that Parodi brings to this work? In highlighting and briefly discussing details (e.g., “disability-led organization,” “first person with a significant spinal cord injury to…,” “community organizer,” “equitable access”), the class can preview and frame some of the key ideas they will encounter in the interview about the importance of centering disabled people in disaster planning, response, and policy-making.

3. Examine the Personal Account: Divide the class into pairs, distribute Graphic Organizer: Single Interview to each student, and share with students the URL for Germán Parodi—”Disability after Disaster: Reflections from a Disabled First Responder.” Parodi discusses his experiences in natural disaster response planning and implementation in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, the importance of having disabled people involved in disaster planning, and the need to work with existing community support systems. You may also be interested in sharing with students the “Audio Portrait” based on audio clips from Parodi’s interview.

Instruct students to read the interview with Germán Parodi and work with their partner to fill out the Graphic Organizer. In Part I, students should write down (or copy-and-paste) any parts of the interview that deal with themes or instances of “vulnerability” and/or “adaptation.” (If you choose to print out the interview and distribute it to the class, instruct students to underline instances of “vulnerability” and circle instances of “adaptation” as they read.) In Part II, students should work with their partner to answer the questions.

4. Class Discussion: Facilitate a class discussion in which students reflect on the interview with Germán Parodi. What stood out most to students as they read the interview? What did they find most interesting or important? What did they learn about Parodi’s experiences? How do Parodi’s experiences reflect broader issues that people with disabilities face during and after climate-change related natural disasters?

Ask students to share which sections of the interview they identified as dealing with themes or instances of “vulnerability” and/or “adaptation.” You may wish to review some of these sections and discuss them as a class. Next, ask students to share their answers to the questions on the Graphic Organizer. Based on the interview, what distinct vulnerabilities do people with disabilities face during natural disasters? What are some of the ways that existing governmental disaster policies and responses fail to account for the specific vulnerabilities experienced by people with disabilities? Why is it important for disabled people to be at the forefront of disaster relief planning and implementation policies? What kinds of knowledge and experience do disabled people bring to these issues? Why does Parodi argue that disaster planners must see disabled people as collaborators rather than just recipients of aid? (For an alternative concluding activity, see Part 5 of the Multiple Interview Lesson below.)

In the Classroom—Multiple Interview Lesson

Note: The Multiple Interview Lesson adds an additional reading to the lesson, provides a richer set of concepts, questions, and themes than the Single Interview Lesson, and offers an even more diverse set of voices for students to engage with.

1. Review Climate Change: See Step 1 above in the Single Interview Lesson for details.

2. Frame the Lesson: Share the URL for Julia Watts Belser’s short introductory essay “Disability and Climate Change” with students and project the essay on the screen at the front of the classroom. (You may wish to use a less challenging, “plain language” summary of the essay located here.) Lead an interactive read-aloud session, pausing to clarify definitions of challenging terms, reinforce key points, and ask students to reflect on passages they have just read. Next, ask students what they think Belser means when she writes: “Disability communities face more risk from climate change”? What does Belser mean when she writes about “disability wisdom” in the face of climate change?

3. Examine a Personal Account: Divide the class into pairs and distribute the Graphic Organizer: Multiple Interviews to each student. Assign each pair one of the four interviews below:

• Germán Parodi: “Disability after Disaster: Reflections from a Disabled First Responder”
• Maria R. Palacios: “Crip Survival Networks: Disabled and Undocumented Communities Resisting Ableism and Abandonment”
• Erin Brown: “Disability Equity and Disaster Response in the Bahamas”
• Patty Berne: “We Save Each Other: Disability Activism, Climate Crisis, and the Power of Fighting with Love”

Note about the Sources: Be sure to preview each of the interviews to make sure they are appropriate for your classroom. The interview with Maria R. Palacios includes several curse words used casually within the conversation. Palacios also utilizes the term “crip” as a chosen identity term. Over the past few decades, many diverse disabled people have reclaimed “crip” and other pejorative terms as self-identifications. Instructors should tell students that this is a term that some disabled people identify with, but that it is not appropriate to use the term to describe people with disabilities in general or to use out of context. For more information, see this explanation. If you choose not to use the Palacios interview, this lesson can still be extremely effective using only three of the four interviews.

Instruct students to read their assigned interview and work with their partner to fill out the Graphic Organizer. In Part I, students should describe parts of the interview that deal with “vulnerability” and “adaptation.” (If you choose to print out the interviews and distribute them to the class, you may wish to instruct students to underline instances of “vulnerability” and circle instances of “adaptation” as they read.) In Part II, students should work with their partner to answer the questions.

4. Jigsaw: After students have completed the Graphic Organizer, create new groups of four students each (combining two pairs who each read different interviews). You may wish to designate one student in each group as “Group Leader” to help facilitate discussion. Instruct each pair of students to first share their overall impression of their assigned interview. For example: What did they learn? What thoughts, emotions, or questions did they have while reading? Next, ask each pair to share with the group their answers to the questions from Part II of the Graphic Organizer. Encourage students to identify both unique and shared experiences and beliefs across their assigned sources as they share their answers to the questions. You may also wish to encourage students to identify different factors that can affect disability-related vulnerabilities (such as race, gender, immigration status, social class, geographic isolation, etc.).

5. Conclusion: Conclude the lesson by assigning students a journaling activity in which they respond to each of the following “Mirror, Window, and Sliding Glass Door” prompts. A “Mirror” prompt asks students to identify how something they learned reflects back on their own experiences. A “Window” prompt asks students to identify how something they learned introduced them to a new or different worldview or experience. A “Sliding Glass Door” prompt “opens the door for students” to learn about these differences with respect and empathy. Students should write in the first person and reference specific examples from the interview(s).

• MIRROR: A mirror provides a reflection of ourselves and our experiences. What is one specific idea, theme, or aspect in the interview(s) that provided a “mirror” to something about your own experience? This could be something you yourself have experienced, thought about, or witnessed/heard about.
• WINDOW: A window allows us to see the experiences of other people. What is one specific idea, piece of information, or experience in the interview(s) that served as a “window” into something new to you? Or what is one thing that you read about that you have never previously considered about climate change and/or disability?
• SLIDING GLASS DOOR: A sliding glass door allows us to enter and experience the world of other people. What is one example from the interview(s) that helped you “open the door” and “step into the world” of another person to better understand their daily lived experiences (i.e., empathize with them)? 

Extra Challenges

1. Explore the Public Archive: Extend the lesson by asking students to explore the public archive website from which the interviews they read were drawn: Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project. Be sure to preview the rest of the archive to make sure it is appropriate for your classroom. Students should take notes as they explore the website based on the questions below. After students have completed their note-taking, lead a class discussion in which they analyze Julia Watts Belser’s goals for the Public Archive and how those goals are reflected in the design and format of the website itself.

• Why was this Public Archive created? What are (the Public Archive creator) Julia Watts Belser’s goals?
• Belser writes: “In building the archive, we strive to ensure access at every step of the process.” Can you find examples of how this goal of accessibility is part of the organization of the webpage itself? 
  • Students might focus on features like font, navigability, plain language, or translation.
• Who did Belser interview and why? What kinds of experiences did Belser want to “put at the center” of this archive?

2. Wheelchairs in Wild Spaces: Share with students the URL for Yomi Sachiko Wrong’s short essay in Orion called “At the Gate.” In the essay, Wrong reflects on her experience as a Black wheelchair-user navigating the physical and social obstacles around accessing parks in Oakland, California. Instruct students to write another journal entry reflecting on what they read and answering one or more of the following questions:

• Who is nature for? How have ideas and policies throughout history “protected” nature for some people and not others? 
• What does “being in nature” look like? What counts as “nature” (and what does not)? How can “nature” be thought about more inclusively? 
• How do people experience nature differently because they have different kinds of bodies or minds? 
• How do your abilities or disabilities shape how you relate to nature? How can we value this diversity?

Special thanks to Max Chervin Bridge for their work in developing this lesson.

Banner images: (Clockwise from left) Satellite imagery of Hurricane Maria (2017), Wikicommons, Public Domain; Person using a wheelchair being prepared for evacuation following Hurricane Maria (2017), U.S. Virgin Islands, U.S. Navy via Flickr, CC by 2.0; Aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017), Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Skerrit via Flickr, Public Domain.