Disability, Climate Adaptation and What Inclusive Design Actually Requires
When a flood warning goes out, who does not receive it?
When an evacuation route is designated, who cannot use it?
When a cooling center opens during extreme heat, who cannot get there?
When an adaptation program is designed, whose needs were never in the room?
More than a billion people globally live with some form of disability. Yet climate adaptation and disability inclusion are still too often treated as separate conversations.
The consequences become particularly visible during emergencies.
An early warning system may work perfectly and still fail someone who cannot hear its alarm. Digital climate information may contain exactly the right advice while remaining inaccessible to someone using a screen reader. An evacuation plan may look comprehensive until someone using a wheelchair tries to follow it.
And when floods, storms, heat, or other climate shocks disrupt health services, transport, electricity, medication supply, assistive technology, or care networks, people who depend on those systems can face additional risks.
These are not inevitable consequences of disability.
They are often consequences of design.
That distinction matters because it changes the question.
Instead of asking how people with disabilities can be accommodated within climate programs that already exist, what if accessibility were one of the requirements around which those programs were designed from the beginning?
What would an early warning system look like if Deaf and blind people helped design it?
What would an evacuation plan look like if wheelchair users tested it?
What would climate-resilient health, education, early childhood development, and rehabilitation systems look like if continuity for people with disabilities were considered essential rather than peripheral?
And what would climate finance look like if accessibility were part of how investments were assessed from the start?
Disability organizations have spent decades building expertise around inclusive design, assistive technologies, accessible services, rights, participation, and community-based support.
Climate practitioners have expertise in adaptation, resilience, disaster preparedness, infrastructure, and climate finance.
These communities need to be in the same room.
Not because climate practitioners need to learn about people with disabilities.
Because people with disabilities and disability organizations hold expertise that climate resilience needs.
Discussion Group Leaders
- Azima Dhanjee is CEO/Co-founder at ConnectHear, advancing accessible technology and disability inclusion through sign language AI solutions that reduce communication barriers for Deaf communities.
- Katrina Virta is International Director of Impact & External Relations at Light for the World, advancing disability inclusion through strategic partnerships, external engagement, and approaches that strengthen impact globally.
- Stephen Ikonya is Director of Programs at The Action Foundation, advancing disability-inclusive health, education, and systems change for children and young people.
Next Steps
What to expect
A cross-disciplinary working conversation connecting disability rights and inclusion with climate adaptation, emergency preparedness, health, education, rehabilitation, technology, and finance.
Participants will examine concrete points where climate systems can exclude people, from early warning and evacuation to digital information and continuity of essential services, and ask how those systems could be designed differently.
People with disabilities will be part of the conversation as practitioners, leaders, designers, and experts, not subjects being discussed by others.
The aim is to move beyond the instruction to “be more inclusive” and toward the much more useful question: what would we actually design differently?
Who this is for
This session is for climate and adaptation practitioners, disability rights advocates, inclusive education and ECD specialists, rehabilitation and health professionals, development financiers, assistive technology innovators, policymakers, community leaders, and people working on climate or development who want to examine whether the systems they are building genuinely work for everyone.
What you will get out of it
- A clearer understanding of how disability, climate hazards, infrastructure, poverty, health, and access can interact to create additional vulnerability
- Practical perspectives on designing accessible early warning, emergency communication, evacuation, and climate information systems
- Insights into how health, rehabilitation, education, ECD, and assistive technology connect to climate resilience
- A framework for treating accessibility as a design and financing requirement rather than an accommodation added afterward
- A stronger understanding of why people with disabilities need to hold decision-making and design roles in climate adaptation, not simply be consulted once solutions have already been developed