Disability & climate roundtable
By Emma Geen
In September, Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership and Sensing Climate ran a roundtable on climate and disability at We The Curious in Bristol. The event brought together representatives from key disability, climate, and nature organisations as well as the local councils and national government to explore the barriers to taking action on disability and climate change.
The areas explored were nature and food, transport, care, energy and housing, and jobs and training. The conversations explored the inclusion of Disabled people in work on just transition (making the changes to limit the impact of climate change in a fair way) and just resilience (making the changes to keep everyone safe and well in a fair way as climate change gets worse). Attendees listened and contributed thoughtfully throughout and came up with useful ideas.
“Being a part of the workshop was valuable and enjoyable. The breadth of participants showed the importance of creating networks across local and national stakeholders to work towards a shared vision. We gained valuable insights relevant to ensuring greater inclusion in climate action at national level”
Chiara Bleckenwegner, UK Government’s Disability Unit.
Councillor Ed Plowden, Chair of Bristol City Council’s Transport and Connectivity Committee, said:
“I was delighted to attend the roundtable and hear from participants with a variety of needs about their lived experiences of transport in Bristol. It has led to setting up a Disabled People Strategic Transport Advisory Group to make sure we are proactively listening to Disabled people and doing our utmost to respond to their needs. I was pleased to announce this new arrangement at the Full Council meeting in October, when a motion about how to make Bristol a much more accessible city was passed unanimously. If we can improve the situation for Disabled people, that helps us to get it right for everyone”
Key themes that came through the conversations were:
An understanding that disability inclusion in climate change work is not as well understood as work to include other disadvantaged communities. Solving this will take education of key people with power to make change, such as funders and politicians. It also needs resource and care to ensure Disabled people are included in conversations and planning on climate change.
Bringing the community of Disabled people in would be helped by using the strong community networks already in place. There is a need for clear ways for Disabled people to hear about how they can get involved, and for these to be rewarding for people to take part in. There needs to be more coproduction on all areas of climate change work, where Disabled people would have equal power to be part of making plans.
Many of the group discussions also explored how Disabled people need to be better represented in positions of power. This includes more Disabled people having the opportunity to act as MPs and councillors, as well as sitting on all relevant boards to feed in from the beginning. Both the Disabled people and politicians present recognised that often only people with lived experience of being Disabled can see possible problems and ways to fix them. The range of Disabled people involved also needs to be wider to better represent all the different types of Disabled people in the community.
There was also wide agreement that more needs to be done to make sure the policies and processes already in place have impact. For example, all public sector organisations should be doing more to keep to their legal responsibility under the public sector equality duty. Equality Impact Assessments, the process used to make sure projects don’t have an unfair impact, often aren’t working. There is a need for them to be given more attention, be done at the right time, involve the right people and be used to prevent negative impacts on disadvantaged communities rather than becoming tick box exercises.
There was also an acknowledgement that though Bristol has done important work to include Disabled people in work on changes being made to the city because of climate change, more work needs to be done to ensure Disabled people are safe in disasters.
Many other useful ideas came through the conversations. The event also sparked new connections that will be the start of more important work in the area.
A second climate and disability roundtable will be run towards the end of 2025 to continue the conversation.
This piece was originally published by Bristol and Nature Climate Partnership: https://bristolclimatenature.org/news/roundtable-exploring-disability-inclusion-in-climate-change-work/