Reflecting on 2024
By Sarah Bell
I can’t quite believe that we have reached the end of 2024 already. It has been a busy time for the project, within a year of many distressing and challenging global events.
In the spirit of trying to bring some threads of hope (however small) that there are people coming together to reimagine alternative ways of living and being together in the world, we thought we’d take some time to reflect on and share some of our 2024 Sensing Climate activities here.
Disability & Climate: In Conversation With…
This year, we have enjoyed five ‘Disability and Climate: In Conversation With’ events with the brilliant Polly Atkin, Julia Watts Belser, Áine Kelly Costello, Mary Keogh, Mahbub Kabir, Gordon Rattray, and Gregor Wolbring.
Across these sessions, we have covered topics ranging from the ways in which disabled people are placed in vulnerable situations through not being valued, included or considered in responses to the climate crisis, through to the importance of working collaboratively and in solidarity across disability, climate and other movements calling for change.
You can tune into the videos and transcripts of those sessions via the Sensing Climate ‘Events’ page, and hear about upcoming speakers for the series in 2025.
Crip up Climate Conversations
Stories have powerful effects on how we understand the world. They may echo existing stereotypes and expectations of how people live – or ‘should’ live – in the world. Alternatively, they can be used to resist these; to reimagine difference and expand whose lives, and ways of living, are valued and respected. As we discussed in a news piece and paper this year, the single story of ‘disability as vulnerability’ flattens a rich diversity of disability knowledge and experience, and closes down opportunities to imagine climate-resilient and inclusive worlds.
So project researcher, Andy Shipley, and I have been working with Áine Kelly Costello and project advisor, Dr Emma Geen, to create some new guidance called ‘Crip Up Climate Conversations’. In the guidance, we share new stories of climate and disability and new ways of understanding disabled people in the context of the climate crisis. We also highlight opportunities to initiate respectful conversations about disability and the climate crisis without polarising or marginalising people; conversations that need to happen to inform transformative, collective climate action that genuinely leaves no one behind.
Drafts are currently under review and we hope to be able to share the guidance next year, including plain English and Easy Read translations.
Disability and Climate in Bristol
This year, our fieldwork has been focused in our first case study city, Bristol. We have loved meeting so many people and hearing people’s messages about what needs to change to ensure that responses to the climate crisis build a fairer Bristol in ways that embed the knowledge and priorities of people who are disabled, neurodivergent, d/Deaf and people with long-term health conditions. We have interviewed 20 people, facilitated ten creative writing workshops and co-created the first Sensing Climate mural, on the wall of Easton Community Centre.
You can tune into a short film about the mural and read more about its messages in an earlier news piece. It was great to be able to screen the film at the University of Exeter on the International Day of Disabled People. Project researcher, Dr Rebecca Yeo, has also shared the key messages at events through this year, including in a session called ‘Resisting Eco-ableism’ at the Leeds Disability Studies conference, at an event called ‘Disability, the climate crisis and capitalism’ at the University of Kassel, and at the Independent Social Research Foundation conference on ‘Migration and Democracy in a Time of Climate Crisis’.
We are currently analysing the interviews and creative writing workshop discussions. We will be producing a booklet with creative writing lead, Dr Tanvir Bush, to share the thought-provoking pieces that people have developed through the creative writing workshops in the new year.
In parallel with this work, Andy and I have been working with project researcher, Dr Alice Venn, to analyse a range of Bristol’s climate and climate-related policies. Through the analysis, we are trying to understand how, if at all, disabled people have been considered within these policies, had opportunities to shape them, and how disabled people might be affected by their implementation. We have just started some interviews to understand how these policies have come about, been implemented and opportunities for disability-inclusive approaches to climate decision-making in Bristol. We will be complementing these with key informant interviews at the national level in the new year to build on our ongoing analysis of national climate policy.
Bringing some of this work together, we were excited to co-organise our first ‘Disability and Climate’ roundtable event with Emma Geen and Bristol Climate and Nature Partnership at We The Curious in Bristol in September. Emma has written a great news piece that captures key discussions from the event, and we will be organising our second one in May next year.
We were invited to speak at the ‘Climate, Health and the Law’ symposium in October organised by Bristol Law School, and the ‘Transforming Bristol Together’ event in November. The latter was organised by Bristol Climate and Nature Partnership to reflect on Bristol’s progress since declaring a climate emergency in 2019 and key priorities for working towards a just transition. At the event, Inclusive Transport Officer, Florence Grieve, performed a moving poem, called ‘A Window on Bristol’, that reflected many of the themes around disability and climate that we have been discussing this year.
In coming months, we will be analysing all this work to produce a summary of the Bristol case study findings so watch this space for that!
We would also like to give a big shout out to team member, Tanvi, whose brilliant work as a Grassroots Community Activist was recognised this year in the Shaw Trust Disability Power 100 list! You can read more about Tanvi’s wide ranging contributions to disability advocacy via a blog post online.
A Change in the Climate
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we are also really excited to be working with creative arts organisation, Roaring Girl Productions (RGP), to encourage diverse audiences to think with, relate to and become involved with the questions raised across the Sensing Climate project. RGP and lead artist Liz Crow have been developing their creative response in a new project, called 'A Change in the Climate'. Through a series of small-scale performance actions, Liz will be exploring a range of themes relating to climate change and disability. Working in a range of natural landscapes with natural materials, these actions will be captured through high quality still images and video and complemented by associated writings. You can find out a little more about the first two performance actions online, with more news to follow!
Writing and Reflecting
Although it’s been a busy year, we have tried to capture some of our thoughts in writing along the way. We were excited to have our first paper published in the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. The paper is called ‘Beyond the single story of climate vulnerability: centring disabled people and their knowledges in ‘care-full’ climate action’. We have reflected on some of the key ideas within the paper in a few of this year’s news pieces, including an introduction to eco-ableism, the importance of thinking carefully about how the vulnerability of disabled people is framed in relation to the climate crisis, and the value of working in crip time to nurture solidarity in the face of crisis rather than panic.
Building on these ideas, we have drafted a book chapter for a book that is in progress, called ‘Lived Experience: Critical Perspectives in a Changing World’. Our chapter shares new stories of disability and climate crisis. It foregrounds opportunities for climate responses to build an inclusive habitable world, while also recognising the risks of asking people to imagine alternative futures when already struggling to survive debilitating societal conditions in the present.
We were also invited to take part in a workshop on ‘resilience and transformative adaptation’, organised by Sensing Climate project advisor, Dr Tara Quinn, at Maynooth University in March. It was a really interesting workshop and a great introduction to the Irish policy context. We are now contributing to a reflective piece sparked by the workshop around care and climate change resilience.
Throughout the year, we have been drafting work-in-progress summaries of our ongoing policy analysis work. We have used those to respond to various consultations including, for example, the draft Scottish National Adaptation Plan 3 consultation, the Irish National Adaptation Framework consultation, and the UK government’s proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework consultation.
We’ve really enjoyed reading insights shared by many others in this area too; from brilliant books including Sunaura Taylor’s ‘Disabled Ecologies’, Naomi Ortiz’s ‘Rituals for Climate Change, A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice’, and Tatiana Konrad’s ‘Disability, the Environment and Colonialism’, to new interviews in the ‘Disability and Climate Change Public Archive’. We have been delighted to re-share some fab news pieces here too, such as a piece by Glen Hoos on the overlap between the needs of people with Down syndrome and urgently needed climate solutions that will contribute to a better world for all.
Training, Education and Resources
A range of useful resources have been developed this year; from the new Easy Read version of the ‘Protest for All’ guide, to learnings from Nifty Sustainability’s ‘Eco-hope and Neurodivergence’ project, Collaborating 4 Inclusion’s ‘Disability Inclusive Emergency Management Toolkit’, and a forthcoming Disability-Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction (DiDRR) e-Learning Course developed by CBM Global in collaboration with the Africa Disability Forum and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). A series of important reports have also been published by the Disability Inclusive Climate Action Research Program, including a new report raising concerns that disabled people are about to be excluded from the New Plastics Treaty.
We piloted a new MSc module this year on ‘Disability, social justice and climate resilient development’ as part of our MSc in Environment and Human Health, in collaboration with excellent colleagues internationally – Professor Siri Eriksen and Professor Ruth Kjærsti Raanaas at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Oslo, Norway, and Professor David Mfitumukiza at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. We are in the process of refining it for the new year and are looking forward to its next iteration!
The Year Ahead
We have lots of activities planned for 2025. In addition to the Bristol-focused and national-level policy activities noted above, we will be starting our Glasgow fieldwork in the Spring in collaboration with Inclusion Scotland, Glasgow Disability Alliance and the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland. These activities will include themed ‘cuppa & chat’ events, interviews, creative writing workshops, mural co-creation, policy analysis and roundtable events.
We’re in the process of setting up an additional case study in Aotearoa, New Zealand, with the brilliant Áine Kelly Costello and Dr Raven Cretney, so watch this space for more news about that.
We’ll be continuing our ‘Disability and Climate: In Conversation With’ series, with excellent speakers lined up for 2025, including Abhishek Kumar, Dan White, Angela Frederick, Raven Cretney, Louise Kenward and Nic Cook.
We’ll be writing another book chapter, this time for a forthcoming book on ‘Disability and the Making of Place’, as well as presenting some of the work so far (online and/or in person) at conferences such as the ‘Housing, Health and Extreme Events’ conference, the ‘Association of American Geographers’ conference Disability Specialty Group keynote, and hopefully the ‘Nordic Network on Disability Research’ conference and ‘Adapt Futures 2025’.
Your news and stories
Through the year, we’ll continue to use these news pages to keep everyone updated. These pages are an open space, both for project-related news and for anyone who would like to share their activities around disability and the climate crisis – individuals, practitioners, artists, researchers or other organisations working in this area. So if you would like to share, we would love to hear from you – do email Sarah at Sarah.Bell@exeter.ac.uk.