The climate crisis is affecting everyday life. It’s asking many of us – human and otherwise – to cope in the face of more frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Worries around life and loss in an unpredictable climate are growing, shifting our sense of home and how we live in our communities.

Disabled people make up 16% of the global population and are particularly at risk of climate disruption. In part, this is due to the damaging impacts of extreme weather events and air pollution on existing health conditions. However, it is also due to eco-ableism. That is, the failure to include disabled people in climate action or to recognise that some of the actions promoted to address the climate emergency are creating new challenges for disabled people.

With disability comes a need for adaptability and creativity in navigating and building relationships within an uncertain world. These skills – and the collective experience of mobilising for societal change – are still largely overlooked within dominant climate responses.

Sensing Climate aims to place these skills at the heart of strategies to navigate the climate crisis: for countering the burnout of people and planet, for building adaptive capacity, and reconfiguring a sense of home in increasingly unfamiliar, fragile landscapes.

In ‘Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility’, Roshi Joan Halifax writes:

“The nature of this crisis goes to the very core of how we live as social beings, how we live as moral and caring beings, and how we meet fear, how we meet loss, and how we meet grief. And as well, in how we open to hope, and how we open to wonder”.

Sensing Climate seeks to create safe, enabling and care-full spaces to support human exchange and connection in this area.

We are bringing people together to explore opportunities to make life better and more socially inclusive through our responses to the climate crisis, rather than deepening or creating new forms of inequality and injustice.

The project has three broad strands of activity, focusing on:

EXPERIENCES AND ADAPTIVE RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE

We will be working with participants in three urban centres to understand how people with varied histories and experiences of disability are adapting to the climate crisis.Cities are important sites of innovation and change, and our case study sites will be Dublin in Ireland, and Glasgow and Bristol in the UK.

In each location people can share their stories in several ways: by taking part in interviews with researchers, joining creative writing sessions, or working with the research team and an artist to create a community mural.

For those who do not live in one of our focus cities, we’ve also launched a series of online conversations focused on disability and climate.

RIGHTS

We will be analysing how disability and climate have been considered in both policy and law, hoping to identify areas for positive change.

People often suggest that we need to respond to climate disruption as individuals – to use the car less, to cycle more, or eat less meat. These actions can be important, but also instil guilt when people cannot make such changes. Moving beyond a focus on individual change, there is a need for political and socio-economic changes that address the deeper causes of the climate crisis and its uneven effects across different people and places.

We will be analysing key policy and legal documents, and speaking to a number of climate and disability decision-makers to explore how disabled people can contribute to climate law and policy frameworks.

INFORMING CHANGE

We aim to understand how to create disability-inclusive cities as part of wider efforts to ensure cities are climate resilient. Through a series of events that create a range of different listening and sharing spaces, we hope to place the rights, knowledge and experiences of disabled people at the forefront of climate adaptation research, policy and practice.

Our work will identify the processes that marginalise disabled people from climate adaptation, and counter these trends by including disabled people and their experiences in conversations that place their skills and needs at the heart of new practices.

You can read more about the project activities and the team behind it online: www.sensing-climate.com

The project is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee from July 2023 – June 2028 and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Geography from July 2023 – July 2026.