Parallel Session C 14.50

Dr Sarah Bell and Andy Shipley

University of Exeter

The climate crisis poses major risks to human life and livelihoods, in ways that are compounding and creating new forms of social inequality. Disabled people – including 16% of the global population and 24% of the UK population – are particularly at risk of adverse climate impacts. Indeed, disabled people are 2-4 times more likely to die or be injured in heatwaves, hurricanes and floods. In part, such risks are due to the damaging impacts of extreme weather events and air pollution on existing health conditions. However, they are 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.

In this paper, we draw on an in-depth documentary analysis of UK housing policy –alongside ongoing semi-structured interviews with disabled people living in the case study area of Bristol, UK– to explore how responses to the climate crisis could help to build fairer communities that take into account the priorities and insights of disabled people. We focus on emerging findings specifically of relevance to the housing sector, and signpost key areas for future work in this field.

Housing quality has important implications for the health impacts of – and people’s adaptive capacity in response to – climate change, particularly in the UK where people spend approximately 90% of time indoors. Housing needs to be accessible, flood resilient, and at a level of thermal comfort that does not create new health issues for residents. The housing sector is already creating challenges for many disabled people, with a shortage of accessible homes, high rates of disrepair, exposure to indoor air pollutants and damp, and low energy efficiency. According to research by Scope, disabled people are more than twice as likely as non-disabled people to live in a cold house, in the face of rising energy costs and energy inefficient homes.

Efforts to decarbonise the housing stock (existing and new homes), and to embed resilience to flood risks and overheating, could be an opportunity to address some of these issues; but only if considered in concert with accessibility measures and with resource made available to make such changes – either to individuals directly or through social housing providers and private landlords. We call for greater collaboration with disabled people’s organisations to identify the homes of disabled people whose health is at risk from extreme temperatures (cold or heat-related) or flooding to prioritise access to energy efficient, decarbonised and climate resilient homes. We also suggest value in mapping the distribution of accessible housing within spatial zones at particular risk of adverse climate impacts, as well as the availability of accessible housing in proposed relocation areas where necessary.

About the presenters

Dr Sarah Bell is a Senior Lecturer in health and disability geography at the University of Exeter, who is currently working on ‘Sensing Climate’; a five-year UKRI-funded project that aims to understand how the climate crisis – and prominent societal responses to it – is shaping the everyday lives and adaptive capacities of disabled people (www.sensing-climate.com). Sarah’s work is underpinned by a passion for qualitative methodological development, designing sensitive approaches that promote critical awareness of alternative ways of embodying, experiencing and interpreting diverse everyday geographies.