Environmental Justice
is Disability Justice.
CLIMATE FUTURES
Understanding the Intersection.
Climate change, environmental injustice, and ecological disruption do not affect all communities equally. Disabled people, Black and Indigenous communities, immigrants, low-income households, and others who have historically been excluded from decision-making often face the greatest risks while receiving the fewest resources.
This toolkit brings together frameworks, tools, research, and practical guidance for advancing disability-inclusive climate resilience, designed for advocates, planners, policymakers, researchers, community organizations, and anyone working toward a more just and accessible future.
Despite comprising the world's largest minority group, people with disabilities are often excluded from decision-making, resulting in disproportionate impacts from extreme conditions.
Yet, by assessing climate conditions through disability frameworks, challenges that were more obscure are better understood. This offers new opportunities for emergency preparedness, response, and climate adaptation that leads to meaningful and sustained resilience.
Why Definitions Matter.
Disability is often discussed in climate and environmental justice work as though it were a fixed category of people: a population that is vulnerable to disasters, extreme heat, pollution, flooding, or other environmental harms.
But how we define disability fundamentally shapes what problems we see and what solutions we pursue.
Different models of disability locate the source of the problem in different places; as a result, they produce different interventions.
A Climate Justice Continuum
What does disability justice add to climate justice?
Many environmental justice frameworks emphasize recognition, participation, and a distribution of benefits and burdens. The interconnected principles of disability justice, together with analytical lenses like the Ecological Models of Disability, expand action on environmental and climate issues towards collective flourishing.
This Continuum encourages process reflections on how climate justice can be more intentional, responsive, and inclusive of the dynamic issues that people with disabilities face.
RECOGNITION
Whose experiences are acknowledged?
ACCESS
Can people participate and survive?
POWER
Who makes decisions and can implement them?
REPAIR
How are harms addressed and acted upon?
FLOURISH
What conditions allow communities to thrive?
In April 2026, CRDJ joined colleagues at NYU's School of Law's Environmental & Climate Justice Initiative, the Institute for Policy Integrity, and the National Disability Rights Network to co-organize a convening exploring the intersection of disability justice and environmental and climate justice. Bringing together advocates, researchers, attorneys, policymakers, students, organizers, and community leaders from across the country, the convening focused on a central question:
What responsibilities emerge when people with disabilities are meaningfully included in environmental and climate decision-making?
The day's discussions moved beyond treating disability as a narrow category of vulnerability. Instead, participants explored how disability can serve as a lens for understanding broader questions of environmental risk, public health, infrastructure, emergency management, governance, and community resilience. Throughout the convening, speakers emphasized that disabled people are often among those most affected by extreme heat, flooding, pollution, power outages, disasters, and displacement, yet their experiences and expertise remain largely absent from environmental and climate policy conversations.
