During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen the disastrous effects of systemic neglect of disabled people.
We are overwhelmingly overrepresented in Covid-19 deaths, yet many countries have engaged in discriminatory medical triage protocols that treat disabled lives as acceptable losses. This clearly devalues our lives, as does many countries’ premature return to « normal » (including the hosting of this COP), well before it was safe for disabled and immuno-compromised people.
Climate breakdown, like Covid-19, compounds existing inequities, disproportionately harming the one billion disabled people on the planet. This is especially true for our disabled communities who are multiply marginalised, and live on the frontlines of both climate change and eco-ableism.
Many disabled people are still imprisoned in institutions, including the 12 residents of an assisted living facility, who were among the victims of the flash flooding in the Ahrweiler district of Western Germany as recently as July 2021. This is one of many instances demonstrating that when disasters hit, disabled people are literally left behind.
Those of us who are also Indigenous understand first-hand how the colonial and extractive drivers of climate breakdown have stolen and damaged our lands, undermined our cultural practices, and left our communities behind across almost every societal development indicator.
Disabled people are adaptable, resourceful and resilient out of necessity.
Our lived experience equips us well to respond to complex problems in our daily lives and in our communities, as we have seen through the disabled leadership during the ongoing pandemic.
We and our representative organisations have spent decades calling for our human rights to be upheld in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, with our movements paving the way to much progress that the rest of society takes for granted (See: Curb cuts, remote working, universal design).
We know how to ensure our communities are not only included, but that our whole society thrives.
Despite this, disabled communities have been consistently left behind in the inaccessibility and exclusivity of a COP where we can barely get in the front door, let alone into negotiation rooms, and where we are conspicuously absent from the substance of the negotiations.
While persons with disabilities are noted in the Paris Agreement preamble as a marginalised group who bear disproportionate climate impacts, such recognition does not go far enough to uphold our rights. 181 Parties have committed to upholding disability rights by signing the UNCRPD, yet many seem to use human rights language in Article 6 as a political football amidst ever-moving goal posts. We are disheartened that in this landscape, a reference to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is not even a consideration.
So how can we ensure justice for disabled people at COP26?
- Parties must include human rights in Article 6. This should include specific reference to the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- Article 6 must establish an independent grievance mechanism
- Persons with Disabilities must be specifically recognised in ACE
- Persons with Disability must be eligible to receive all forms of climate finance directly to our community and representative organisations so finance reaches disabled people on the ground
- Parties should reference Rights of Persons with Disabilities in their NDCs, and be required to report on how their contributions uphold our rights under the UNCRPD
To echo the words of UNSG Special Envoy on Disability & Accessibility, María Soledad Cisternas Reyes, our disability rights movements have rallied around the call “Nothing About Us Without Us” for decades. We know that climate change is about us, so it must be “Nothing about climate change, without Persons with Disabilities.”