By Rafaello Adler-Abramo
Incorporating disability issues into general resilience planning is not only a life-saving necessity, but also a timely opportunity for broader disability inclusion.
Resilience planning is currently expanding and often well-funded. It is expected to vary by locale and populations, so differing needs are assumed. Additionally, much resilience planning is being developed de novo, possibly allowing easier incorporation of disability needs in primary planning, rather than being relegated to “special needs” addenda. This strategy may represent a plausible on-ramp for mainstream incorporation of Disability needs and knowledge.
Recently, I successfully advocated for the incorporation of persons with disabilities’ (PWD) needs into a Massachusetts state-facilitated municipal resilience planning program, in time for their five-year update. While planners’ guidance previously urged attention to needs of numerous groups identified as experiencing heightened vulnerability, PWDs’ specific needs had not yet been included.
The goal of resilience planning — to ameliorate harm to life and property due to climate change — cannot be achieved unless it addresses the needs of PWDs as members of the public, in both Rapid-Onset emergencies (e.g., floods) and Slow-Onset disasters (e.g., rising temperatures). Fulfilling the resilience mandate requires identification of specific vulnerabilities and functional limits that may affect access in emergencies.
What might explain why PWDs’ needs were not previously incorporated in this program’s first years of resilience planning? While explicit exclusion may not be occurring, the absence of disability-informed planning has the same functional result: preventing equal access to emergency communications, evacuation vehicles and routes, shelters, or continuity of care is life-threatening.
This program had done customized outreach to many vulnerable groups at heightened risk from climate change, called “Environmental Justice (EJ) Communities”. PWDs were not included at that stage, possibly because of insufficient understanding of intersectionality between Disability and other vulnerabilities. To serve such dually-vulnerable individuals, they must be recognized simultaneously as members of other disenfranchised communities and also as people with disabilities.
A possible additional cause of PWD omission is that EJ Communities are generally identified by mapping, an otherwise valuable tool well suited to identifying geolocal communities (e.g., heat islands in poverty areas), but not appropriate for identifying individual PWDs who are geographically diffuse. To avoid this omission in the future, I suggest either to consider PWDs as an EJ community, or to use a different primary criterion for defining groups with heightened vulnerability to climate change.
My intervention began with gathering evidence of disability-specific needs that were not yet addressed in state resilience planning and collecting PWD-developed resilience resources. Next, I identified an entity charged with state-wide responsibility to provide technical support and planning funds to all municipalities: the Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) grant program, which “provides support for communities in Massachusetts to identify climate hazards, assess vulnerabilities, and develop action plans to improve resilience to climate change.”
I shared the following assertions and evidence with an official from the MVP program, who proved amenable to considering these issues. In contrast to the guidance for identifying community vulnerabilities which was in place when I first contacted the program, their recently released Phase 2 update (“MVP 2.0”) explicitly identifies PWDs as having specific vulnerabilities which should be considered in resilience planning.
Disability-inclusive planning is within the purview of climate resilience planning:
By framing the lack of explicit inclusion as tantamount to exclusion, I conveyed the message that not including PWD needs would have been equivalent to denying equal access. Highlighting intersectionality reframed finite resource allocation away from either/or to both/and.
Inaction by planners can directly result in injury and death
People with disabilities comprise up to 27% of the population, and experience increased morbidity and mortality compared to the general population. In the realm of resilience planning, this excess harm is preventable, as it is not due to biological vulnerability, but instead to insufficient planning that ignores existing, disability-inclusive disaster planning recommendations.
PWD inclusion in planning materials provided to municipalities is feasible without additional staffing, as many resources have already been developed by PWDs
Numerous disability-inclusive resources have already been developed within the context of disaster planning, including protocols, guidance, training, communications and simulations. Providing these materials early in the process may have helped avert any misperception that numerous procedures would have to be developed de novo, and also ensured protocols would be PWD-developed.
Making emergency resources accessible to PWDs makes them accessible to others with functional limits who don’t identify as disabled.
To facilitate buy-in from other decision makers and constituents, I provided information about positive ripple effects of inclusive resilience planning beyond PWDs. For example, communication methods accessible to those with severely impaired hearing or sight are more accessible to the elderly, and to people who lose eyeglasses or hearing aids in emergencies. Similarly, evacuation vehicles and shelters accessible to wheelchair users are also accessible to people with sports injuries and those whose mobility depends on continued functioning of elevators and electricity.
Subsequent to my intervention, newly-inclusive PWD presence was evident in two of the MVP program’s established formats for public input: community outreach webinars about climate impacts faced by specific marginalized groups and the general public, and its Equity Council. One webinar explicitly sought PWD input. A long-time disability activist participated and was encouraged to speak at length. Disability representation also came to the Equity Council, whose membership previously had been finalized without any PWD members. Following this intervention, Council membership was expanded to include a PWD position, which was offered to, and accepted by, the activist who had spoken in the webinar. These developments suggest the successful incorporation of climate resilience disability needs in guidance to municipalities, albeit at an initial level. This success offers hope for resilience planning as an entry point to Disability inclusion. Full inclusion, however, will require sustained effort.
Rafaello Adler-Abramo is a recent graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
