Want to tell stories at the intersection of climate change and disability justice? Here's what you need to know
Tips by Aine Kelly-Costello, ideas for your next story, data and resources on climate change and disability justice
Welcome, new subscribers! I’m Priti Salian, an independent Indian journalist, researcher, trainer, and the creator of this newsletter. Thanks for writing in with your lovely messages on Reframing Disability’s first birthday! I appreciate your warmth and love and hope to continue bringing our community together with this newsletter.
Earlier this month, I was at the Splice Beta media gathering in Chiang Mai, to conduct a workshop on disability inclusion in social media.
Splice Beta ensures diversity, inclusion and access is integrated into the event. This year there were nearly 66% first-time attendees, with over 53% of speakers identifying as women, and a Splice Pay It Forward Fund. Giving disability inclusion a seat at the table was another significant step by the hosts towards inclusivity.
What makes Splice Beta resonate so deeply with me is that it’s a unique gathering for media professionals across Asia. Attendees arrive with the genuine intention of building friendships, leaving egos behind, and eagerly coming forward to say hello, and connect. Amidst all the warmth, smiles, and hugs, people end up forging lifelong friendships - just as I did.
The participants in Chiang Mai told me that they found my workshop “eye opening” and took away simple, actionable tips for their day-to-day posting on platforms. Thank you to all for taking this much-needed step towards accessibility.
Reach out if you’re interested in workshops and sessions on disability inclusion. And as promised, Reframing Disability will be conducting its first webinar this month. It’s free to join! To participate, write to me for the link at pritisalian[at] gmail[dot]com or hit reply.
Date: Tuesday, 26th November, 4 pm to 5 pm Indian Standard Time (UTC + 5:30/ GMT + 5:30).
Topic: Disability Activism On Social Media with Puneet Singh Singhal and Virali Modi. Both Virali and Puneet have a legion of followers who actively engage with their posts. They will tell us about their strategies, process, tips for engagement, monetisation and overall success on social media. So, if you use social media for activism, or just want to elevate your social media skills, this webinar is for you.
If you can, I would be grateful for your support of Reframing Disability’s mission on a pay-as-you-can basis. It will help me devote time to the newsletter and hire writers to contribute. Donate a custom amount from anywhere in the world, one-off or on a monthly/annual basis. Write to me at pritisalian[at] gmail[dot]com or hit reply for UPI or bank details.
Image description: Áine stands smiling outdoors on a house balcony, their short brown hair blowing in the summer breeze. They are a white non-binary femme wearing a blue V-neck T-shirt with a white pattern. Suburban treetops dominate the background, with Auckland's skyline visible in the distance.
Áine Kelly-Costello is a proudly disabled storyteller, researcher, and advocate based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Aine is a friend of Reframing Disability and very generous in sharing their knowledge, so it’s always a pleasure having a conversation with them.
Everyone’s eyes are on the 29th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) so I spoke to Aine about what reporters and storytellers could do for disability inclusive climate coverage.
For COP29, Aine suggests that reporters ask disabled attendees about their experience with the newly integrated accessibility features.
Recently, Narmin Jarchalova, COP29’s chief operating officer mentioned that dedicated lanes for disabled people in public screening areas, areas for wheelchair maintenance service and charging points, sunflower lanyards for people with hidden disabilities who need extra support, and a quiet room for people with sensory processing problems are available at the event.
Sign language interpretation is being introduced for the first time at a COP conference, though it’s surprising that it wasn’t done earlier. For attendees with a visual impairment, tactile maps at some entrances, as well as contrast colours on door frames are available. For individuals with hearing and speech loss there is an audio induction system.
And what would they consider progress for disability inclusive climate action at the conference?
“If there are any international aid or reparations funding tagged as being for people with disabilities and importantly able to be managed by OPDs as close to the grassroots as possible,” Aine said.
Read on for the rest of the excerpts from their interview:
What should journalists know before taking the plunge into climate and disability coverage?
For journalists who have experience on environment and climate:
From a disability perspective, it's really important to recognise that their stories should be grounded in climate justice. So, systemically recognising the root causes of climate breakdown are actually the things that need to be uprooted to make life better for disabled people as well. Interrupting the extractivist, capitalist ways of working that put profit before people and planet, means looking to indigenous people, disabled people, and all those most marginalised for how we collectively need to live differently.
A lot of climate journalism can sometimes tend towards stories that are like, “what can you do in your own life right now?” and they can become very consumerist and individualist. Some of those stories really don't serve the disability community. One of the most prominent examples in the waste reduction spaces, is of doing away with plastic straws. But it’s important to recognise that some disabled people need plastic straws because there are no other alternatives that are working for them. Another example is when we talk about [cleaner means of transport ] like using bikes and public transport. Not all disabled people can do that due to inaccessibility and other barriers. So, not generalising about exactly how we all ought to change our lifestyles is important.
In the environmental and climate space, we talk about a subset of ableism called "eco-ableism". These are examples of how eco-ableism can be perpetuated, however unintentionally.
Another important thing is not homogenising the community because disability is so vast. So, the experience of someone who has paraplegia and is in a wheelchair and the experience of someone with a learning disability are totally different. And people with the same disability can also have very different experiences.
For journalists who are familiar with disability, but have never done climate reporting before:
The resource guide I've been compiling for Disability Debrief should be useful. It strongly profiles disabled voices. It includes a selection of articles for understanding disability and climate justice, including focuses like climate activism, education, adaptation, disasters, etc. I also wrote a piece about trying to get my own head around the disability/climate intersections at a really broad level.
I’ve seen stories on climate change during heat waves. But it would be good to cover the ongoing precarity that some people live in because of accumulating and intolerable levels of heat. As one example, I tried to do that here for Disability Debrief.
Reporters should also think about if [interviewing someone right after a disaster] is the best time. Maybe not - not always, anyway. But looking at how it's affected their lives months and years later, things like displacement, loss of access to livelihoods or health care and the ongoing impacts of that precarity is really important.
Giving disabled people agency in the coverage is critical too. You could ask disabled people to tell you, for instance: “What do you want to say to the emergency response agencies about doing things differently? How are you and your community adapting under these circumstances?” With these answers you can get different stories coming through that can be beneficial for everyone.
Journalists who want to make a longer term commitment to this reporting should start building their networks and relationships with disabled people - academics, first responders, organisers, artists, educators and more - working in this area. That takes time and many times conversations won't lead directly to stories.
It would be remiss of me not to point out too that there's a lot of distrust of the media in general from disabled people who've been harmed by coverage of their own stories or communities in the past. Often, disabled journalists can get more leeway in as it can be easier for us to connect with people and build that rapport. It's important for editors to commission disabled journalists to cover this area.
When pitching a story, how can journalists explain the criticality of climate and disability coverage to make their pitch stronger?
Disabled people are among the most impacted by climate breakdown but also have a lot to offer to climate response. Emphasise almost anything disability-related is still an under-covered angle on climate. We need the breaking news stories, but for outlets that understand solidarity with marginalised communities as a priority, those impacts felt more slowly over time also need to be covered. Greater frequency of droughts, heatwaves, superstorms and so on - what that means for those living through those realities on an ongoing basis.
Coverage can create awareness about the impacts of climate change, whether it's extreme weather, food security, or causes of internal displacement from a disability perspective. In part because of inaccessibility of information, some disabled people may not be able to articulate [the impact of climate change] so well, [but it’s a reporter’s responsibility to ask].
Coverage also raises a broader awareness that disabled people also have ideas and can take leadership in the right circumstances as well. It can take a while to get to the point where people have the confidence to take leadership, but starting to build some of those media narratives that disabled people have agency would be better than just doing a story on climate and health impacts, and writing one little sentence about disability and vulnerable groups.
What are some of the tropes to avoid in disability coverage?
Things that take away disabled people's agency, or focus on how badly a disabled person was impacted in a particular moment in time, but without putting a wider picture of why, or the systems that played into that. So while showing the intense impact for the disability community it’s important to also dig into “why it’s like that” and “did it need to be like that” and “could it have been different”.
For getting different perspectives into a story, recognising the diversity within the disability community, and also the intersections of race, gender, age, geography etc. is essential.
Don't know where to start? Here are some topic ideas for your next story - by Aine in Unbias The News
On just about any climate topic, there’s room to investigate what it might mean for disabled people. How are they excluded? What solutions might they have to offer which aren’t getting the attention they should?
Broad areas, with reading suggestions as jumping-off points, include:
Accessibility of low-emissions cities
Climate-induced relocation and migration
Long-term impacts of climate-fuelled precarity e.g., access to housing, healthcare, reliable power
Creative reflections on Crip Ecology and (disability-inclusive) disaster simulation
Livelihood impacts and disability inclusion in a just transition
Meaningful disability inclusion in national and local plans and policies
Intersectional perspectives of disabled climate activists (examples in the US, UK and internationally) and efforts to counter ableism in the climate movement
Legal cases challenging things like lack of disability-inclusive disaster preparedness and failure to account for human rights obligations in climate responses
Activist-scholars making the case for more research on disability-inclusive climate responses
Plastic bans disproportionately impacting disabled people
Lack of emergency services available for disabled people in climate emergencies such as extreme floods
Resources
Listen
The Enabling Commons podcast hosted by Aine Kelly-Costello, and available with transcripts, includes conversations with activists and experts at the intersections of disability and climate change.
Inherited is a podcast that uplifts compassionate, sound-rich climate storytelling by, for and about young people across the globe, particularly those from marginalised communities.
Read
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s Advocacy Brief, the go-to document for finding recent data on disability, displacement and disaster resilience. The brief was developed after an extensive review of existing recent studies and literature related to displacement, disability, climate change and disasters, including the 2023 Global Survey on Persons with Disabilities and Disasters, which analyses responses from 1,304 displaced and stateless persons with disabilities, almost a quarter of its total respondents.
The Disability And Climate Change Public Archive Project documents the wisdom disabled people bring to navigating this crisis. It includes conversations with disability-identified activists, advocates, artists, first-responders, policymakers and other communal leaders.
National Indigenous Disabled Women Association- Nepal (NIDWAN), that works at the grassroots and global levels collectively by cross-movement collaboration, conducted a scoping study in 2023 on the plight of Indigenous women and girls with disabilities on the nexus of climate change and sexual and reproductive health and rights in Nepal.
Communicating Climate Change With Care and Impact
Climate communication is an important tool for storytellers. This particular resource is a “welcoming stepping stone for anyone looking for ways to deepen or expand their approaches to communicating climate change issues, challenges, stories, hope, joy, uncertainty, possibilities, and pathways for uplifting collective, interspecies dignity and thriving, says the creator, Meghan Wise.
In “Unpacking Climate Policy," journalist Ashli Blow helps you understand the nuances of climate policy in reporting and storytelling.
Watch
Cripping Climate Adaptation: Disability Justice and Climate Change (with captions and transcript and with audio description), is a film from Canada about disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction.
I found theatre maker Deb Patterson’s comparison of ableism to climate change in the film quite interesting. “Ableism is a set of beliefs that assumes that people with disabilities are somehow empirically inferiored and evaluates a person’s worth based on our ability to produce,” she says, adding, “climate change and ableism share a similar worldview that the earth exists as a source of wealth. Any area of the earth that isn’t being exploited for its full monetary value is not serving the greater good in some way.”
Thank you for reading this climate edition. There’s much more to say about disability inclusive climate change storytelling, and I’ll have more for you in the future issues. Meanwhile, send me your tips, ideas and thoughts and whether you’d like to attend the webinar on 26th November. Your messages warm my heart and I always write back. Let’s also connect on LinkedIn and Twitter!
Warmly,
Priti
Thank you for sharing these insightful thoughts from Áine Kelly-Costello. I have a question: how can we engage deaf people in thinking about the issues of climate change?