Accessibility isn’t a ramp tacked onto a broken staircase. It must be the foundation. That means funding disability-led research. That means rewriting disaster protocols with disabled people at the drafting table. That means treating accessibility not as a favour, but as a right.
When the flood came, no one came for my grandmother.
She had broken her femur three years earlier and never walked again. Her leg had twisted into something uncooperative, rigid, untrusting. We made her a bed in the highest room, which was not very high at all. We packed bags, not knowing if we would carry her or leave her behind. And as the water climbed the steps in Bangladesh that year, my parents did not cry. They planned. The kind of planning you must do when the state has forgotten you.
This is what climate disaster looks like for disabled people: isolation, improvisation, abandonment.
But we do not talk about that.
We talk about carbon emissions and sea levels and climate resilience, as if survival is just a matter of attitude. We talk about vulnerable populations without asking who we made vulnerable in the first place. We praise the strength of communities after disaster hits, but we ignore the deep inequities that shape who lives, who dies, and who disappears from memory.
The United Nations says disabled people are two to four times more likely to die in natural disasters. That sounds like a statistic. It is also a eulogy.
And still, we frame inaccessibility as a technical gap, rather than what it truly is: a systemic failure with deadly consequences.
Most disaster response plans do not account for disabled people.
In Bangladesh, where climate change has intensified floods, cyclones, and displacement, people with disabilities are systematically left out of disaster planning. National frameworks like the 2013 Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act and the Standing Orders on Disaster promise inclusion. But on the ground, that promise falls apart. According to a 2023 report in The Business Standard, nearly 80 per cent of local disaster management committees excluded disabled people entirely. One-third of these committees did not even know what role disabled people could play in response planning.
The barriers are not just bureaucratic. They are deadly.
A 2020 study in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction found that most cyclone shelters in Barisal were inaccessible to those with mobility impairments. Evacuation drills often excluded people with disabilities altogether. In Gaibandha district, 60 per cent of disabled residents had no access to early warning systems. Megaphones failed the deaf. Written warnings missed the blind. None of it reached those without formal education or assistive devices.
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
After Cyclone Sidr in 2007, The Daily Star reported that disabled survivors were the last to receive aid. They were stranded, not because they were invisible, but because every part of the system had decided someone else mattered more.
People are left behind on rooftops. People die in attics, in wheelchairs, in silence.
And then they vanish from the headlines.
But they do not vanish from their communities.
I think about the disabled child who drowned in Hurricane Katrina because her family could not evacuate in time. About elderly residents abandoned in flooded care homes during Japan’s 2018 heatwave. About my own grandmother, whose life depended not on infrastructure, but on my parents’ impossible choice: to carry her, or to lose her.
Disability is not a sidebar in the climate crisis. It is the front line.
In Bangladesh, over 10 percent of the population lives with a disability. That number rises after every flood, every cyclone, every emergency that leaves behind injury or trauma. Climate change does not just impact disabled people. It creates disability. Extreme heat leads to heatstroke. Rising waters bring infection and untreated wounds. Collapsing infrastructure causes physical injury. Displacement results in psychological trauma. Warmer temperatures accelerate the spread of diseases like dengue and cholera. Cyclones leave survivors with lasting PTSD.
Each disaster does not just expose inequality. It manufactures it. Again and again, climate change becomes a pipeline into disability, and a trap for those already there.
In countries like Bangladesh and India, disability often means being confined to a bed in a shared room, on the second floor of an uncemented house, in a village no one can find on a map. It means your wheelchair rusts in the yard. It means you depend on your family for every movement, every meal.
When the floods come, no one comes for you. Not the state. Not the neighbours. Sometimes not even your own family. Because what can they do? Carry you through waist-deep water with three children and no boat? Shelters do not consider you. Warnings do not reach you. Relief does not include you.
ou stay. You drown. You are mourned quietly, if at all.
Climate change is not just a carbon crisis. It is a crisis of privilege.
Countries like Bangladesh are told to adapt. Told to build higher, evacuate faster, survive longer. But how do you adapt when your government is dealing with inflation, food insecurity, political unrest, and housing shortages? When you are still recovering from the last disaster as the next one forms offshore? Since the 2023 overthrow of Sheikh Hasina’s government, political instability has only made future climate planning more uncertain. et, countries like ours, low-emission and low-income, are the ones drowning first.
We are less than one percent of global emissions. But we are on the frontline. Meanwhile, richer nations with the power to reduce emissions and invest in equitable adaptation are still debating whether to act. Still building walls instead of bridges. Still profiting from the fuel that floods us.
When Bangladesh drowns, because that is the fear that sits in my gut every time I look at satellite rainfall maps, I wonder who will care. Not about the economy. Not about the infrastructure. But about the people. The disabled grandmother who cannot climb stairs. The child who uses a wheelchair. The stroke survivor who cannot run.
Are they not people?
But that’s not the whole story. Because disabled people are not just vulnerable. They are architects of survival.
Across the Global South, disability-led initiatives are reimagining what real resilience looks like. In Vanuatu, peer-to-peer evacuation plans are designed around real bodies — not ideal ones. In the Philippines, grassroots groups are distributing inclusive emergency kits packed with medication logs, sensory tools, and visual guides.
In Bangladesh, organisations like Access Bangladesh Foundation and the Centre for Disability in Development are training first responders and community members through Disability-Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction (DiDDR) programs. These workshops are not abstract. They simulate floods, evacuations, and sheltering from the perspective of people who are blind, wheelchair users, or neurodivergent. They ask the question no one else seems to: What if the most excluded person had to be the first to survive?
As disability activist Shamima Akter said in a recent workshop in Shariatpur:
“We don’t want to be protected. We want to be included in the plan.”
This isn’t charity. It’s a strategy, and it’s working.
If climate justice doesn’t centre disabled people, it’s not justice. It’s an illusion.
Accessibility isn’t a ramp tacked onto a broken staircase. It must be the foundation. That means funding disability-led research. That means rewriting disaster protocols with disabled people at the drafting table. That means treating accessibility not as a favour, but as a right.
Think back to the last climate disaster in your city or region. Who got the warning? Who had the means to act? Who got out? Who didn’t?
My grandmother survived that flood. But only because my parents chose to stay. That choice—between your mother’s life and your children’s — is one no family should ever have to make.
Yet, that’s the unspoken reality for millions. Climate disaster is not a great equaliser. It is a magnifier of all our failures — of inequality, of ableism, of systemic neglect.
We say “no one left behind” like it’s a promise. But right now, it’s a lie.
And I’m writing this because I’m tired of this lie.
If you’re building climate policy, centre disabled people. If you’re funding disaster planning, fund disability-led groups. If you’re telling stories — tell ours. Loudly. Urgently. Before the next storm hits.
