 All right, hi there, folks. I'm Sheila Wildman. I'm Associate Director of the Downhousing Health Justice Institute, and I'm here to welcome you to the second lecture in our seminar lecture series on health law and policy. We're convening in DiMaghi, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'k'la people, and we honor the wisdom of the elders past and present. We are convening the Day Before Truth and Reconciliation Day, which, of course, is a day that honors the children who never return home and survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process and the work of universities. We recognize, too, that African Nova Scotians are a distinct people whose histories, legacies, and contributions have enriched that part of DiMaghi known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years, and recognize the legacies of slavery that also continue to mark our communities, even as resilience and joy is such a central part of the vibrant lives of African Nova Scotian communities and indigenous communities today. Today, we turn our minds to further deep interlocking injustices and think about ways forward amidst what sometimes feels like cataclysmic and permanent crisis. This is our second lecture in this year's series, which, like our last session with Dr. Sarah Sack on a human rights approach to plastic pollution, further explores the intersections between health and environmental or climate justice. For that, we're so fortunate to have with us Dr. Sebastian Jo Duant. And I just remembered, I've never even asked you how to pronounce it. It's correct. Jo Duant. I've done it pretty well so far. Dr. Jo Duant is an associate professor in the Faculty of Law McGill University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Human Rights Health and the Environment, drawing on his lived experience with multiple sclerosis. Dr. Jo Duant co-founded and directs the Disability Inclusive Climate Action Research Program, a pioneering initiative to generate, co-produce, and translate knowledge at the intersections of disability and climate justice. His research in this area has been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and has been covered by media outlets worldwide. In 2023, he received McGill University's Changemaker Prize in recognition of his dedication to sharing knowledge that has had a significant impact on society. I have to run out early. I apologize just before 1 o'clock, so I'll be here with you, but leaving a little bit early. And I'm going to leave you in the able hands of the Director of the Health Justice Institute, Dr. Matt Herter, to field questions and close up. So with that, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jo Duant. Thank you so much for that introduction and thank you so much for coming to this talk. I want to begin actually with the very beginning of how I got involved in this research. So in 2015, when I first started at McGill, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And my immediate thought in the emergency room, I remember telling my wife, I was like, oh, I guess, and not knowing what this meant really, but I guess I'm going to work on disability and healthcare, and that's what I'm going to do. And then the following summer in the hot and humid and muggy weather of Montreal, I discovered that I was intolerant to heat, which is something that affects 65% of people who have multiple sclerosis. It's because the sheathing of our central nervous system is attacked by our immune system, and the heat makes it even more difficult for the nervous system to function. So having discovered this, I was thinking to myself, oh my goodness, this problem that I've been working on my whole adult life suddenly affects me differently. And I realized that I had never thought of the linkage between climate justice and disability justice. And I also realized that not many people and especially in academia were working on this. So the first thing I want to say about this is I come to this topic with a lot of modesty in the sense that although I've been working on this now for almost five years, I still feel like I'm a newcomer in the field of disability. I still feel like I'm very much building on what others have done and the advocacy and the work that they've done in the past. And I've been very grateful to be able to count on their support and their mentorship. But also modesty in the sense that, honestly, the only reason that I'm doing this work is because I happen to be a climate scholar who got MS. So I wasn't specifically brilliant or empathetic. It just didn't occur to me till it came into my life. And so I have also, there's a lot of empathy when I work on this because I understand that there are a lot of people for whom disability in the climate space is not a topic that they know much about or that they're comfortable about. Having said that, when it comes to governments who have signed international treaties past laws that commit themselves to mainstreaming disability across various fields of public policy, I have no empathy for the fact that they're not doing that work. One last aspect of this that I want to discuss is just I had to find the solution to this problem of heat intolerance. And so what I did was I thought to myself, surely someone has solved the problem of how do you survive when it's really, really hot. And my thought was to look at the people who are mascots at Disney World in Orlando. So I discovered the niche world of ice vests. And I found these ice vests that they're actually not water. It's a material that freezes at nine degrees. And you can wear this vest when it's 30 or 40 degrees outside and you'll stay cool for about three hours. So I started doing this and this is just a photo of me with my daughter wearing this vest when running because you also get heat intolerance from running. So there's two things that came out of this story for me. The first was, okay, like we as people with disabilities we have certain insights, certain ideas that we can contribute to thinking about climate change. And the other thing that came to me of course was that my ability to do this was very much dependent on the healthcare that I had access to my educational background and the resources I had to be able to purchase this expensive niche vest. And so this is a very much an important aspect of this work is actually trying to think about not just people with disabilities at large but understanding how disability intersects with other forms of privilege and impression to shape patterns of vulnerability and resilience. So I don't know if I'm speaking to an audience of people who are familiar with disability or climate change. I'm mostly used to speaking to people who are familiar with climate change. So I'll do a just very brief introduction to disability to begin with. So something that you should know is around 15% of the world's population has a disability. This is an average. And so we're thinking about sensory impairments or vision, hearing, also mental health, also mobility, also thinking about learning and other intellectual disabilities as well. Now in Canada because we have an aging population it's actually around one in five Canadians that has a disability. So I'm showing you here a chart that shows the rate of disability across different age groups in Canada. As you can see once you're over 75 almost one in two Canadians have a disability. Another thing that's important to discuss right away is how we understand disability. So the contemporary approach we're thinking about disability is the social model of disability. So the idea isn't that it's the impairment that the person has, that's the problem. In fact it's the interaction between that impairment and the way societies are organized. So if you are someone who uses a wheelchair the main problem that you might have is the fact that you can't get into a building because it's not accessible. And of course as I've already alluded to these types of barriers and the challenges that come from living in a society that isn't inclusive for people with disabilities are even more acute for people who experience multiple intersecting forms of discrimination due to gender, race, indigeneity, age. And finally although I'm speaking I'm hoping to people who are aware of this but people with disabilities have this international convention that protects their rights. That most countries who are parties of the Paris Agreement have signed that clearly applies to climate change and of course countries also have laws that provide rights and protections for people with disabilities. Okay this extremely brief introduction to disability brings me to the first thing that I want to tell you which is that people with disabilities are disproportionately harmed by the climate crisis. So when you look at the evidence you can see that people with disabilities face disproportionate rates of mortality and harm in what we call the rapid or severe onset impacts of climate change usually taking the form of severe weather events. So we're looking at cyclones, floods, extreme cold events, droughts, wildfires and heat waves. Just to give you an example, the Pacific heat dome that killed over 600 people in Vancouver in July 2021, 91% of the victims had a disability. I'm showing you here a map of different types of climate impacts that have affected the functioning of health care facilities over a decade in Canada. And so here I'm just making the point that also there are indirect impacts that occur to people with disabilities in terms of disrupting access to essential care and services due to climate change. And one final point I want to make about this is we also have evidence showing that people with disabilities face these very long-term barriers to recovering from these extreme weather events. So I'm showing you here a picture of the flooding after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And the research we have out of that unfortunate event is that people even a year after these events, people with disabilities were still homeless, still had difficulties finding accessible housing. Now people with disabilities are also disproportionately affected by what we call gradual or slow onset climate impacts. So things like coastal erosion, the gradual increase in temperature, worsened air quality, food shortages, water scarcity, and the increased risk of vector-borne diseases. So this is a map of Canada showing you the areas where warming has, so the gradual increase in temperature has occurred most significantly. And the only point here to make is that while, you know, not quite from heat waves, but just this sort of gradual increase, three to four degrees warmer in long extended periods of summer, have all sorts of impacts for people who have neurological conditions, who have diabetes. So they're not, this isn't a heat wave, this is just sort of the normal that we're sort of getting used to in terms of summer. And what it can do is not only lead to increases in hospitalization, but also limit your mobility because it's just too hot outside to go and do anything. I'm sure, unfortunately, you're all familiar with the increased worsened air quality due to wildfires that struck across Canada this summer. And specifically looking at, in the data out of Quebec, over the summer we saw a 17% higher number of asthma related emergency visits and really very closely tied to the level of air quality index during that period. And just a final example, you should know that in Canada, half of the people who experience food insecurity are people who have disabilities. And so when a climate impact, such as drought, affects agricultural yield somewhere in the world, and then that leads to increases in agricultural prices, this will affect people with disabilities the first and the most because they're already experiencing the challenges of feeding themselves in the current context. The second thing, the second point I want to make is that all of these different manifestations of climate vulnerability are due to the violations of their human rights. They're not natural, they're not inevitable. They are the product of decisions that have been taken or not taken by governments. So the main model for understanding climate vulnerability resilience sees it as a function of three things. Exposure, what kind of risks you're exposed to. Sensitivity, so how sensitive you might be to a kind of risk. Adaptive capacity, which is usually the most important one. So what services, knowledge, networks, support programs, do you have access to that will allow you to be resilient or not in the context of different types of climate risks. And what I'm going to show and argue here is that all of these disability rights, violations of disability rights or respect for disability rights will actually end up mediating these three factors. And of course when people with disabilities end up being more affected by climate impacts that of course only reinforces social inequities that they face. So I'll use a specific example which is a heat wave that killed 66 people in the city of Montreal in July 2018. And the thing about this heat wave that I want to draw your attention to is that a quarter of the victims had schizophrenia. Okay so that's a death rate that's 500 times their share of the Quebec population. Why would people with schizophrenia be more likely to die in a heat wave? So in terms of exposure, what we see from the data coming out of that episode was that these people were typically living in these poorly ventilated buildings also in areas that had a very little green space. They are also more sensitive to heat due to the medications they take that impair thermal regulation. And finally they typically have limited adaptive capacity due to poverty, social isolation so they don't have necessarily the people, friends checking in on them. Due to poverty they don't necessarily have access or they don't live in buildings that have a modern passive cooling or they don't have access to air conditioning. I would also argue that the deficiencies in healthcare are at risk here because the thermoregulatory impacts of these medications is well known and so you would expect that pharmacist doctors would have informed their patients of these risks. But I would say the most important failing here is really that people in this category and actually more generally people with disabilities they would just weren't part of the planning for these kinds of events. If you'd looked at the heat wave response plan of the city of Montreal prior to this event they listed children and the elderly. They did not think about or plan for people who had conditions that made them intolerant to heat so they didn't reach out to these people. There was no early warning system. There were no measures to ensure their safety in that context. So the third thing I want to tell you is that people with disabilities are systematically neglected in adaptation planning. So we have done this exercise of collecting all of the climate policies adopted by the state parties of the Paris Agreement and assessing whether they reference people with disabilities and whether they actually abide by their rights. So this is, I'm going to discuss results from last year's report and we have an updated version that we'll be launching at the next climate negotiations. So if I'm looking at our first report which we found that only 46 parties to the Paris Agreement mentioned disability at all in their adaptation policies. This is strange because the Paris Agreement in its preamble recognizes that people with disabilities are more affected by climate change. And I want to be clear this 46 parties figure is not, when these states reference disability in adaptation policies, most of the time it's just that people with disabilities are lumped into a list of groups that are vulnerable. When we look at actually, are there measures to enhance the resilience of people with disabilities? We could only find 15 policies that had at least one such measure. We could only find two that referenced the rights of people with disabilities. We could only find two that refer to the importance of recognizing and integrating the knowledge of people with disabilities in adaptation planning. Only 14 that recognize that people with disability should be involved in these adaptation efforts. And only one that we could find where there was evidence that they had actually consulted people with disabilities in any way in this planning. The one policy that scored the best in our assessment is the policy adopted by the small island state of Kiribati. So in this adaptation policy, there's measures and funding earmarked to involve people with disabilities in adaptation planning, set up projects to meet their needs and also set up communication systems to warn them of different types of climate risks. You might be wondering how Canada has performed in this. So Canada launched its first national adaptation strategy last December. And this policy pretty much did not really mention people with disabilities, there was one reference. And I'm here, I've highlighted an extract from this policy. So this is their analysis of the risk factors of that Pacific heat dome event. Of the 169 people who died in the June 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, 67% were over 70 years old, 56% lived alone and 61% were located in low income neighborhoods. These are all important facts, but they somehow neglected to cite the 91% figure that was established in the coroner's report. So point is in this strategy, the vulnerability of people with disabilities and their needs was wholly not considered, even in the analysis of the problem, they weren't even considered. Thankfully, the CDC did a story on our research. That somehow led to their credit, I would say, the ministers for disability and climate change to invite me to Ottawa to give them advice on what they should do. And the news sort of, this is so complicated and strange, but there's a national adaptation strategy launched in December and then in June, they launched the adaptation action plan, which is an implementation of that strategy. And the good news, at least, is that they have made all sorts of very specific commitments of what they will eventually do. So, and I can't really complain about the language that they've used here because it's what I suggested that they use. So the promising, the promise here is that there's a commitment to actually develop policies. So hopefully that will get us somewhere pretty soon. So I wanna discuss now what we can do to address the climate vulnerability of people with disabilities. The first thing that we need is disability-focused climate litigation. This is something in our research program that we're actively working on. So I'm showing you here two pictures. One is a picture of what I can only just call a sort of attempt at making a ramp at the very last minute. So this was in the context of Hurricane Sandy in New York. They did not have accessible hurricane shelters in the city. They also had no plans to meet people, sorry, no plans to evacuate people who are on continuous medical equipment. And so the Brooklyn Center for Independence of, sorry, the Brooklyn Center for Independent Living sued the city of New York and eventually won. There was a settlement and as a result, the city of New York has had to implement all sorts of measures to ensure that the way it responds to hurricanes is inclusive of people with disabilities. I think we will see multiplication of these types of cases because in fact, over and over again, we're aware in terms of research, media or just organizations of people with disabilities reaching out to us, letting us know that the lack of accessible shelters, transportation, lack of planning, lack of inclusion is pervasive around the world across various different forms of climate risks. So of course, the first starting point really is for governments to implement disability inclusive disaster responses. So and to be clear, there's nothing here that we don't already know how to do. It's just, we know there are some jurisdictions who do better jobs than others. So we know about the fact that you need an accessible vehicle, for instance, to evacuate people or an accessible shelter. The problem is that we just see over and over again that governments aren't doing this. So that's sort of what you need to do to respond in an immediate way in relation to an extreme weather event caused by climate change. But the thing that I think is most important is and the thing that we really need to do and occurring more in a medium term is involving people with disabilities in adaptation planning. So I wanna be clear to just distinguish between the two. So disaster risk reduction is all about saving people from a hurricane that might destroy their building, evacuating people into cooling centers because there's a heat wave. Adaptation planning is actually, if you do it correctly, you don't need to evacuate people, right? So if you have proper adaptation policies and interventions, you don't need to evacuate people and get them to shelters. They're able to be resilient and cope with the risks in their own homes or in their own communities. And so it's vital that we include people with disabilities in this effort to develop these medium term interventions that will actually enable them to not be at risk and not need to be evacuated in the context of a severe weather event. So we, hopefully that would also lead to adaptation interventions that enhance the resilience of people with disabilities. So I'm showing you here an image of two workers that are installing air conditioning in the city of Boston. So the city of Boston has a program where they're actually distributing air conditioning to people who are at risk in heat waves. There's also something that's really interesting that's happening across Canada is possibly the development of policies whereby air conditioning is redefined as a medical device. And so this is an example of something that if you were able to set up a program to subsidize or enable people to have access to air conditioning, those who are at most risk in a heat wave, while those people won't need to be evacuated or warned necessarily about the need to be evacuated anyway in the context of the heat wave. Something that I'm really excited about as well is the possibility of leveraging adaptation interventions to enhance disability inclusion. So we have to do all sorts of things in our society to be resilient to climate change. Lots of changes that we'll have to make in terms of our infrastructures, in terms of our buildings. And is it possible that we could use this also as an opportunity to make things better for people with disabilities? So I don't have an example in the adaptation field necessarily, but I have an example actually from the decarbonization and transportation sector. So in the United States, the 2021 infrastructure bill which has billions of dollars dedicated to green infrastructures, green buildings across the United States. Thanks to the efforts of Senator Tammy Duckworth who is a wheelchair user herself. There's a program that's included in this. It's called ASAP, All-Stations Accessibility Program. And what's happened here with this program is they've earmarked money to take the existing rail and transit infrastructures to make them, to transform them to make them accessible. So this is exactly what we need. There will be way more money, by the way, that will be spent on decarbonizing our buildings, our infrastructures and also on making them more climate resilient. Then there would be unfortunately to make our society more accessible. So I'm very enthusiastic and I promote this kind of measure every chance that I get. And this new adaptation plan in Canada they actually did include that as a thing that they have committed to eventually doing. So hopefully that will come soon. Ultimately, of course, what we really need beyond all of this are long-term interventions that fulfill disability rights. So if, of course, people with disabilities have access to a decent income or if the barriers to employment were addressed and the barriers that they face. So lots of estimates suggest that there's around 60% of people with disabilities who could work if proper accommodations were made for them to do so, but they are not so they're unemployed. If people had that income, if people had that employment, well, we wouldn't need to subsidize their acconitioning. We wouldn't need to figure out how to save them in the context of the precarious situation in which society has placed them. So ultimately, the most transformative measures needed here will be measures that actually ensure and sort of address the social, economic, and institutional marginalization of people with disabilities in our society. I want to end on a specific story and a vision for what university-accessible climate resilience might look like. So I'm showing you here a map that reflects the very origins of the contemporary disability rights movement. So in the 1970s in Berkeley, wheelchair users, specifically, were sick and tired of not being able to get onto a sidewalk. So what did they do? They started making their own curb cuts. So this is the map indicating those first curb cuts that they made themselves. Eventually, from this sort of, you know, guerrilla urban planning intervention, they lobbied the city of San Francisco to make sure this became a requirement and that's what they did. And of course, this innovation then spread all over the world. So what this illustrates is two things. One is the potential of people with disabilities as knowers, makers, and doers, people who can transform our world, and especially in a time when it will be changing and more difficult to live in this world, we absolutely need to bring in our expertise, our knowledge, our ideas. I like to say that the thing that we know how to do is to make things work. And I think what we can definitely contribute to this is make climate resilience work for as many people as possible. So this is sometimes called the curb cut effect. So the reality is that if you have these curb cuts on the sidewalk, it's not just wheelchart users who are using them. In fact, primarily it's other people who are using them, people, parents with strollers, the delivery people who are delivering things all over North America, the little kids on their bikes, the person who's injured that week. And so the reality is that what we see over and over again is when we adopt a university-accessible approach to climate resilience, we are making it more accessible or inclusive, not just for people with disabilities, but all sorts of people in our society. So I'll end just with a pitch for you to, or promotion anyway. We have a podcast series called Enabling Commons, where we've interviewed people with disabilities from all over the world that share their lived experience of climate change, but specifically also their experience of acting as agents in the climate movement. And if you're interested in more content on this or anything else on disability and climate change, you're welcome to visit our website, sorry, www.disabilityinclusiveclimate.org. Thank you so much. Yeah, that one example is the Kiribati climate policy. And it's not surprising that this small island state ends up being the one who performs the best, at least in our first round of this analysis. For two reasons, one, they are very acutely concerned with climate change and are really innovating, many of these states are innovating and having to adopt policies like, how do you relocate communities? They're actually having to do that. But also, the organization of people with disabilities that's been the most active in advocacy and knowledge generation on climate change is from this region, so the Pacific Disability Forum. They have done lots of work in this area and so they have built this regional network of activism around this issue. So the result of that is this policy. Now, can I say that this is the best, most inclusive climate adaptation policy meal I can't, but it's certainly by the very low standards of the performance of the other countries of the world, it does very well. So I can't say that it's, so I guess it's meaningful in the sense that it's had an impact for sure, yeah. So, I'm sorry, what was the first question? Oh, yeah, where they lived. Yes, yeah, where they lived, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, these people were not living in institutions. So they were living typically alone and typically in these neighborhoods where, yeah, no green spaces, lots of heat islands. So yeah, I'm not quite sure about the death rate in the, yeah, that study didn't suggest that people had died in those long-term care facilities. On the other hand, when we look at Hurricane Katrina, and I don't advise you to do this, but you can go online and you can see horrific images of long-term care facilities where people would just let the die. And so you can just see medical equipment chairs just flooded. So you're right that the congregation or institutionalization of people with disabilities typically places them at risk, especially we saw this during the pandemic as well. And yeah, so I think that's a clear problem to be addressed. Now, what was the second question? This was whether that has been pulled out with some of the consultations of reporting on consultations that people take into account with the different kinds of spaces where you could sort of proportionally, you're gonna help more folks with disabilities, including folks who are older. Yeah, I don't, I mean, to be clear, there have been so few consultations. Yeah, for sure. So, and I don't think that reaching out to people who are in those long-term care facilities seems to be a priority of any government on any issue, as far as I know. So yeah, I don't have, but like I said, I only have one policy where I have some evidence that they consulted people and really usually it's like groups, organizations with people with disabilities. We're not talking here about sort of deep engagement with people with disabilities, using a sort of really sophisticated approach. No, fortunately. Yeah, I mean, we do have a number of projects that are on the go where we will be doing this and specifically looking at age and disability and intersections. And so, yeah, we will have to figure out how do you include people who are in these long-term care facilities in those interviews. And yeah. We're gonna leave it to others for the planning. Mm-hmm, I'll take the, yeah. So in terms of the green spaces, I mean, there's, first of all, it's really interesting if you, one of the things I've learned from, it's very enriching to sort of like suddenly in your academic career, having to go into a whole other field. And coming from the climate environmental policy space where there's lots of data and lots of research, I've been really struck at like, there's so limited data on disability in all sorts of things. And it's typically just a category and a second of the population that's forgotten. So we are writing a paper right now that's about accessibility of green spaces. And when we look at the existing literature, what's really fascinating is you can find papers that are called accessibility or equity in green spaces. They don't mean people with disabilities. Like they use the term accessibility, but they don't actually mean people with disabilities. They mean people of color or low income neighborhoods, or low people on low incomes. Which is fine, obviously those, we need to think about equity and accessibility in terms of those measures or those factors as well. But anyway, so very little research on this topic. And so unfortunately we're not seeing, because there's not a lot of research, it's not surprising there's not a lot of policy interventions that are looking at that aspect of it. But what I can tell you, unfortunately from our own sort of work we're doing this case study in Montreal, actually the city of Montreal has some very detailed data on how accessible their own green spaces are. They have nine measures of accessibility for each of these. I don't know when they developed this, if they ever thought that someone would bother to look at the results in the aggregate, but they're terrible. So using their data, only 5% of green spaces in the city of Montreal are accessible on at least one of these nine measures. So yes, so it's a huge challenge. And I'm only aware at this stage of one study in the US where they've looked at how the accessibility of green spaces to people with disabilities in the city of San Francisco. And that's because they have lots of good data on in their census on people with disabilities at a sort of micro level. So they're able to do that work. And we're trying to do that here in Canada. But anyway, the micro level data on disability is not publicly available. So you have to go through a separate process to get it from Stats Canada. Anyway, so was there a second question that you'd ask, or did I? Okay, I kind of have a little. Yeah, yeah, I need, I mean, first of all, with this current project that we're doing, we are arguing that the city of Montreal is violating the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Like it's honestly a pretty easy case to make. Like parks are supposed to be built to everyone. And they're clearly not based on their own data. So we're writing this up in an article. And then the question is whether a group of people who have actually built a case on that is a separate issue. And there's so many barriers to using law as a way of changing the world as many people in this building will be aware of. So, but yeah, ultimately, without the data, it's really hard to sort of make a compelling case to policy makers and urban planners, especially the more sort of technocratic side of that work. They are very much interested in numbers. And so it's interesting. I can, you know, you can, I can give you lived experience and testimonials of inaccessibility. And those are really an important form of knowledge, but they don't seem to have the same kind of impact on policy making as does sort of just the act of counting things. And yeah, so that's been an interesting discovery. Yeah, I guess it's also, yeah. Yes, so there are, I can think of two specifically. So the UN is just in the process of launching a program that will help six countries in sub-Saharan Africa integrate disability into their adaptation planning. And we've been sort of very fortunate to have been, to have been involved in giving them advice on what they should do. Although they're so, and I should say governments actually have reached out to me and other colleagues about what they should do. And it's really fascinating because I don't, I mean I could go very, very in detail, except I sometimes don't have the evidence for specific interventions. But the starting point of this is reach out to people with disabilities and like in your jurisdiction. You know, that's like the starting point, like learn from them. Like I can't tell you what you should be doing for this ability of climate change in Uganda. Obviously not. So it's just, there's this really sort of, again it sort of reinforces the fact that there's a lack of capacity on disability in the climate world. And that's something that we are actively trying to address, but it's obviously a learning curve. The UK also, which funds about half of the adaptation efforts of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They have a very strong commitment to disability inclusion in their aid funding. And as a result, we've given them some advice on how they could include that in that adaptation funding. One thing I want to just mention is really fascinating out of this work. So a paper that's coming out where we've done this broader analysis of human rights and adaptation policies is that the developing countries actually tend to perform better than the industrialized countries. Because the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies are forcing them to include disability or gender as factors in their adaptation policy. So the UK does this, but the UK's own adaptation policy does not include women or people with disabilities or people of color. So there's a lot of hypocrisy happening there that we are actively pointing out to governments and hoping that they will address. Yeah, so this in a way is sort of half of our research agenda. Because the other half is about disability inclusion in the decarbonization of society. So we are doing things like looking at how people with disabilities are affected by mass transit, our bike sharing program is accessible, electric vehicles accessible. By the way, our results are that really they're not and it's terrible. So that's like just a spoiler for you. So yeah, this plastic straw band we use as a metaphor really of this type of eco-ablism. So absolutely it's part of our work. I also have a project that I'm doing with critical disability scholar in the UK who name is Sarah Bell. And so you know her, yeah. So I mean, it's not sort of, it's not at the front and center of what I do, but it's definitely something that we contribute to and it's a slightly different perspective than the one that we take where we're not I guess I'm just too sort of practical to be full, too practical and too interested in as something that can be applied right away versus sort of the long term. Although I recognize that maybe A, I'm fooling myself or B, I recognize that the long term work of transforming these deeper structures of colonialism and capitalism and other forms of discrimination that that can't be done through law or only through law or only through policy. So for sure it's a very valuable perspective and not at the heart of what we do but definitely people in our team who do it. Do you mean like in terms of eco-anxiety or do you mean as a risk factor, yeah? Yeah, I mean we haven't worked on that actively although we do have one person we've interviewed in our podcast series that's all about eco-anxiety. Her name is Tori Swee. But yeah, I mean in terms of the challenge here of course is that we're the only research program on this issue and I happen to know the five, six people who are also working on this. So over time hopefully more and more people will start to be involved and they'll be able to, we'll be able to get into different directions. Yeah, we are in a way pursuing the most sort of urgent acute cases of adverse impacts of climate change or climate action. So we're focusing really right now on heat waves and then the people who are dying in those. So mental health, I mean there's definitely neuro and psychosocial disabilities. So intellectual disabilities for sure is something that we're looking at. But yeah, it's an important intersection of course to look at that and it's not something we've had the chance to look at specifically but it's very important. Maybe you could do this work so that we could just reference what you do. That's a good question. I actually don't know. I don't think it was looked at in the epidemiological report. I think unfortunately there's the possibility, well yeah, I mean maybe this is an ignorant claim on my part, but if you are on medication, are you like, how likely is it that you'll also be unhoused? I mean maybe you're less likely, I'm not sure. But so the category of people with schizophrenia who died were people who were taking these medications and I impaired their formal regulation. So I guess it's not a representative sample of the community and there are lots of people who choose not to take those medications. And so yeah, in terms of the, yeah, the unhoused for the data in Vancouver, I don't think it was there either. They wasn't, yeah, and I guess that's the challenge of working with that population. I mean I complain there's not a lot of data around disability, but I think that the data on the unhoused population is also very much lacking. But typically people with disabilities make up a significant share of the unhoused population for sure. I don't know, sorry. I don't know how you would do that. I'm aware of those kinds of studies. And they typically, yeah, so we can probably assume that people with disabilities are overrepresented in those low income neighborhoods that lack tree cover, but we don't really have the data for sure to make that point or it's usually not a knowledge point in these kinds of studies. But yes, if you are intervening to make things better, how do you then ensure that doesn't lead to non-con effects? I don't know. However, I'll say this, a lot of our work is really ultimately emphasizing the concept of inclusive design. And that has to be, the point that I like to make is you're not gonna have the perfect policy or intervention right away, especially for something as complex as disability, given the multiple types of impairments, lived experiences that you might have of different barriers, the ways those intersect with different sorts of privileges and discrimination. So what's most important actually is setting up mechanisms that allow you to be flexible and iterative in the way that you approach these interventions and trying to learn over time how to make them better and ensure they don't have these unintended adverse effects. So that's my only thought is you can't just sort of just show up in a neighborhood and start planting trees and then let things go. You have to have a process and a mechanism that's inclusive and includes the community and learns from the community over time to ensure that that intervention makes sense and that it doesn't lead to adverse impacts that people haven't thought of. Yeah. So I guess I was kind of naive, maybe, but when I went to that meeting of the ministers in December last year, I remember telling my wife, I'm like, look, they said they're gonna do this, amazing. And then spend six months talking to different officials and telling them, yeah, there's something called the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Canada signed it, obligations, you know. So realizing that it's not just, I mean, there's attitudes for sure, but there's really just complete ignorance of these issues. And the government has a responsibility to ensure that all of its civil servants, especially in areas that are making policy that affect people with disabilities, like they should be aware of their obligations. And so unfortunately, the lack of attention to disability in climate policy is not unique to climate policy. It's something we see over and over again. Countries will have laws or policies that are about disability, but they don't mainstream those, they don't include those in the other areas of social, economic, and environmental policy. So it ends up always being this kind of like thing that's separate that maybe is a bonus that you look into along the lines of what you've discussed. I think that this is misguided. I think it's, you know, from a legal perspective, obviously incorrect, and a violation of Canada's obligations, very clear under the convention, but also just from a, I just think it's bad design. And that's how I kind of approach it. And I think that actually the environmental and climate field, they don't have very realistic models of human behavior, of behavioral change. So their idea really is the sort of canonical approaches are you change the incentives, therefore people will change their behavior, right? Or you provide them with information or maybe moral arguments and therefore they'll change their behavior. But all of the research on the psychology of environmental behaviors or pro health behaviors tells you this is not how it works. So people, and you know, specifically the, there's this theory, the theory of planned behavior looks at like what are the structural constraints that exist that don't lead you to change. And this is what a disability perspective can bring. So I will say that I was definitely one of these environmentalists who would ride my bike down to McGill in Montreal and I'd see these people driving and I'd be like, what's wrong with these people? It's like, why are they driving? Like so bad, you know? And then I got MS, right? And in my first year I had some mobility issues and so I had to drive to work. And then I was like, oh wait, I was making all sorts of assumptions about these people. Why are they driving? Why aren't they riding, you know, why aren't they riding their bikes? So that was a really interesting experience for me to think about that. And obviously it's not the case that everyone who's driving has a mobility impairment. But maybe there's some other structural reason, some other reason they have that maybe they don't want to ride their bike or take the bus, right? Maybe they couldn't get their kid in the daycare that's near their house so they have to drive there. Maybe they have an elderly parent they need to check on after work. Maybe they just like the convenience of a car and they don't think, you know, getting on the bus or cycling is appropriate for them or cool or whatever. So thinking, what I find interesting is when you start thinking about inclusive design, when you start thinking about what are the barriers that people face in terms of changing their behaviors, you then sort of confront these assumptions and you hopefully develop better policies that and programs that will meet the needs of more people. So that's kind of my hope and the approach that I take. Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that I always think about is in any space that I enter, I always think to myself, like, who's not here? You know, and I don't presume to know why they're not here but I would want to know. And that sort of takes, you know, a deep meaningful commitment to engagement. And that takes a lot of work, I think, to think in those terms. So yeah, that's, I guess, one thing that I would suggest. And you never know who's gonna benefit from these things. That's the thing, like, even in my teaching, I'm sorry, I'll just, in my teaching, you know, one of the things I do is I provide all the readings and word documents and I demonstrate to students how they can use this in their text readers. This is what you would need to use as a visual impaired person to be able to do the readings. And I demonstrate this to all the students that they can listen to the readings in my course. And every year, there's someone who comes up to me and says, you know, I have narcolepsy, this has been a game changer for me. I have ADHD, I have a hard time focusing on some of these longer texts I've been able to do, you know, listen to them. So it's really interesting, like, sometimes when you make things really inclusive and accessible, the range of people who can benefit are, it's unexpected but it's a very powerful effect to you never know who's gonna benefit from these things. Well, as far as migrants with disabilities, what we know is that there's also the barriers to migration for people with disabilities. There's sort of the disruption in the support and the services and the care that they might have somewhere and then having to go somewhere else where they can recreate that or even, you know, accessible transportation or housing. Most of the climate migration that's occurring today is within borders. So this is where we have some of this data. Now, when we think about migration across borders, well, the problem is that most of the countries in the world that have a public healthcare system have a policy that discriminates against people with disabilities. So in Canada, if you want to migrate to Canada, you have to, your status, your immigration status can be, like basically your application can be denied. If you are a loved one, we're shown to be a burden on the Canadian healthcare system. So that's so quite apart from whether, how we might change our policies to ensure that we're, you know, providing safe haven to climate migrants. We actually have the longer-term problem of not even having, you know, those barriers to migration for people with disabilities. Not really. I mean, it's something that I sort of informally, you know, work on and definitely try to support graduate students undergrads with disabilities. So, but it's not something I'm doing in terms of my research. One thing that's for sure is that it's definitely the case that most of the people somehow who work on disability have some kind of connection to disability whether personal or in their family. That's something that happens. And of course, you know, I had the sort of privilege of acquiring a disability way after I had done my doctoral work. So yeah, a lot of changes are needed in academia to make it more inclusive for students and faculty members with disabilities. Having said that, you know, sometimes I think about the possible other careers that I could have pursued. Like I did work as a lawyer at the UN and academia can be very accommodating of a person managing chronic illness in a way that other workplaces might not be. And surprisingly, a lot of people that I know who have had disabilities their whole lives have decided to go into academia because they thought it would be a place where they could manage their conditions. So that's kind of interesting too. So it's not all bad, I guess, I wanna say. But thanks for the question. Before I invite you to join me in thanking Professor Charles Lance for the presentation and the conversation we've had, I just wanted to give you one piece of housekeeping information around the series. This is our second of the eight seminars that we'll be having between now and start of September and April. The next seminar is on Friday, November 3rd. But it's the only seminar of the eight that's actually online at the moment. So we won't gather in person, we'll meet online. That presentation will be from Professor Rezia Belt from Stanford Law School, she'll be joining us. And the title of her talk is The Hidden History of the American Insanity Defense. So we hope you'll join us online. The information about how to join that presentation is on our poster or on our website. Should not be hard to find. Please be in touch if you have any difficulties or other questions about the seminar series at the Health Justice Institute, more broadly. With that said, I wanted to thank Professor Schottraner for his presentation, which married his own personal perspective and experiences, his lived expertise, and that of course, with his deep research knowledge in the law around climate change and disability rights as well. The results that he shared, the examples that he shared were unfortunately as bad or worse as you might have feared in terms of what happens to folks with disabilities in the face of climate change. So clearly there is a tremendous amount of work to be done. As the conversation in particular, after the presentation highlighted, that work has to happen both through law and opposition to law, but with other kinds of disciplines, right, cultural changes that need to occur, changes in how we think about design, whether you're in engineering or climate science and have a capacity to include perspectives of people who are going to be most marginalized by the changes to our planet. So I think Professor Schottraner has sort of opened our eyes to the scope of the challenge that we all have to participate in trying to change. And I want to thank you for your work in sharing it with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.