Accessible Futures

The Adaptation Game, Why Disability Voices Matter

Climate change affects everyone, but it does not affect everyone equally. For disabled people, emergency planning and climate adaptation often involve barriers that others may never need to consider. This is why it is important that disabled people are involved in designing the conversations, tools and solutions that help prepare our communities for the future.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to contribute to The Adaptation Game, an interactive workshop resource designed to help people think about climate risks, community resilience and practical responses to changing environmental conditions.

My role was to provide a disability perspective, helping ensure the scenarios reflected the realities experienced by disabled people and their whānau. Rather than viewing disability as an afterthought, the aim was to consider accessibility and inclusion from the beginning.

This meant looking at questions such as:

• What happens when someone cannot easily evacuate during an emergency?
• How do communication methods need to change for people with different access needs?
• What support networks exist for disabled people before, during and after an event?
• Are community responses genuinely inclusive, or do they unintentionally leave people behind?

Bringing disability perspectives into the discussion helps create more realistic and inclusive conversations.

The Adaptation Game encourages participants to work through practical situations together. There are no perfect answers. Instead, it creates opportunities for people to listen, ask questions and better understand the experiences of others.

For me, this work reinforced an important lesson. Accessibility should never be something added at the end of a project. It should be considered from the beginning. When disabled people are included in planning and decision making, the outcomes are better for everyone.

Climate adaptation is not only about responding to environmental change. It is about ensuring every member of our community has the opportunity to participate, contribute and remain safe when those changes occur.

By bringing disability perspectives into projects such as The Adaptation Game, we move one step closer to creating communities that are more resilient, more inclusive and better prepared for the future.