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Globally, more than 1 billion people with disabilities are disproportionately and differentially at risk from the climate crisis. Yet there is a notable absence of climate policy, programming, and research at the intersection of disability and climate change. Advancing climate justice urgently requires accelerated disability-inclusive climate action. We present pivotal research recommendations and guidance to advance disability-inclusive climate research and responses identified by a global interdisciplinary group of experts in disability, climate change, sustainable development, public health, environmental justice, humanitarianism, gender, Indigeneity, mental health, law, and planetary health. Climate-resilient development is a framework for enabling universal sustainable development. Advancing inclusive climate-resilient development requires a disability human rights approach that deepens understanding of how societal choices and actions—characterised by meaningful participation, inclusion, knowledge diversity in decision making, and co-design by and with people with disabilities and their representative organisations—build collective climate resilience benefiting disability communities and society at large while advancing planetary health.

Over the past decade, widespread concern has emerged over how environmental governance can be transformed to avoid impending catastrophes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and livelihood insecurity. A variety of approaches have emerged, focusing on either politics, technological breakthrough, social movements, or macro-economic processes as the main drivers of change. In contrast, this paper presents theoretical insights about how systemic change in environmental governance can be triggered by critical and intellectually grounded social actors in specific contexts of environment and development. Conceptualising such actors as critical action intellectuals (CAI), we analyze how CAI emerge in specific socio-environmental contexts and contribute to systemic change in governance. CAI trigger transformative change by shifting policy discourse, generating alternative evidence, and challenging dominant policy assumptions, whilst aiming to empower marginalized groups. While CAI do not work in a vacuum, nor are the sole force in transformation, we nevertheless show that the praxis of CAI within fields of environmental governance has the potential to trigger transformation. We illustrate this through three cases of natural resource governance in Nepal, Nicaragua and Guatemala, and Kenya, where the authors themselves have engaged as CAI. We contribute to theorising the ‘how’ of transformation by showing the ways CAI praxis reshape fields of governance and catalyze transformation, distinct from, and at times complementary to, other dominant drivers such as social movements, macroeconomic processes or technological breakthroughs.

This paper uses governance of water infrastructure in two settlements of Baltistan as an entry point to examine the co-production of power and vulnerability. Access to water and irrigated land is a critical factor in determining how the effects of disasters, such as flooding, are socially distributed within a community. At the same time, the governance of water is intimately linked to the longer-term politics of disaster vulnerability. We examine three different forms of disputes over water infrastructure where struggles over authority and social ordering materialise: (i) between and within settlements over access to a water resource; (ii) within settlements over post-disaster water infrastructure development and (iii) between a settlement and the district government over land, water rights and flood protection. The findings illustrate that the governance of water infrastructure involves continuous negotiations, contestations and disputes over access rights. Access to water resources as an expression of rights plays a key role in the recognition of authority relations. In particular, influential individuals seek to legitimise their leadership role in a settlement by representing the rights and interests of groups in the negotiation of these disputes. However, environmental variability and change, including disasters and post-disaster development interventions, alter perceptions of what constitute legitimate rights, and provide spaces for popular contestation of authority relations through silent non-compliance with decisions. The close interlinkages between material and non-material effects of a disaster are a key feature of the co-production of power and vulnerability. By adding authority relations to studies of village-level practices around disasters, we enrich our understanding of the co-production of power and vulnerability and how these dynamics unfold over time. It is only by investigating this co-production that a deeper understanding can be developed of the mechanisms through which vulnerability is either exacerbated or reduced for particular groups.

Alarming rates of environmental change have catalyzed scholars to call for fundamental transformations in social‐political and economic relations. Yet cautionary tales about how power and politics are constitutive of these efforts fill the literature. We show how a relational framing of adaptation and transformation demands a political, cross‐scalar, and socionatural analysis to probe the affects and effects of climate change and better grasp how transformative change unfolds. We bring affect theory into conversation with the literature on adaptation politics, socio‐environmental transformations, subjectivity, and our empirical work to frame our analysis around three under investigated aspects of transformation: (i) the uncertain and unpredictable relations that constitute socionatures; (ii) other ways of knowing; and (iii) the affective and emotional relations that form a basis for action. Affective adaptation represents a different ontological take on transformation by reframing the socionatural, normative and ethical aspects as relational, uncertain, and performative. This directs analytical attention to processes rather than outcomes. The emphasis on the encounter between bodies in affect theory points to the need for experiential and embodied ways of knowing climate to effect transformative change. Effective transformation requires recognizing uncertainty and unpredictability as part oftransformative processes. This is not because all outcomes are acceptable, but rather because uncertainty and unpredictability are elements which help generate affects (action) and emotional commitment to shared human and more than human relations in action, projects, and policies. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation Transformation in the face of climate change requires new human‐environment relations as symbolized by a major river gone dry in Nicaragua. Affective processes whereby change can be debated using science, emotions and experiential ways of knowing opens new political pathways to change.

In this Personal View, we examine how the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and lived experiences of disability can deepen understanding of four key features of climate-resilient development: social justice and equity as normative goals; the ethical underpinnings of social choices; the inequitable relations that drive marginalisation; and the ways in which society navigates uncertainty through inclusive and contestatory politics. A disability lens not only helps to understand how marginalisation generates vulnerability; it also helps to elaborate the ethic of solidarity as underpinning social choices and steering development towards climate-resilient pathways. Social justice concerns non-discrimination and equitable participation in everyday informal arenas, as well as formal decision making processes. The resilience knowledges of disabled people help to rethink sustainable development by expounding human interdependence and everyday problem solving in the face of uncertainties. They also contribute to opening up climate change decision making and knowledge processes in ways crucial to engendering transformative change. Embracing human diversity by recognising dignity and capacity is required to counter othering and marginalisation, ensure human wellbeing and planetary health, and achieve socially just development. As such, solidarity is not just a normative goal, but also a means of building climate-resilient development.