Inclusive education: the missing piece of the climate resilience puzzle

By Hamish Higginson, Sightsavers’ global technical lead for inclusive education. View Hamish’s LinkedIn profile

Climate change is no longer a distant threat or a series of abstract statistics; it is a current reality that is fundamentally reshaping the landscape of global education.

While the climate crisis affects every child, its impact is not felt equally. For the millions of learners with disabilities living in climate-vulnerable regions, a single extreme weather event – a flood, a cyclone, or a prolonged heatwave – can mean more than just a temporary break in schooling. It often marks the permanent end of their education.

As the international community strives to build ‘climate-resilient’ education systems, we must ask a critical, often overlooked question: resilient for whom? If our schools are rebuilt without ramps after a storm, if our early warning systems use sirens that a deaf child cannot hear, or if our emergency plans ignore the continuity of power for life-sustaining assistive technology, we are not building resilience. We are entrenching exclusion and leaving children with disabilities behind.

The intersection of disability and climate risk

The data highlights a harsh reality: people with disabilities are disproportionately affected by climate change. This is not due to their impairments, but due to systemic failures in how we design our societies. When climate-induced disasters like heatwaves, floods, and displacement occur, children with disabilities face a unique set of barriers:

• Inaccessible infrastructure: schools and evacuation centres often lack universal design (designed to be accessible and usable by all people), making them physically unreachable for those with mobility impairments
• Information and communication gaps: early warning systems are rarely available in accessible formats such as braille, easy read or sign language, leaving children with sensory or cognitive disabilities without crucial information during a crisis
• Disruption to support services: many children rely on assistive technology, like hearing aids or communication devices that require electricity. Power outages or displacement frequently interrupt the continuity of these tools, which are vital for learning
• Economic and social vulnerability: when families face climate shocks, children with disabilities are often the first to drop out of school due to increased caregiving demands, the loss of accessible transport or the financial strain on households

To address these challenges, we must move away from a ‘charity’ mindset and toward a rights-based framework, treating disability inclusion as a core, non-negotiable component of climate adaptation. 

Upholding rights

At Sightsavers, our approach to climate-resilient education is anchored in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Sightsavers’ work is specifically designed to uphold these rights, especially in the face of environmental crisis.

Article 3 (General Principles) demands full participation, inclusion and accessibility. A truly resilient system must ensure equality of opportunity, ensuring that a child’s right to learn is not dictated by the weather.

Article 4 (General Obligations) mandates that states and organisations ensure the realisation of all human rights without discrimination. This means involving organisations of people with disabilities (OPDs) in the design of climate-responsive education policies from the very beginning.

Article 11 (Situations of Risk and Humanitarian Emergencies) is perhaps the most critical article in the context of climate change. It requires that people with disabilities are protected during natural disasters. Resilience is only achieved when emergency education and evacuation plans are proactively inclusive.

Sightsavers’ new initiative: the Sarankhola blueprint

At Sightsavers, we are moving beyond advocacy to demonstrate how inclusive climate action works in practice. Our newest education project in Bangladesh aims to empower students with disabilities through inclusive education in climate-vulnerable areas. This builds on work carried out under Inclusive Futures (UK aid’s flagship disability inclusion initiative) in Narsingdi and Sirajganj districts, where our advocacy with partners and OPDs secured inclusive policies in 2,444 schools, reaching 490,000 students.

Inclusive disaster management

Standard disaster management often overlooks the specific needs of children with disabilities, which is why we are working directly with local disaster management committees to ensure that early warning systems are multisensory, and that search and rescue teams can support people with disabilities during evacuations. By making safety plans inclusive, we can ensure that more children with disabilities can continue their education.

Resilient infrastructure and universal design

We’re working with the Directorate of Primary Education on the development of inclusive physical and digital learning spaces in 20 target schools, so they remain operational and accessible during environmental instability. By applying universal design from the start, we are showing that inclusive design is an achievable, cost-effective necessity. It is far more efficient to build accessibly today than to retrofit an exclusive school tomorrow.

Continuing learning through home-based education

In a region where flooding can cut off school access for weeks at a time, home-based education is a lifeline during climate disruptions, ensuring schooling continues for children with high support needs. The project focuses on helping communities to deliver home-based schooling effectively, creating supportive home environments and working alongside schools to help children smoothly transition into mainstream education. We’re also training teachers across 114 primary schools in universal design for learning, ensuring that access to education is achievable whether in the classroom, community centre or at home. No child’s education should be paused because they cannot physically reach a classroom.

Systemic accountability and policy

We believe that local change must drive national progress – which is why this project is designed as a pilot in response to Bangladesh’s national Primary Education Development Programme 5 (PEDP-5) which is scheduled to commence in July 2026 and represents a strategic evolution in Bangladesh’s education sector. Unlike its predecessors, PEDP-5 explicitly shifts from simple ‘access’ to equitable learning outcomes, specifically targeting systemic barriers related to disability and climate vulnerability. By involving OPDs and self-help groups (community groups primarily formed by parents and caregivers of children with disabilities) in planning, the voices of learners with disabilities and their families, are at the heart of national standards for inclusive, climate-responsive schooling.

The bottom line

Educational continuity depends on climate-resilient systems that are intentionally inclusive – for resilience to be truly effective, it must safeguard the rights and learning pathways of everyone.

The work we are beginning in Sarankhola is a testament to what’s possible when we stop viewing disability and climate as separate silos. By integrating inclusive design, protecting assistive technology and involving OPDs in planning from day one, we’re not just protecting a child’s right to learn. We’re building a more resilient, equitable society for everyone.