Co-Creating Disability-Inclusive Climate Solutions

We at the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) hosted a full-day in-person roundtable event on Monday, 23 June 2025 at University College London, Marshgate Campus, during the London Climate Action Week. The event was planned as part of our research project titled “Disability-inclusive Solutions for the Climate Crisis: Leveraging Urban, Infrastructure, and Assistive Technology Research” in partnership with the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, funded by the UK International Development (AT2030 Programme) and UCL Grand Challenges. Together with over 40 participants — including academic researchers, practitioners, representatives from organisations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), and GDI Hub team — we explored inclusive approaches to urban climate action through research and innovation.  
 

This blog highlights some of the key messages from the roundtable based on participants’ contributions.   

The Roundtable 

We facilitated the roundtable in three parts — Warm-Up, Brainstorm, and Discuss —for an engaging dialogue among participants and a collective reflection on key research questions. 

• Through the ‘Warm-Up’ activity, participants exchanged introductions and their experiences relating to the need for disability-inclusive urban climate action. It created space for participants to understand each other’s personal and professional perspectives, laying the groundwork for meaningful collaboration throughout the day. 

• For the brainstorming activity, participants worked in groups of seven and collaboratively listed real-life scenarios that demand inter-disciplinary coordinated action and explored potential inclusive solutions. For example, one of the groups raised concerns about how accessible pavements tend to make road surfaces impermeable, highlighting the need for material and design innovation that holistically addresses accessibility requirements, responds to flash flooding risks, and strengthens local climate resilience. 

• Finally, the discussion session was curated as two segments focusing on the challenges and opportunities for disability-inclusive climate research and innovation in urban contexts, moderated by Iain McKinnon, CEO and Co-founder, GDI Hub, and Ben Hardman, Head of Innovation Ecosystems, GDI Hub. Opening the discussion on inclusive research, Pratima Gurung, an academic activist and an indigenous woman with a disability from Nepal, emphasised the value of observation-based research methods, particularly for evidencing lived experiences from local, grassroots context. The second segment was kick-started with a disability activist encouraging the room to think of inclusive innovation through the design principles of CASE i.e. Context-specific, Affordable, Scalable, and always Evolving solutions that meet the needs of people with disabilities and are sustainable. The discussion brought out ‘disability inclusion being an add-on or after-thought in climate programming’ as a major challenge for finding integrated solutions. However, participants also highlighted training and empowering local OPDs to lead climate decision-making can be a real opportunity for changing the status quo.  

Through the day, the GDI Hub team delivered four context-setting presentations based on our desk review covering a range of discussion themes — such as framing of disability inclusion; cross-disciplinary solutions presented in the literature; research methods used; and how the literature discusses climate and disaster action. 

Three Key Messages for Inclusive Climate Research and Innovation 

While a detailed thematic analysis is underway to synthesise the insights shared at the roundtable, here are three big ideas that stood out and had wider consensus on. 

 1. Co-creating inclusive solutions can transform systems and societies  

GDI Hub’s AT2030 Inclusive Cities research has shown that integrating inclusive design principles and accessibility at the outset of a project will ensure equal participation and equitable outcomes. This was further emphasised at the roundtable, with recommendations for adopting co-creation and co-production processes from the very beginning to support inclusive climate research and innovation. “Involving people with lived experiences of disability from the ideation stage — not just during product or policy development and testing phases — is key to ensure we are asking the right questions and in the right language,” one participant highlighted.  

Building on these thoughts, Iain McKinnon, GDI Hub emphasised the need to leverage these co-creating processes to find solutions that drive systemic change in our societies.  

One of the things that [co-production] engagement makes me think about is also making sure that you're encouraging and facilitating leadership. Rather than it being experts engaging with disabled people or disabled community, but supporting in how can we ensure that disabled people are in those leadership positions in the first place? I think it is important.  

- Iain Mckinnon, CEO and Co-founder, GDI Hub 

2. Embracing lived experience and local knowledge is key to relevant and resilient solutions 

A lot of disabled people have to invent solutions themselves, and these are usually locally resourced….. It would be really helpful if we can create a repository of such solutions. Because often times, people know the challenge that they're facing but they don't know how they can navigate that solution. 

- Kavya Mukhija, Graduate Student in MSc Disability, Design, and Innovation, UCL 

Kavya’s comment positioned people with disabilities as innovators and highlighted the value in embracing self-designed, locally resourced solutions. The emphasis on creating a repository of solutions particularly highlighted the benefit of knowledge exchange. The EnAble India and Zero Project are testing a similar approach through the DISH platform, which aims to aggregate solutions from the disability sector and disseminate to a wider audience. The roundtable participants extended the focus on local solutions to also brainstorm on the feasibility of solutions produced in the Global North context to work in the Global South. This was particularly discussed from the perspective of market economics and geographic advantages; for example, the opportunity to harness solar energy in the South Asian and sub-Saharan African regions could drive climate solutions that are low-cost and locally manufactured.  

On the other end, Kavya also brought out the cultural nuances associated with inclusive research and innovation. “I think it's also important to talk about language….. Because in countries like India, there are often no vocabulary for disability-related conditions or any type of challenges that people are experiencing around climate crisis,” she remarked. A lack of respectful and appropriate vocabulary poses a strong communication barrier for people with disabilities to share their lived experiences and directly inform climate decision-making. It also poses the risk of misrepresentation and underrepresentation of their needs and climate risks, leading to incomplete or inaccurate disability data. To truly value local knowledge, participants noted the importance of recognising the limits of local language and exploring creative research methods—such as observing or shadowing people in their daily lives—to better understand diverse experiences. 

3. Nurturing a needs-based inclusive innovation ecosystem to avoid disability dongles 

With new challenges that come with climate change, we also see new tech solutions popping up, including some well-intentioned ones at supporting people with disabilities. However, such solutions often adopt an ableist lens and fail to address the root causes of climate vulnerability or the systemic barriers people with disabilities face. A stair-climbing wheelchair for people with mobility impairments is a classic example of a disability dongle. While it may appear innovative and adaptive, it individualises a systemic problem by expecting people with disabilities to get a new, fancy machine because we couldn’t build ramps. It attempts to solve accessibility from an ‘ableist lens’ and fails to promote inclusive design principles and change the physical environment for long-term resilience. The roundtable participants agreed that innovation for the sake of innovation will not add any value to the everyday life of people with disabilities. 

 From this context, it is essential to place ‘the need’ at the center of innovation. Florence Grieve, Inclusive Transport Advocate at the Bristol Climate and Nature Partnership, highlighted that “We need an app” may not be the right way to solve some of the challenges that people with disabilities face. In alignment with this, Rebecca Posner, Director of Inclusive Research at the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers, expressed the need to engage people with disabilities even at the stage of framing a problem brief, to ensure we are exploring the right issues in a user-centric manner.  

It is having solutions that there's a genuine desire for, and with a bit of investment — whether it's funding or political investment — we can be driven forward by existing solutions. That kind of avoids the “innovation for innovation’s sake”, because if there's no need or no desire for a product or a service, then it can't be scaled. 

- Eleanor Grose, Associate, Innovation and International Development, The Carbon Trust 

 Looking Forward and Beyond

Insights from the roundtable is key to our ongoing research on “Disability-inclusive Solutions for the Climate Crisis”. As a specific research output, GDI Hub will soon publish a paper with a clear articulation of gaps in disability research across urban infrastructure and assistive technology disciplines, from the lens of climate action. The paper will also present a list of opportunities for cross-disciplinary disability-inclusive climate innovation in urban contexts, synthesised based on the findings from the systematic rapid literature review and the roundtable.

But GDI Hub’s mission is to look beyond that and accelerate new ideas into impact for a more just world — for disabled people, and for all people. We are committed to co-creating solutions that evolve, with our emerging needs and evolving understanding of disability and climate crisis. 

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