S4 E3: #GreenJusticeAfrica: Making climate change more accessible and less ableist

In conversation with Dr Yolanda Munoz

"You cannot talk of climate change when inclusion is an afterthought".

The Centre for Human Rights is embarking on a campaign, #GreenJusticeAfrica to address the impact of climate change on the protection and fulfilment of human rights in Africa. Climate change is now one of the biggest threats to human rights globally. In this episode, Dr Yolanda Munoz, an academic and advocate for the rights of people with disabilities and a full-time wheelchair user, discusses the impact of climate change on the rights of persons with disabilities.

There is no climate justice without disability justice. Climate change is currently the central political and moral issue around the globe. It affects everyone, but not equally. For persons with disabilities, the threat is compounded by discrimination, marginalisation, and other pre-existing inequalities. From the 1990s, disability rights started to receive more attention in the African Commission. Though the African continent has made significant strides to include persons with disabilities in the society, the same cannot be said of climate justice. The even adaptation and mitigation practices, which seek to combat the effects of climate change may do harm to disability communities in Africa. In order to reduce such harms in the present and avoid them in the future, Africa must employ ethical frameworks that bring disability justice to the forefront of climate justice. Disability justice should be an integral part of conversations in climate change.

Professionally, Dr Yolanda Munoz has explored the social arrangements behind the unquestioned exclusion of people with disabilities. She has also served as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, as Program Officer with the Disability Rights Fund, as an external consultant for Global Greengrants Fund and has collaborated with the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program, with the Faculty of Law at McGill University. In the academic field, she completed a Masters and a PhD in Japanese Studies, with speciality in the Ainu women of Northern Japan. Her knowledge on feminist theory and practice has been the motivation to design and teach the course “Gender and Disability,” offered since 2006 at the McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies.

This conversation was recorded on 5 July 2022.

Music: Inner Peace by Mike Chino https://soundcloud.com/mike-chinoCreative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/0nI6qJeqFcc