LocationsThe Invisible Frontline: Disability and Climate Vulnerability in the Pacific
June 15, 2026
The aftermath of a Tropical Cyclone can expose existing inequalities, highlighting the importance of including persons with disabilities in preparedness, response, and recovery efforts to build resilient communities across the Pacific.
Philip Petueli still remembers the sound of Tropical Cyclone Bebe.
More than five decades later, the storm remains etched in his memory — the violent winds, relentless rain, and uncertainty that swept through his village in Tailevu as homes began to give way beneath the weather.
Philip was 12 years old at the time.
Living with quadriplegia, he could not move to safety on his own. There were no accessible evacuation systems, no disability-inclusive emergency planning, and no early warning messages tailored for persons with disabilities. In rural Fiji in 1972, warnings came mainly through radio broadcasts, if families could access them at all.
When floodwaters rose and their home was damaged, Philip’s grandparents carried him to safety themselves.
For Philip, climate disasters have never simply been about surviving the storm. Survival has always depended on whether someone could physically help him escape it.
Today, as Pacific Island Countries confront increasingly severe cyclones, flooding, sea-level rise, and displacement, Philip’s story reflects a reality still too often absent from climate discussions: climate change does not affect everyone equally.
The Pacific continues to bear the brunt of a climate crisis it did little to create. Across the region, rising seas, stronger storms, and climate-related displacement are intensifying pressure on already vulnerable communities. Yet within these communities, persons with disabilities often remain among the least visible in climate preparedness, adaptation planning, and climate finance systems.
“Climate resilience cannot just be measured by infrastructure or finance flows,” Philip says quietly from his home in Delainavesi, Suva. “It must also be measured by whether people like us can actually move to safety.”
Philip Petueli at the Fiji National Council for Persons with Disabilities.
Persons with disabilities remain among the most exposed yet least recognised people in climate and disaster systems across the Pacific. While Pacific Island Countries have become some of the world's strongest voices on climate justice, disability inclusion is still too often missing from the data, the planning, and the financing that shapes how resilience is built.
That absence creates a dangerous cycle.
When persons with disabilities are not counted in vulnerability assessments, they do not appear in adaptation plans. When they do not appear in adaptation plans, climate finance does not reach them. And when climate finance is designed without them, the systems it builds, the early warning networks, the evacuation infrastructure, the community preparedness programmes, are all built around an assumption of who needs protecting that leaves some of the most vulnerable people out entirely.
This is not a marginal problem. It is a design problem. And it begins with data.
Across the Pacific, disability data remains limited, inconsistent, or absent altogether. Systems often cannot clearly measure how many persons with disabilities are at risk during disasters, what barriers they face during evacuation, or what support they require before, during, and after an emergency. Without that information, the case for inclusion cannot be made with the evidence that decision-makers and donors require.
Closing that gap is not simply a technical exercise. It is the precondition for everything else. For evacuation planning that works, for early warning systems that reach everyone, and for climate finance that is inclusive by design rather than inclusive by retrofit.
In the Pacific, the UN Development Programme is working alongside governments, disabled persons organisations, and communities to embed disability inclusion into the climate finance and preparedness systems being built right now. The work is underway, but there remains an urgency to accelerate this further.
Globally, the United Nations estimates that 15 percent of the world’s population lives with disabilities. Yet emergency response systems continue to underserve them, particularly in geographically dispersed and climate-vulnerable regions such as the Pacific.
Evacuation centres may not be fully accessible. Early warning systems may fail to account for persons with hearing, speech, or mobility impairments. Transport systems may not accommodate those unable to evacuate independently.
For Philip, communication remains one of the greatest barriers.
While he fully understands the people around him, the severity of his impairment affects the clarity of his speech. During emergencies, communicating urgent needs to responders or volunteers can become difficult, especially when people are rushed, stressed, or unfamiliar with disability specific support.
“It takes patience to understand me,” he explains. “But emergencies are not patient moments.”
His experience highlights another overlooked dimension of climate resilience: accessibility is not only about ramps and buildings. It is also about communication, dignity, preparedness, and whether systems are designed to recognise different forms of vulnerability before disaster strikes.
Yet Philip’s story is not only one of exclusion.
It is also a story of community resilience.
Throughout his life, Philip’s survival during climate events has depended less on formal systems and more on the strength of his family, church, and wider support network. His relatives have carried him during evacuations, ensured access to food and medicine after disasters, and remained central to his safety and wellbeing.
For many persons with disabilities across the Pacific, this remains the reality, survival during a disaster often depends not on institutional preparedness systems, but on whether family and community are present to fill the gaps.
The informal carers who fill the gaps that formal systems leave, family members, neighbours, church communities, volunteers, remain largely invisible within climate policy frameworks, despite often being the first and most critical responders for persons with disabilities.
In Pacific communities, where collective responsibility and communal care are deeply embedded in ways of life, these networks are not a workaround. They are resilience itself. But they too are rarely measured, rarely resourced, and rarely recognised in the climate finance frameworks that claim to serve the communities they sustain.
That must change. And it must change at the point where climate systems are designed, not after.
For Philip, preparedness begins with visibility. It means knowing whether evacuation centres are genuinely accessible before disaster strikes. It means emergency planning that accounts for the realities persons with disabilities face every ordinary day. It means climate finance architecture that asks, at the very first stage of design, who might be left out, and builds the answer in before the money moves.
Because when climate systems fail to see persons with disabilities, climate finance fails to reach them.
And in a region already carrying the burden of a crisis it did little to create, invisibility is not just an oversight.
It is its own form of harm.