Frias, who uses a wheelchair, said the rally was supposed to have a barricaded section toward the front of the stage reserved for people with disabilities, but it was never set up.

“I really struggled to be able to hear the speakers when I got there,” Frias said. As an organizer she was able to get to the front of the stage, but others weren’t so lucky. “There were so many other attendees, and disabled attendees, who I know ended up leaving because it just was not accessible to them.”

At other climate marches where she was invited as a speaker, the stage sometimes didn’t have a wheelchair ramp. On those occasions, she wasn’t able to be on stage.

“I’m like, ‘You invited me to come here.’ I would assume they would know that I need access.”

It’s just one of many ways that activists with disabilities have found barriers to participating fully in activism around climate change — an issue that has an outsized impact on them.

For Frias, the climate crisis already hits close to home. She has cerebral palsy, a neurological condition. For Frias, cerebral palsy impacts her ability to sweat, which makes it difficult to cope with the heat. Usually she would be able to depend on the seasonal temperatures to provide relief, but with climate change, the heat is lingering longer throughout the year and is becoming more intense.

“It gets really scary, because historically, disabled folks live in poverty. So we don’t have access to things like air-conditioning and things like that,” she said, remarking how her own family conserves how much they use air-conditioning in the summer to prevent high electricity bills.

She also worries about having to evacuate for extreme weather events. She lives in an apartment with her family in West Harlem that isn’t wheelchair accessible. And, while she says she typically isn’t concerned about flooding in her neighborhood, a train station 10 blocks from her apartment flooded last summer.

“I always have this anxiety in the back of my mind when it comes to sort of like any inclement weather event or extreme weather because I know that I don’t have the ability to as rapidly evacuate from a situation like that as an able-bodied person,” she said.

For these reasons and more, advocates say disability justice, and the intersectional nature of the movement across race and gender, should be centered in the fight for climate action and climate justice. As some of the people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, they want to ensure their voices are being heard — that starts with making sure climate initiatives and events are accessible from the grassroots to the global stage.

Read the full article about activists with disabilities by Jessica Kutz at The 19th.