On the 26th of May Sweltering Cities hosted our first Heat and Disability Symposium, bringing together more than 120 people with lived experience of disability, researchers, advocates, and policy makers from across Australia to discuss how extreme heat impacts disabled communities. This event was run in cooperation with Writer and Disability Advocate El Gibbs, and Dr Elizabeth Humphrys and Professor Beth Goldblatt from UTS.
With extreme heat becoming more frequent and intense, people with disabilities are facing unique and often overlooked challenges during hot weather. Throughout the symposium, speakers challenged the assumption that disabled people are inherently vulnerable. Instead, they highlighted how vulnerability is created when systems fail to meet people’s needs, and compounded by inaccessible housing, transport, emergency planning, healthcare and support services. Yet disability perspectives remain largely absent from discussions about climate adaptation and heat resilience.
The symposium created a space to bring these conversations together. Through presentations, a panel discussion and an interactive workshops, attendees explored the many ways that heat intersects with disability, from housing, transport and energy insecurity, to healthcare, emergency preparedness and social isolation. On this page you’ll find a recording of the event, a summary of the discussion, the presentation and case studies and other resources. Thank you to all our collaborators, speakers, case study contributors, volunteer and attendees who made this event possible.
Catch the recording of our symposium below
Setting the Scene
Disability advocate, writer and policy consultant El Gibbs opened the symposium by exploring how extreme heat intersects with existing inequalities faced by people with disabilities. She highlighted the compounding impacts of energy insecurity, inaccessible housing and transport, low incomes, social isolation, barriers to evacuation, and exclusion from decision making processes. She challenged the framing of disabled people as inherently vulnerable, arguing they should be recognised as partners in building resilience and shaping solutions rather than passive recipients of support.
Dr Elizabeth Humphrys spoke about the impacts of extreme heat on workers, particularly lower-paid and frontline workers such as carers, delivery drivers, cleaners, and construction workers. She highlighted the growing pressures heat places on workers and support systems, and argued that climate adaptation is inherently political – stressing that disability rights and inclusion must be central to adaptation planning, not treated as optional.
Luke Nelson and Riley Buchanan from Inclusion Australia focused on the experiences of people with intellectual disability during extreme heat, noting that isolation is one of the most dangerous risk factors during extreme heat, particularly for people who rely on others for support. They discussed for the importance of supported decision making and accessible communication around heat, including Easy Read resources, to ensure people with intellectual disabilities can access information and exercise real choice in emergencies.
Providing a medical perspective, Dr Catherine Pendry described extreme heat as a public health emergency and a “silent killer” responsible for more deaths than other natural hazards combined. She outlined the health impacts of extreme heat and highlighted how factors such as social isolation, medication management, and unreliable access to power can increase risk for people with disabilities.
Finally, disability and human rights advocate Kelly Cox explored how heat creates compounding and cascading risks for people with disabilities, through factors such as energy poverty, barriers to evacuation, and even the physical strain of equipment such as her hot metal wheelchair in extreme heat. Drawing on human rights and disaster risk reduction frameworks, she emphasised that heat becomes a disaster when systems fail, and asked whose lives are being left at risk through current approaches to climate and emergency planning.
Together, the panel highlighted a common message: extreme heat is not just an environmental issue – it is a question of health, equity, accessibility and human rights.
After the panel, Nat from Sweltering Cities presented the findings of the Sweltering Cities Summer Survey with a deep dive into the results from people with disabilities and chronic illness.
Exploring Lived Experiences
Following the panel, participants worked through case studies to get an insight into the lived experiences of people with disabilities during periods of extreme heat.
Working in small groups, participants were asked two questions:
- How is this person impacted by extreme heat? What might happen to them during a bad heatwave, and what might be the long-term effects of increasingly hot summers?
- What resources, networks, supports or policies could help this person survive and thrive during hotter summers and heatwaves?
While each case study reflected a different lived experience, several common themes emerged.
Participants consistently highlighted impacts are rarely just physical. Extreme heat was linked to social isolation, mental health impacts, disrupted sleep, fatigue, anxiety, and reduced participation in work, study and community life. With these impacts in mind, participants also discussed the cumulative effects over repeated hot summers, where people become increasingly exhausted, isolated and excluded over time.
Access to cool spaces emerged as a major concern. Participants noted that cooling centres, libraries and other community facilities can only be effective if people can physically access them. Transport barriers, inaccessible infrastructure, support worker availability, and concerns about discrimination all prevent people from reaching cooler spaces when they need them most.
The affordability of staying cool was another recurring issue. Across multiple case studies, participants raised concerns about rising electricity costs, energy insecurity, and poorly insulated housing. Many noted that cooling is not a luxury but an essential health support, and that no one should be forced to choose between their health and being able to afford an electricity bill.
Many discussions also highlighted the burden of navigating complex systems that are not designed with people with disabilities in mind. Whether accessing healthcare, disability supports, workplaces, transport, housing or emergency services, participants described how existing barriers to support are often intensified during periods of extreme heat.
A strong theme throughout the workshops was that responsibility for managing heat is too often placed on individuals. Participants highlighted the need to move beyond personal coping strategies and towards structural solutions that create safer homes, workplaces, communities and support systems.
Importantly, participants emphasised that many of the challenges discussed were not inevitable consequences of disability, but the result of systems and policies that fail to meet people’s needs. Many of the solutions identified focused on addressing these barriers through better housing, transport, support systems and emergency planning.
Disability-led solutions and key asks for decision makers
Across the workshops, there was a strong sense that many of the solutions already exist, but are too often underfunded or design without meaningful input from the people they aim to support.
Housing emerged as a clear priority, with calls for heat-safe homes through stronger minimum energy efficiency standards, better thermal performance in rental housing, and increased investment in retrofits and cooling upgrades.
Closely linked to this was calls for stronger energy concessions, subsidies for cooling costs, and protections against disconnection during periods of extreme heat. Reliable power was identified as particularly important for people who rely on assistive technology, medical equipment, or cooling to manage health conditions.
Participants called for more accessible cooling spaces, such as libraries, pools and community centres, alongside affordable transport and support to reach them safely. Many also highlighted the importance of social connection, including community check-in systems and neighbourhood networks that support each other during heatwaves.
Participants also called for stronger emergency planning that explicitly includes people with disabilities. This included more accessible communication, improved training for emergency responders, and ensuring people with disabilities are involved in emergency planning before disasters occur.
Workplaces, schools and universities were also identified as important sites for change. Participants called for stronger protections against heat exposure, more flexible arrangements during extreme weather, and greater recognition of heat as a serious health and safety issue.
Many discussions focused on the need for more flexible support systems. Participants raised concerns about disability support cuts and highlighted that support already often doesn’t meet heightened needs during heatwaves. They emphasised that systems such as the NDIS need to be responsive to changing environments and recognise the flexible support needed during periods of extreme heat.
Across all discussions, one message remained consistent: people with disabilities are experts in their own lives and that meaningful climate adaptation requires moving beyond consultation and towards genuine partnership and co-design of policies and systems.
What happens next
The Heat and Disability Symposium highlighted both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity to build more inclusive and accessible responses to extreme heat.
As Australia continues to experience hotter and more dangerous summers, participants make it clear that disabled perspectives must be embedded across climate adaptation, emergency management, housing, energy, transport, and health policy. Extreme heat is not experienced equally, and responses that fail to consider disability risk leaving many people behind.
These conversations and ideas shared throughout the symposium will help to inform Sweltering Cities’ ongoing work on heat and disability, including future advocacy and community engagement.
If you’d like to get involved, we encourage you to:
- Watch the symposium recording and explore the resources below that were shared by participants
- Sign up to our newsletter receive updates on our work
- Join our volunteer network and help shape future campaigns, research and community projects
- Share your own experiences of heat and disability to keep the conversation going!
Together, we can build cooler, safer and more inclusive communities for everyone.
