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During the 1960s, disability activists fought for the right to live independently, rather than in institutions like nursing homes. That led to the first Center for Independent Living: a hub serving and largely run by people with disabilities, established in Berkeley, California, in 1972—now one of 403 locations across the country. CILs help disabled people live at home who might otherwise have been institutionalized, in part by connecting them with resources like state programs to fund home care.

Now, in the worsening climate crisis, CILs have a new challenge: helping disabled people prepare for and survive extreme weather events, which are becoming both more severe and more frequent. The difficulties they face drive home the disproportionate and often ignored impact of climate change on people with disabilities. Extreme heat, for instance, puts disabled people in particular at increased risk of dying. Losing power can ruin essential medication that needs cold storage. And when it comes to local evacuation plans for wildfires and flooding, mobility issues are often unaccounted for. The list could go on and on.

Disabled people are “two to four times more likely to die or be injured in [climate] disasters or crises than nondisabled people.”

Hundreds of disabled people in the San Francisco Bay Area died as a consequence of power outages between 2005 and 2012, notes Berkeley’s CIL emergency preparedness and outreach coordinator Henry Maeko—a systematic failure that’s put pressure on the region’s natural gas and electricity company, PG&E.

“Because of the harm done to disabled people during power outages and heat waves,” Maeko says, PG&E “has been essentially mandated to provide funds for disability centers and communities in order to provide things like backup batteries.”

Back-up batteries and generators can be the difference between life and death for people........

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