When the future cannot reach everyone: Disability erasure in climate modelling

Climate models play a central role in shaping how societies imagine, evaluate, and prepare for possible futures. Yet these models rest on largely unexamined assumptions about human capacities, behaviour, and access to digital infrastructures. Among the most consequential omissions is disability. Despite the global prevalence of sensory, physical, cognitive, psychosocial, and communication-related disabilities, human diversity remains largely under-represented in adaptation-orientated climate modelling contexts. These models often operationalise populations as cognitively uniform, digitally fluent, and functionally homogeneous. As climate governance increasingly relies on digital systems, such assumptions generate an epistemic narrowing, constraining which futures are rendered thinkable and whose vulnerabilities become visible to policy. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), digital accessibility research, and epidemiological evidence, this Short Communication examines how climate modelling practices reproduce exclusion through ability-normative imaginaries and inaccessible digital infrastructures. Using conceptual illustrations, it shows how disability is progressively erased from modelling assumptions over time. The paper argues that inclusive climate futures require expanding the ethical and epistemic foundations of modelling itself. A future imagined without disabled people cannot prepare to protect them. • Climate models embed implicit assumptions about human capacity and participation • Disability remains largely absent within climate-modelling imaginaries • Digitalisation may intensify epistemic exclusion in future-making processes • Modelling assumptions influence which vulnerabilities become visible in projected futures • Inclusive climate futures require rethinking the epistemic foundations of modelling