Climate Resilience in Special Education: Economic Perspectives on Building Inclusive and Sustainable Learning Environments in South Africa

Abstract

Climate shocks and disability exclusion are converging on the same classrooms, yet the economics literature has kept them apart. Schools in South Africa already lose instructional time to floods, heatwaves and drought. At the same time, a large share of the estimated 3.3 million people with disabilities in the country remain shut out of schooling altogether. Global estimates put this exclusion at up to 7% of gross domestic product in low- and middle-income economies. What is missing is an economic account of what it would take to build learning environments that are both climate-resilient and genuinely inclusive. Current practice treats these as separate infrastructure problems, competing for the same scarce budget. This is the motivation for the present paper. The objective is to develop an economic framework for prioritising investment in climate-resilient special and inclusive education infrastructure in South Africa. The method is a structured desk-based review of recent high-impact literature in development economics, climate adaptation finance and disability studies, interpreted through the capability approach developed by Sen and standard investment appraisal logic. The central finding is that conventional cost-benefit analysis systematically undercounts the returns to resilient school design whenever accessibility is treated as an add-on rather than a co-benefit, understating the true rate of return on inclusive climate adaptation. The paper concludes that the climate adaptation agenda and the disability inclusion agenda in South Africa are, in economic terms, the same investment problem viewed from two different ministries. It recommends an inclusion-weighted appraisal method for school infrastructure finance, treating accessibility as a fourth dividend of climate resilience investment rather than a residual cost.