The Grey Lens: Ageing, Sustainability, and Climate in Our Shared Tomorrow
- Author(s): Arvindd Narayanan and Ambika Shankar
- Size: 140 mm × 220 mm
- Pages: 50
- ISBN: 9789394657502
- Cover Price:
Rs.1.00 / US $1.00
Book Details
India and much of the world are entering a period defined by two irreversible shifts: a rapidly ageing population and an increasingly unstable climate. Although each has been studied extensively in isolation, their intersection remains insufficiently examined in public discourse and policy. Yet for older adults, climate change is not an abstract future risk—it is a lived reality that shapes health, mobility, dignity, and survival.
The Grey Lens brings ageing and sustainability into the same frame. Drawing on public-health research, climate science, policy analysis, and lived experience from India and across the world, the book examines how rising temperatures, air pollution, and environmental stressors disproportionately affect older adults, also highlighting the often-overlooked role of elders as custodians of ecological knowledge, restraint, and resilience.
Structured across themes of vulnerability, exposure, systems readiness, and stewardship, the book moves beyond crisis narratives to ask deeper questions about justice, responsibility, and intergenerational ethics. It argues that climate resilience cannot be achieved without addressing the realities of ageing, and that policies for older persons must now engage directly with environmental risk.
Written for informed citizens, practitioners, and policymakers, The Grey Lens offers a grounded, evidence-based perspective on what it means to grow old in a warming world and why protecting the dignity of older adults is inseparable from protecting the planet itself.
Target Audience
-
Researchers, policymakers, public health professionals, environmental planners, gerontology scholars, healthcare practitioners, development agencies, urban planners, climate experts, and students interested in ageing, sustainability, climate change, and public policy
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
A warming world and ageing citizens
Ageing populations and development planning
Climate risks and older adults
Environmental stress and the biology of ageing
Older adults and contributions to sustainability
Moral and policy considerations
Towards an integrated approach
Sustainability through a grey lens
Reconsidering what sustainability encompasses
Low consumption practices and environmental impact
Traditional ecological knowledge and local resilience
Older adults and environmental action
Intergenerational transmission of environmental values
Sustainability and healthy ageing
Barriers to inclusion in sustainability planning
Repositioning older adults in sustainability discourse
Heat, health, and human limits
Ageing physiology in a warming climate
Heat as a social and environmental vulnerability
Geographies where heat and age intersect
Heat as a multi-system health stressor
Heat and air pollution as a combined threat
Healthcare systems under heat stress
Ethical and policy implications
Towards heat-resilient ageing
When the environment ages you
Beyond chronological age
Air pollution as a driver of accelerated ageing
Climate extremes and the ageing brain
The heat–pollution–ageing feedback loop
Unequal burdens of environmental ageing
Lived experiences of environmental ageing
Implications for public health and policy
Ageing in the Anthropocene
Systems under strain
Why systems matter more as societies age
Healthcare systems
Housing and the built environment as unacknowledged health systems
Urban infrastructure and the geography of exclusion
Social protection systems
Fragmentation as the core institutional failure
Towards climate-ready, age-aware systems
Conclusion
Bibliography
Keywords
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