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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