Record-breaking summer heat focused attention on climate change, but Cornell experts say too little has been paid to its intersection with another critical trend: the world’s rapidly aging population.
Older adults are known to be among the most at risk to extreme weather events that are expected to grow more frequent, from heat waves to hurricanes. Over 70% of those killed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, were age 60 or older.
Meanwhile, by 2030, more than 1 in 5 Americans will be at least 65 years old, and by 2050, the number of people aged 60 and older globally is expected to double to more than 2 billion.
“Just as COVID-19 affected older people disproportionately, the same is true for the effects of climate change,” said Karl Pillemer, the Hazel E. Reed Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College of Human Ecology (CHE), and professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Helping older people and the communities in which they live become climate-resilient has to be one of our highest priorities, because they are among the most vulnerable, and the issue has been almost ignored up to this point.”
Click here to read full article by James Dean, Cornell Chronicle