Ageing in the Anthropocene: The Limits of Adjustment and Adaptation in Asia
In 2022, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) released a report on the challenges posed by ageing and climate change in Asia (ESCAP 2022). The report noted that “the population of the Asia-Pacific region is rapidly ageing. The number of people aged 60 years or over is projected to increase from 13.6 percent in 2020 to 24.9 percent in 2050. This shift in age structure is occurring while human-induced climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, and droughts.” In this context, the report continued, “the region has experienced significant climate-related natural disasters, and its population is highly vulnerable to future disasters.” The UN agency’s prognosis was that Asia is at the heart of a “climate-ageing intersection,” demographic and environmental. Both ageing and climate change have been identified by the UN as global and planetary-scale agendas, the former defined as “unprecedented, without parallel in the history of humanity.” It stressed that Asia is a “risk-scape,” faced with a “daunting spectrum of natural hazards,” facing a “tipping point” where disaster-fueled climate change and extreme events exceed the capacity of nations and societies to respond (ESCAP 2022).
The ESCAP report’s contents took me bysurprise, because the UN and its regional commissions tend to be cautious and guarded in their projections and forecasts. While writing my book, As the World Ages, I had closely traced past UN reports and meetings on ageing, and I was used to hearing a more hopeful narrative. At least regarding population ageing—one of the two pervasive, planetary crises that were preoccupying ESCAP experts—the World Health Organization, in its declaration of UN Decade of Healthy Ageing in a Climate Changing World 2021–30, had stressed the equitable treatment of a growing ageing population and recommended enhancing community resilience. In another statement, populations were expected to be “adding years to life but also life to years” and to “pass on the best possible future to their children” (WHO 2025). It was this affirmation of the agency of older persons and “legacy thinking” about their present and future contributions that was a missing piece in this Asia-based report.
This made me curious about exploring Asia as an alternative frame of reference for these debates. I was interested in understanding how this thinking on ageing and the Anthropocene has evolved from within Asia, rather than outside it. Asian experts and publics have common regional challenges, which are both demographic and climatic, and share connected histories in a past constituted by colonialism, postcolonialism, industrial acceleration, and a future constituted by complex choices. The ESCAP report represents a growing line of thinking and policy advocacy in Asia that has emerged at the “climate-ageing intersection.” This term is telling. It describes an overlap and immediate, urgent interaction between two crises, rather than perceiving them as being historically conjoined. In particular, they are attributed distinct trajectories and paces that ignore their links with population growth.
When I probed further, it was clear that the United Nations ESCAP report had drawn from a strong undercurrent of ideas and studies conducted by Asian experts. These studies originated mainly in China and Japan and focused on older persons and their social behaviors, which aggravated their vulnerability to climate risks and undermined climate sustainability. Simply stated, they found that “aging triggers an increase in carbon emissions” (Wang and Liu 2024). Some experts have pointed out that “older adults [have] less environmentally friendly behaviors” and that older-age vulnerability and dependency will demand a shift and forms of uses of technology for productivity that are less labor intensive, “from labor substitution to technological reliance,” for example (Li et al. 2024). This research stresses that older people, especially in the first stages of population ageing, are a driving force in household carbon emissions. Proposed solutions emerge from this research, including social interventions to enhance environmentally friendly behaviors, changing consumption patterns, and technological improvements and upgrades in their lived environments (Wang and Liu 2024). In a widely cited paper by energy economists (Fan et al. 2021), the authors argued that urban population ageing significantly increases urban household carbon emissions, though this is not true for rural populations. The conclusion is that “population age structure change [that] has a more long-term impact on climate change than population size” and that older persons’ consumer behavior needs to be investigated, because it is hard to modify.
In my view, this research is problematic, because it identifies older persons solely as dependent consumers of energy and health care resources and as recalcitrant adaptors to more technocentric and efficient forms of care and infrastructure. It also generalizes the negative climate-related behaviors of older persons. Fan writes, for instance, that the consumption behavior and habits of the elderly differ from those of the younger population due to “solidified ideologies” and declining physical functions and that they are viewed as less environmentally friendly. They also face challenges posed by a lack of resources and inadequate access to efficient technology or health communication, which would help them cope with climate change-related risks (Fan et al. 2021).
Eric Klinenberg’s work on the heat wave in Chicago (Klinenberg 2002), and Richard Keller’s study of the Paris heat wave or canicule (Keller 2015) serve as a persuasive counter to these presumptions about how older persons react in climate-crisis events. Their research shows that older persons were blamed by politicians for neglecting warnings and failing to listen to news updates. But the issue was not individual initiative or behavioral “choices” at all, because their neighborhoods, precarious housing, and social isolation had already compromised them, leading to high fatalities. Other tropes such as that of maladjusted, conservative, and obdurate older adults are unconvincing, because psychological research conducted among both the “young-old” and the “older-old” (those aged above eighty years) has shown that these behaviors differ widely based on cohorts, on life experiences, and on the retention of emotional intelligence and social cognition (Baltes 2006).
In my view, these expert evaluations from Asia conceal more than they reveal. Ageing and specifically older persons’ behaviors are constructed as issues of unproductive dependency—social, economic, and health-focused needs—that are holding back Asia’s transition to rapid industrialization, and in the near future, to technology-intensive information societies. Further, as Asia cultivates its domestic market of consumers increasingly (with a volatile global market in North America and Europe), ageing populations are also identified as citizen-consumers, making choices that are adaptation unfriendly, such as resisting energy-efficient environments. They are expected to be more pliant so that they can be guided to more specialized, age-suited, and environmentally friendly products.
What is unspoken in these policy studies is that ageing and the Anthropocene are occurring in the context of a deep churning in Asian markets. The “silver” market has been a regular focus of news in Asia, and growth estimates are that 1 billion people over the age of sixty could serve as consumers of high-tech, specialized health care, housing, and lifestyle products (Interesse 2025). Ageing populations are clearly welcome as discriminating, climate-friendly consumers with means to integrate more sustainable lifestyles, but equally, they may be condemned as maladapted if they are poor, dependent on care, and require support for making social and climatic adjustments.
Historical Perspectives
Building on these policy debates, I am interested in analyzing how ageing has been problematized in the context of climate change, because I see historical continuities, not least in a repetitive, recurrent, and contradictory characterization of ageing itself. How can we understand these generalizations about ageing and ecological thinking in Asia historically? Part of the explanation can be traced back to gaps between demographic and developmental expectations. For Asian countries, demographic thinking and plans for growth were premised on two expectations: first, a fall in fertility, and second, that longevity and “aging populations” (defined by the World Bank and UN as a threshold when the share of people aged sixty-five or older exceeds 7 percent of the total population) would occur over the same extended time and stages as with demographic shifts in Western societies in Europe and the United States. American social scientists were influential in shaping thinking among the Asian political and scientific elites about plans for industrial development to improve standards of living, though they warned that catching up with Western capitalist development would put pressures on these societies (Frey et al. 2014).
However, there were crucial differences in the timing of these pathways of transition to modernization in the case of the West and in postcolonial Asian societies. A crucial ecological difference was that Western development and demographic transitions occurred before the growing climatic crises of the Anthropocene and in turn created the unsustainable conditions for non-Western nations to undertake their developmental push, situated in the Great Acceleration of the 1950s and 1960s. For Asian nations, with neither access to more efficient technologies nor the capital that the West had derived from colonization, the fallout of industrialization and the health and demographic shifts that have followed have seemed too little and too soon. When compared with the classic demographic and development models, epidemiological and demographic “progress” in Asia and Africa is viewed as being out of step with the trajectory and time that was taken by the West. For Asian policymakers and experts, despite varying differences within Asia and diversity within countries (especially societies in China and Japan, with their unique demographic experiences), current crises are occurring “before their time” due to a decline in fertility and a rise in longevity that has occurred over a few quick decades in Asia, while in Europe, these shifts unfolded over a century, allowing time for adaptation in social, environmental, and health policies (Bloom et al. 2003). China is viewed as an “overachiever,” for instance, in the “compressed” process of mortality decline since 1950, completed even as its per capita income was low. This represents a challenging divergence from the classic models in the West (Chakrabarty 2009, 2014; Pomeranz 2000; Wang 2011). It implies fears of growing old before growing rich (as Chinese scholars have often summed it up) and insecurities of not achieving levels of prosperity that were achieved by Europe and North America.
These “compressed” and pressured economic growth models that have reshaped population policies have not only left societies in Asia unprepared for the crisis of ageing, but also, side by side, unable to cope with environmental disasters. I argue that when climate discourses have been allied to ageing over the past ten years in the case of South Asia, for instance, they are voiced in the registers of a different sense of time: not of a linear, progressive demographic time, which was promised and failed. Instead, it marks for Asia a conjunctural and cyclical time of crisis and a cycle of overlapping crises that have shaped both developments and globalization, where the ecological crisis has trumped the possibilities of a demographic dividend and of economic growth that were already taking a path that was “different” from the West.
In Asia, with a recent past of developmental and modernization anxieties relating to population control and family planning, ageing was characterized as a challenge to rapid development. Today, an accelerated rise in longevity and a fall in fertility have increasingly made older populations a target of criticism. Newer policy discourses link the onset of demographic ageing and older persons as representing unplanned and untimely crises in these societies. The pace of ageing and life expectancy and the working and social lives of older persons still differ widely within nations and across them: the difference, for example, between a hyperaged society such as Japan and an ageing society such as India, where life expectancy and premature mortality can vary by a decade across states within the country (Das and Mohanty 2024). The rapid fall in fertility and ageing over the recent decades across Asia is therefore a signifier for these deficits between the promises of linear, developmental progression and the complex, circulating time of overlapping crises of climate and ageing, which are seen as distinct and conjunctural.
But what is overlooked in the ESCAP report and studies is that both developments at a planetary and global scale are rooted in the same thinking and priorities. Older persons, historically, have been frequently accused of either being misaligned with energy-intensive capitalist development and its accelerating pace, or impeding efforts to meet goals to conserve and adapt to climate change. This “adaptability deficit,” as I will term it, is based on metrics and deliverables that are oriented toward growth-centered futures in which ageing populations already do not have a place due to their lifespan. So, locating planetary problems in individual behavior and choice, which posits a culture of blame, is a convenient and short-sighted claim.
Adjustment and Adaptation in Asia
That experts have associated ageing populations with social, economic, and ecological risks is not surprising. Throughout the twentieth century, ageing was represented by influential social scientists in the West as a burden on modern and industrializing societies, and older persons were termed as “maladjusted” to industrial life and to the social, economic, and cultural changes brought on by changes in technology, economic relations, and social roles. They were also associated with politically conservative views and with attributes such as a reluctance to adapt to the social, political, and environmental challenges of their times. Sociologists and demographers were interested in both making older persons adjust to urban ecologies and in preserving their social integration.
In Asia, however, modernization goals were pursued in the shadow of the Great Acceleration, and questions about the adverse effects of population growth were linked to rising industrial pollution and urbanization. In my view, these demographic and ecological issues were argued deeply, but from the point of view of space, labor, and consumption, or alternatively, that of food security. Ageing populations were still seen as a minority in relative demographic impact, but as large in overall numbers, and therefore they marked a challenge to adjustment in India’s modernization plans and growth. In the 1970 and 1980s, Indian social science experts increasingly saw demographic setbacks and fertility as barriers to achieving India’s developmental goals (“the leap to development”). Excess population, Indian experts argued, affected local ecologies, created several forms of air and agrarian pollution, and depleted natural resources. Older populations specifically were linked to the challenges faced by India’s ambitious agenda for development, which needed to free labor and to increase participation in new industries and projects. Indian social scientists undertook studies focused on family ties in “joint families” and concluded that older persons were maladjusted, because they wanted to retain authoritarian control through intergenerational families. India’s path to “familial modernity,” however, needed families to be defined by “nuclear” ties that fostered more democratic interactions and innovation in individuals and citizens.
In the 1970s, the well-known and controversial Indian demographer-politician and population campaigner Sripati Chandrasekhar argued in an evolutionary, ecological narrative that older persons and joint families were barriers to a life of greater consumption and tied land and property to tradition. Chandrasekhar’s views are problematic on many levels, because he assumed that the Hindu joint family “model” and its conservative older adults and households were a pervasive and static category across India and had existed for many centuries. He was also generalizing that nuclear families, which separated generations, served to control fertility and adjusted to new ideas (Sivaramakrishnan 2018).
Older adults were both a focus of power in families that needed to be checked and posed problems of vulnerability and destitution that were associated with their migration to crowded cities, and this worried policy makers in South Asia. Robert Park’s work on urban ecologies and social adaptation, and Robert Havighurst’s work later in the 1960s on ageing, adaptation and successful engagement in maturity were intended to challenge negative stereotypes of aging. Their ideas were recast in India, shaping the ecological outlook of the Bombay school of sociologists founded by G. S. Ghurye and of economists such as Radhakamal Mukerjee. Mukerjee, however, differed from his contemporaries and saw the ties and intergenerational functions played by elders in the joint family as being suitable for India. If modernization brought social and environmental dislocation, older persons and ties of kinship could stabilize families and communities, he believed (Sivaramakrishnan 2018).
It also became increasingly evident to some sociologists that ageing in South Asia was different from what Western demographic and gerontological discourses described. In the West, it was social ageing or adaptation and adjustment that was crucial as a concern for the individual and society. “The main preoccupation in the West,” wrote sociologist Alfred de Souza (1978), “is with the integration of the aged in the mainstream of society once they retire from the industrial process.” The latter concerned only a minority, for instance, in India, of those who received pensions and enjoyed a surplus to retire around the chronological age of sixty or sixty-five. This was a linear conception of time and development, both demographic and developmental, and it was ill-suited to understand a complex cycle of disempowerment experienced by older populations. De Souza argued that the rush by an Asian elite to modernize had left no means through either traditional security, such as family support, or through new forms of social protection to mitigate the distress experienced by the most vulnerable populations.
De Souza’s statements are interesting because they stress the structural limits of adaptation in the context of industrialization and rapid social change, and all this in decades of great acceleration, the effects of which created the Anthropocene. Older persons who experienced challenges mostly due to an inability to adjust to retirement or other such professional transitions were still a small, but significant minority in South Asia, as he points out. They consisted of those who received pensions and enjoyed a surplus in savings to retire around the chronological age of sixty or sixty-five. For those who had lived through cycles of poverty, adaptation was determined not just by income, but also limited by social marginality and a lack of social protection, especially for poor agricultural and rural workers as they age, who have few savings from their low wages. What is useful in de Souza’s analysis is that while technology, infrastructure, and other developmental vulnerabilities are often readily addressed by policymakers, social vulnerability that is spread across communities and generations is more complex.
Recasting Ageing and Adaptation
So, how should we try to understand the challenges posed by intersecting “crises” of ageing populations and climate change risks? These past and present debates are significant for my analysis of Asia’s perception of its planetary futures. Asia has lived with older demographic and developmental legacies in which ageing populations were represented as maladjusted or impeding modernization and population growth, and that made them potentially unpromising postcolonial citizens. In the Anthropocene present, I argue, they are represented as poor citizen-consumers, contributing to climate-change-inducing pollution and countering adaptation measures that mitigate the worst aspects of capitalist overconsumption.
However, “transcending” challenges is not necessary to become resilient to upcoming risks and complex crises. Asia and its demographic, social, and natural landscapes can be interpreted beyond the categories and silos of demographic pressures and concepts such as adjustment, adaptation (or “adaptability deficit,” as I have termed it), and resilience. There is no return to a “normal” past for the aged, nor for a planetary crisis; both require a redefinition of life ahead. It is the biological and social connections and intergenerational continuities, rather than transitions and discontinuities, that can help us understand how to reconcile and cope with ageing in a global and planetary environmental crisis.