Aging in America News

| Q&A with Liat Ayalon

| Liat Ayalon, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Social Work, at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Prof. Ayalon is currently funded by the European Research Council to reduce ageism in the second half of life. She is also funded by the Israel Science Foundation to study intergenerational relations in the context of climate change. Prof. Ayalon was selected by the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing as one of 50 world leaders working to transform the world to be a better place in which to grow older. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We were talking before, and I was telling you I come from the early childhood world, where we talk about how little children are particularly vulnerable to climate change. And I wanted to ask more about why older people are, too. 

There are many reasons why older people are more vulnerable that are biological and physiological in nature. Their immune systems are declining. Sensory decline prevents people from noticing signals and existing medical conditions also make older persons more susceptible. But since I’m from social science, I would say that a huge reason is social isolation in older age. 

What’s an example of that?

During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the people who were most vulnerable were the isolated older people. And since I’m researching ageism, I would say older people are also being excluded from policy documents regulated to climate change. So even though there is plenty of research to show that physiologically they’re vulnerable, there is nothing to address this issue in preparedness and adaptation measures and so forth. 

Do you think this blind spot is international? Is Israel different in different cultures? 

Maybe I will start by saying that the issue of aging and climate change has not received enough attention from the research community. So you are asking me questions that I can answer only in a very speculative way. There isn’t enough research to show what’s out there. I can say that the legal research conducted in Canada or the U.S. has shown that climate change policy, for instance, does not acknowledge older people. We see similar issues coming up in Israel, where climate change is hardly acknowledged. 

I didn’t know that generally Israelis don’t think about climate change much. 

No. We care about other things. We need to think about what’s going to hunt us in the next minute, not what’s going to hunt us in the next century. 

Beyond heat, there are a multitude of other threats, including extreme weather. 

In addition to all the physiological things, you do need someone, for instance, if you use a wheelchair, to help you get out of the house. Or if you can’t hear the siren, you need someone to alert you. 

Have you seen any programs or practices that you find encouraging? 

What I see as encouraging is the fact that even at this conference [Gerontological Society of America’s Annual Scientific Meeting] we have three different symposia on the topic. So I think there is more and more awareness of that. The WHO’s Healthy Aging Collaborative has a policy report on healthy aging in a healthy climate. In a decade maybe we’ll have a better understanding. 

Is there research that you yourself are excited about or that you’re planning on?

We just received funding for a collaborative project with Deborah Carr from Boston University to look at social isolation, social relations, and loneliness in the context of climate change. We will be looking at people both in Tel Aviv and Boston during wintertime, and during summertime to understand the climate context, but also the environmental context and how it relates to the social experiences in their environment. 

What else intrigues you about climate change?

The research shows that it’s mainly younger people who report worries about the climate, eco-anxiety, eco-depression. But older people oftentimes are the ones who are more likely to engage in environmental behaviors. They’re just more pro-environmental overall, even though they’re being blamed a lot of times. That’s how I got to this field. Since 2018, I have been listening to climate discourse that was quite divided emphasizing us versus them. 

Everybody blames the Boomers for everything. But in reality, they’re more conscientious than they get credit for. 

In reality, none of us is doing enough. More importantly, it can’t be only at the individual level. It also has to also come from the top via policies and regulations.

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