According to the World Health Organization, existing healthcare systems are not designed to respond to ageing and older people. There must be a fundamental shift in the way society thinks about this problem. If older people can experience these extra years of life in good health and if they live in a supportive environment, their ability to do the things they value will be little different from that of a younger person. If these added years are dominated by declines in physical and mental capacity, the implications for older people and for society are more negative.
Planning cities and communities in this perspective would provide a better old age for many. Unlike most long-term predictions, there is nothing hypothetical about global ageing, as the demographic transformation is known. Post-second world war baby boom in many countries is one reason for the change but the two more important are a reduction in the fertility rates and a sustained increase in longevity. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) Report on ageing, by 2050, the world’s population aged 60 years and older is expected to total 2 billion, up from 900 million in 2015.
Today, 125 million people are aged 80 years or older. By 2050, there will be almost this many (120 million) living in China alone, and 434 million people in this age group worldwide. By 2050, 80% of all older people will live in low- and middle income countries. The pace of population ageing around the world is also increasing dramatically. France had almost 150 years to adapt to a change from 10% to 20% in the proportion of the population that was older than 60 years. Places such as Brazil, China and India will have slightly more than 20 years to make the same adaptation.
While this shift in distribution of a country’s population towards older ages – known as population ageing - started in high-income countries (in Japan 30% of the population is already over 60 years old), it is now low- and middle-income countries that are experiencing the greatest change. By the middle of the century many countries for e.g. Chile, China, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation will have a similar proportion of older people to Japan.
In many countries, the fastest-growing demographic group is the over-80s or -85s, often termed “the oldest old”. Such greater longevity, suggesting that ageing is a biological process, rather than a chronological one, may bring some people to spend nearly as much time in retirement as they did in their working lives. A longer life brings with it opportunities....READ MORE
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