Adapting communities to better serve growing elderly populations also makes those places more climate-resilient. A new book charts the path to making this connection.

When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments.

Housing expert and community resilience advocate Danielle Arigoni argues in her new book that adapting our communities to better serve the needs of older adults - generally defined as those 65 and older - in fact makes our communities safer, more livable, and more climate-resilient for everyone. Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation draws on her long experience in urban planning and community development to offer a new process and framework for how towns and cities can approach both disaster recovery as well as everyday decisions about how they'll build and change.

Sightline interviewed Danielle about her findings. Her book is available from publisher Island Press and other places books are sold.

YOU'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT AND WORKING ON THESE ISSUES FOR DECADES. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO START WRITING THIS BOOK?

I was compelled to dive into this topic after seeing some statistics that showed older adults dying at much higher rates than the rest of the population in a slew of disasters: Hurricanes Katrina, Florence, Maria, Ian, and Ida. But also in Winter Storm Uri, the California Camp Fire, and then again in the Pacific Northwest heat waves of 2021 and 2022. In all these cases (and more), older adults represented upwards of 50 percent, two-thirds, or even 85 percent of the people who died. When you think about the fact that Katrina was nearly 20 years ago - when 70 percent of the people who died were over 65 - and that the rate of fatalities for older adults is virtually unchanged since that time, it's pretty sobering. And maddening.

I have to credit AARP for really helping me to understand the impacts of our built environment on older adults, which invariably fuels the disaster rates we see here. I am an urban planner and have worked at the intersection of housing, transportation, and infrastructure for 20-plus years - always with an eye to ensuring that it could be improved to deliver better environmental and social outcomes - but I confess that I had some blind spots about the needs of older adults and people with disabilities. My five-year tenure as Director of Livable Communities at AARP really opened my eyes and helped me recognize the connections between the climate resilience work I had done previously at EPA and HUD, and the opportunities to better align that work with the needs of older adults.

I realized that there was virtually no information out there that connected the dots between two massive trends: climate change and our rapidly aging population. My hope was that I could start to create a common understanding of those connections in ways that would compel work in both the aging and climate fields. That is the gap that I hoped to fill with this book.

HOW DO CLIMATE IMPACTS ESPECIALLY AFFECT OLDER PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITIES?

Climate impacts older adults in so many ways, some of which are unique to them, but many of which are shared with people with disabilities, low-income people, and disinvested communities.

For example, extreme heat impacts everyone, but for older adults it is especially deadly. 2023 was the hottest year on record on Earth so far, which of course affects everyone - but not equally. Extreme heat is now the leading cause of we...