A mini-review of Green Aging: reframing AgeTech for climate adaptation and environmental justice

Introduction: aging, climate change, and digital transformation

Climate change, population aging, and digital transformation are among the most consequential forces shaping contemporary societies. Each brings significant risks and opportunities, but their intersections remain underexplored in both gerontological and environmental discourse. While in gerontology, health and equity in the context of environmental change are increasingly examined, fewer studies have explicitly integrated technological transformations within this dynamic. Similarly, climate policy remains limited in its consideration of age and aging, while technology research often overlooks the differentiated experiences of older adults and rarely, if ever considers the environmental impact of the technology (1). Despite growing attention to these domains, their combined implications for policy, infrastructure, and health systems remain insufficiently integrated.

Older adults, particularly those living in poverty, social isolation, or with functional limitations, face disproportionate vulnerability to climate hazards such as extreme heat, poor air quality, and disaster-induced displacement (2,3). The convergence of environmental degradation and population aging demands a rethinking of both risk assessment and infrastructure planning through an age-inclusive lens. Yet, AgeTech—digital and assistive technologies designed for older populations—remains largely siloed from mainstream climate adaptation discourse. Rather than being positioned within climate adaptation systems, AgeTech is often confined to the domain of care and aging services (4). This separation limits the potential for technological systems to support coordinated climate adaptation across health, housing, and emergency response contexts. Thus, there is an urgent need to examine its potential and limitations within broader environmental policy frameworks, from municipal emergency planning to international climate negotiations.

Importantly, digital inequalities persist along age, race, class, and geographic lines (5). The digital divide, defined as disparities in access to and meaningful use of digital technologies, further compounds climate vulnerabilities among older populations (5). Whether due to limited infrastructure, affordability, digital literacy, or inaccessible design, many older adults are excluded from the very technologies intended to support their safety and well-being in a changing climate. Yet, the digital transformation of health, housing, and emergency infrastructure is reshaping how older adults adapt to environmental threats. AgeTech—including early warning systems, smart homes, telehealth, and wearable monitoring (4,6)—offers adaptive potential to support aging-in-place and climate responsiveness, while also raising concerns related to environmental sustainability (7,8).

This mini-review draws on a focused narrative synthesis of interdisciplinary literature and expert discussions, including a public health workshop held at the 17^th World Congress on Public Health (9), to examine these intersecting dynamics. In this context, we introduce Green Aging, a framework intended to encourage critical engagement with the promise and pitfalls of AgeTech in the context of climate change. Green Aging is conceptualized as an integrative framework that links aging, technological systems, and environmental change, rather than as a prescriptive policy model. The framework examines how AgeTech can contribute to climate adaptation while avoiding techno-solutionism and the reproduction of social inequities, and considers the governance and policy conditions required to center older adults within a just and sustainable transition.

The Green Aging framework

The Green Aging framework is proposed as a conceptual and heuristic tool for understanding the dynamic interplay between aging, climate change, and digital transformation. Rather than representing a linear or causal sequence, the framework reflects a systems-oriented perspective in which multiple domains interact iteratively across individual, community, and policy levels (Figure 1). These include: (I) context, which refers to the broader socio-political, geographic, and infrastructural conditions shaping older adults’ exposure and adaptive capacity; (II) outcomes, which identify the health, safety, and social effects of environmental change on older adults; (III) impact, which evaluates the environmental consequences of AgeTech itself; and (IV) mechanisms, which capture the social, institutional, and policy levers through which age-inclusive, climate-resilient technologies are developed and implemented. These domains were identified through a focused narrative synthesis of interdisciplinary literature and informed by expert discussion, and are further guided by realist-informed thinking, particularly a context-mechanism-outcome lens adapted here for conceptual rather than methodological purposes. While realist approaches have been widely applied in literature reviews, particularly in distinguishing mechanisms from contextual influences (10), this distinction is especially important when considering technology as a mechanism within environmentally situated contexts. In this framework, the impact of a mechanism is understood not simply as an effect “on” or “of” outcomes, but more broadly as the introduction and uptake of innovations that shape possibilities for well-being and healthier aging.

Figure 1 ‘Green Aging’ illustrates the dynamic interplay between aging environments (climate events, technology, economy, policy) and mechanisms that enhance climate resilience in older adults. Inclusive design, governance, and advocacy mechanisms that empower older adults as climate actors: these systems shape and are shaped by contextual conditions, influencing AgeTech uptake, well-being outcomes, and iterative tech development through feedback loops.

It is important to note that Figure 1 provides a simplified visual representation of the Green Aging framework. It is intended as a heuristic guide rather than a linear or causal model, illustrating key domains and their relationships within a broader systems perspective.

Context

Within the Context domain, Green Aging emphasizes the importance of addressing upstream social determinants of vulnerability. These include socio-economic and -political status, housing stability, geographic location (e.g., rural vs. urban), access to healthcare and mobility services, and the strength of social and institutional support networks. Race, gender, disability, and immigration status intersect with age to shape exposure to climate hazards and access to adaptation resources. For example, older immigrants and racialized seniors in high-density neighborhoods may face both greater heat exposure and fewer support mechanisms, while older adults in rural areas may lack digital infrastructure altogether.

The role of digital transformation is especially significant in shaping these contextual inequalities. While AgeTech—including remote monitoring, telehealth, environmental sensors, and smart home adaptations—offers opportunities for enhanced safety and autonomy, its benefits remain unevenly distributed. The digital divide, defined by disparities in access to internet infrastructure, device affordability, digital literacy and autonomy, and trust in technology, continues to exclude many older adults (5). This divide is not only a technical issue, but a socio-structural one, often reflecting and reinforcing existing power relations. As such, addressing context in the Green Aging framework requires a systems approach that examines how material, social, political, and technological infrastructures interact to either constrain or enable climate adaptation for diverse aging populations.

Outcomes

Outcomes focus on how climate change affects older adults’ health, safety, mobility, mental health, and independence. From heat-related illnesses to displacement and solastalgia, these impacts require coordinated responses that often intersect with digital tools and public health infrastructure (11,12). In addition to physical and mental health risks, climate change contributes to increased mortality and morbidity and therefore healthcare utilization and costs, reduced functional capacity, and loss of autonomy among older adults (11,12). These outcomes are often compounded by systemic neglect in emergency planning and healthcare access, particularly in under-resourced regions. As a result, even moderate environmental stressors can trigger cascading vulnerabilities across multiple domains of aging. Importantly, within the framework, outcomes are not treated as end-points but as dynamic states that both shape and are shaped by contextual conditions and institutional responses. Addressing these challenges calls for age-integrated adaptation strategies that link AgeTech with climate-informed urban, suburban and rural planning, community health outreach, and accessible digital platforms for real-time risk communication. Understanding outcomes through this expanded lens reinforces the need for intersectional and multisectoral interventions that promote well-being, safety, and dignity for older adults facing environmental threats.

Impact

Impact addresses AgeTech’s ecological footprint. While these innovations hold significant promise in supporting aging-in-place and climate adaptation, they come with notable environmental trade-offs. AgeTech devices such as smart home systems, wearable health monitors, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled health applications often rely on rare earth minerals like lithium and cobalt, the extraction of which contributes to environmental degradation and significant carbon emissions during mining and processing—often in the Global South including developing countries and or ecologically sensitive areas (13). These devices are also energy-intensive to produce, operate, and maintain, particularly when paired with large cloud-based data storage and continuous connectivity, thus amplifying their carbon footprint (14). Furthermore, many of these technologies are not designed for long-term use, as they have limited repairability, short product lifespans, and are difficult to recycle, adding to the growing crisis of unsustainable electronic waste (8).

To address these issues, Green Aging advocates for circular economy principles tailored to AgeTech development. This includes designing devices for longevity, incorporating modular and repairable components, promoting closed-loop recycling systems, and adopting lower-carbon manufacturing and data management solutions (15). Policies and standards must also be enacted to ensure that sustainability is embedded into the entire lifecycle of AgeTech products; from design and sourcing to distribution and end-of-life management. By integrating ecological consciousness into AgeTech innovation, we can support a transition toward technologies that serve aging populations without compromising planetary health. Within the framework, these impacts are understood as feeding back into both contextual conditions and policy mechanisms, reinforcing the need to align technological innovation with environmental governance.

Mechanisms

Mechanisms refer to the social and institutional pathways through which AgeTech and climate policy interact. These mechanisms encompass participatory governance, advocacy structures, regulatory environments, funding systems, and the co-creation of inclusive technologies. Rather than conceptualizing mechanisms as linear or binary processes, Green Aging emphasizes the complex interplay of power dynamics, ageist assumptions, and policy inertia that can both hinder and catalyze engagement, especially when layered with structural inequalities and marginalization (16,17). In this sense, mechanisms operate across and between domains, shaping how contexts are experienced and how outcomes emerge.

Expanding the mechanisms domain requires closer attention to how institutional structures shape the design, implementation, and uptake of AgeTech within climate adaptation strategies. Policy frameworks often prioritize technological efficiency, economic growth, or environmental metrics without explicitly considering how older adults engage with or are affected by these systems (16,17). This can result in AgeTech solutions that are poorly aligned with older adults’ needs or that reproduce inequities by privileging those with greater financial or digital resources (5). Embedding age-inclusive mechanisms, therefore, involves rethinking governance models to ensure that older adults participate meaningfully in agenda-setting, decision-making, and evaluation processes (18).

Crucially, mechanisms also involve the development of cross-sector partnerships, i.e., between governments, health systems, technology developers, and community organizations that can integrate AgeTech into broader climate adaptation infrastructures (19). Stronger coordination across these sectors can support interoperability, enhance early warning systems, and ensure that technological innovations are complemented by social support systems. Through this lens, mechanisms become not only pathways of exclusion but also potential levers for transforming AgeTech into a more equitable, sustainable, and age-responsive component of climate adaptation.

Conceptual foundations and framing

Gerontological literature has long debated normative models of aging—such as Successful Aging, Active Aging, and Productive Aging—that valorize independence and activity (20). These models, while influential, have been critiqued for reinforcing ageist ideals and for insufficiently addressing structural inequalities (21). These critiques are important for situating Green Aging within existing debates, as they highlight the limitations of framing older adults primarily through productivity, independence, or adaptation alone.

Green Aging builds upon these critiques and draws conceptually from Haq’s (22) 3C Model—Contributor, Casualty, and Champion—to offer a more pluralistic lens. It acknowledges that older adults may simultaneously experience environmental harms, act as agents of sustainability, and contribute to climate risks through high consumption or political resistance to mitigation policies. In doing so, the framework aligns with calls for more nuanced and heterogeneous understandings of later life within climate discourse. Further, Green Aging aligns with post-growth and just transition frameworks that challenge dominant economic models and foreground equity, ecological limits, and intergenerational justice (23,24). This is particularly relevant in the context of AgeTech, where market-driven innovation often prioritizes efficiency and consumption, potentially privileging more affluent older adults while marginalizing those in underserved communities.

Developing critical scholarship that acknowledges both environmental and geographical gerontology, further critiques the technocratic framing of aging, urging a shift from individualized, consumer-centric models to systemic and rights-based approaches (25). Green Aging thus draws on these insights by reframing AgeTech not simply as an instrument of care or convenience, but as part of a broader socio-ecological system that must be accountable to environmental limits and social justice imperatives. In this way, the framework extends beyond individual-level interventions to consider how technological systems are embedded within, and shaped by, wider institutional and environmental structures. This perspective directly informs the structure of the Green Aging framework, where context, outcomes, impact, and mechanisms are treated as interconnected domains rather than discrete categories.

Finally, the framework is informed by principles from realist approaches (26), particularly the emphasis on how context, mechanisms, and outcomes interact within complex systems. In this paper, these principles are used conceptually rather than as a formal methodology, focusing on “what works, for whom, in what contexts, and why”. Rather than presenting a fixed model, it offers an open framework to explore possibilities for ethical and inclusive adaptation. This conceptual orientation enables scholars and policymakers to grapple with complexity, while maintaining a normative commitment to sustainability, inclusion, and intergenerational fairness. Green Aging does not position older adults as uniformly vulnerable or virtuous, but as diverse actors embedded within, and capable of reshaping dynamic technological and ecological systems.

Inclusion, participation, and implications for research and policy

The Green Aging framework is an initial conceptual tool that provides a timely and strategic approach to rethinking the intersections of aging, technology, and environmental change. It challenges conventional approaches to aging and adaptation by centering older adults as agents of innovation and sustainability. By engaging older adults as co-designers, contributors, and leaders, AgeTech can be developed to better reflect their lived realities, functional needs, cultural contexts, and environmental concerns (18). In doing so, technology becomes not only a support mechanism for aging-in-place but a medium for enabling climate-adaptive, age-inclusive futures.

Participation in AgeTech design and climate policy must account for structural inequalities and cultural contexts. Culturally responsive co-design requires recognizing older adults as experts in their own lives, particularly those from marginalized groups including Indigenous elders, racialized communities, low-income and rural populations. Such approaches must move beyond tokenistic inclusion toward sustained engagement across design, implementation, and evaluation processes, with particular attention to assessing health impacts and cost-benefit considerations prior to scaling.

Older adults also vary significantly in their values, politics, and relationships to climate change (27). Some may champion sustainability; others may resist environmental regulation due to distrust or differing priorities (28). Green Aging calls for reflexivity in research and policy, avoiding idealized or homogenized portrayals of “the older adult”. Participatory approaches should be contextually grounded, co-designed with communities, and sensitive to the social and psychological dimensions of technological uptake.

Yet, despite increasing exposure to extreme climate events and disruptions to health and housing systems, older adults remain underrepresented in both climate policy and digital innovation (5,16). This exclusion is shaped by overlapping cultural, socioeconomic, and geographic factors that systematically marginalize certain populations (29). For example, racialized older adults, newcomers, Indigenous elders, and those in rural or low-income contexts often face barriers such as limited broadband access, lower digital literacy, language barriers, and historical exclusion from institutional systems (5).

To ensure equitable adoption of AgeTech, strategies must address these intersecting inequities through culturally responsive and community-engaged approaches (30). This includes involving diverse older adults in co-design, investing in localized digital inclusion strategies, and fostering trust through sustained relationships with community-based organizations. Without such interventions, AgeTech risks reinforcing a digital divide that mirrors and deepens existing climate injustice.

At a systems level, AgeTech must be embedded within multi-level governance frameworks that align technological design with public infrastructure, environmental policy, and social care systems. Cities and institutions must move beyond tokenistic inclusion and commit to building age- and climate-inclusive digital ecosystems. Smart city planning, public health delivery, and emergency preparedness should include older adults not only as end-users but as knowledge holders whose lived experience can inform more responsive systems.

This paper presents an initial conceptual framing of Green Aging, informed by realist principles, but further development is needed to translate this framework from theory into practice. Advancing Green Aging requires more targeted and context-sensitive research. Future studies should prioritize real-world evaluation across community-based, clinical, and home-based settings, rather than relying solely on controlled environments. This includes careful consideration of cultural diversity, cognitive capacity, and linguistic accessibility in the design and deployment of digital interfaces.

Scalability remains a critical challenge. Innovations that are effective in one setting may not translate across regions or populations. There is a need for frameworks that support the adaptation and long-term sustainability of AgeTech across different policy and geographic contexts. This requires not only technical adaptation but also political, cultural, and institutional alignment.

Participatory research and evaluation methods are also essential. Older adults must be recognized not merely as users or beneficiaries of AgeTech but as co-researchers and co-evaluators, contributing to design, implementation, and impact assessment. Their insights should inform not only design but also implementation and impact assessment. Such approaches can enhance the relevance and uptake of AgeTech while challenging persistent ageist assumptions about older people as passive recipients of technological change (17,18).

Policy translation is another underdeveloped area that requires urgent attention. More work is needed to understand how AgeTech innovations interact with regulatory environments, care infrastructures, and climate adaptation strategies. As Haq [2017] suggests, aging in a changing climate requires policies that connect individual needs with broader environmental systems. Green Aging extends this by positioning AgeTech as a key site where such integration can occur.

Ultimately, advancing this agenda will require sustained transdisciplinary collaboration (19). Gerontologists, environmental scientists, planners, technologists, and public health experts must work together and alongside older adults to co-create solutions that are context-sensitive, sustainable, and scalable. Importantly, this involves recognizing and supporting the existing contributions of older adults to climate action through activism, volunteerism, and civic engagement.

Overall, the implications of Green Aging point toward a shift from innovation-as-usual to approaches grounded in inclusion, equity, and environmental responsibility. As population aging and climate change intensify, centering older adults as active contributors—not only as vulnerable populations—will be essential for building resilient and sustainable futures.

Conclusions

Green Aging is offered as a conceptual bridge between aging studies, environmental policy, and technological ethics. It challenges dominant narratives of AgeTech as inherently beneficial and urges stakeholders to reflect on who benefits, who is left out, and what environmental costs are incurred. Central to this perspective is the recognition of older adults as a heterogeneous population whose relationships to climate, technology, and aging are shaped by intersecting social, economic, and environmental conditions.

By embedding justice, inclusion, and sustainability at its core, Green Aging moves beyond techno-optimism and deficit-based models of aging. The framework provides a foundation for interdisciplinary collaboration and policy development that better reflects the diverse experiences of aging in the context of climate change. Through this reframing, this mini-review highlights the need for continued empirical research, policy integration, and participatory approaches to ensure that AgeTech contributes to both climate adaptation and environmental sustainability.

Acknowledgments

None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the Guest Editor (Mellissa Withers) for the series “Towards Planetary Health Equity: A Global Call for Shared Solutions” published in Journal of Public Health and Emergency. The article has undergone external peer review.

Peer Review File: Available at https://jphe.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/jphe-2026-0023/prf

Funding: This study was funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant No. 199042).

Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://jphe.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/jphe-2026-0023/coif). The series “Towards Planetary Health Equity: A Global Call for Shared Solutions” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

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