“Experiential Knowledge, Ageing and Climate Change: an Example from Czech Republic”
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The intersection of climate change and rural ageing represents an urgent but understudied issue, in addition to the fact that rural areas are ageing more rapidly than their urban counterparts. The scant research on the topic shows that older people living in rural areas might be more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change as they experience the impacts first-hand. They might possess fewer resources to support their coping strategies, and climate adversity challenges their health, communities and place-based identities. At the same time, rural older people are less likely to support climate mitigation and adaptation policies and have a lower level of trust in scientific explanations of the causes of climate change. More research is needed to explore the intersection of climate change and rural ageing to obtain more fine-grained, culturally contextualised and geographically diverse outcomes, as suggested by the first panellist. In our presentation, we draw on an analysis of 40 in-depth interviews collected in 2021 with older long-term residents from two climatically distinct rural regions in the Czech Republic. We address the question of how participants interpret their lifelong environmental experiences in the context of accelerating climate change, represented by the phenomenon of long-term drought. |
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