Do you sense it too???? That conventional retirement planning is leaving us unprepared to navigate the challenges of climate change in our later years. Most people focus solely on how many dollars they will have in their various bank, investing, and other financial accounts as they prepare for their golden years. And while yes, for many of us money will play a vital role in our retirement years, given the political, economic, and climate uncertainties that lie ahead, we’re going to need a lot more than just financial capital to live well in our later years. In the first post in this two part series linking retirement planning and climate change, which you can read here, I highlighted the financial and holistic wealth building side of things. In this second part I will be delving deeper into what to my mind climate resilient retirement planning needs to involve.
So let’s ponder together how we can design more climate resilience into our lives, homes, and communities as we age.
- Climate Resilient Retirement Planning: Time for Lifestyle Design
- 1) Climate Resilient Retirement: Building Community
- 2) Climate Resilient Retirement: Prioritizing Good Health Throughout Your Life
- 3) Climatizing Your Body
- 4) Climatizing Your Life
- 5) Climate Resilient Retirement: Climatizing Your Home
- 6) A Side Note on Assisted Living Facilities
- 7) Climatizing Your Community
- Wrapping Up Climate Resilient Retirement Planning!
Climate Resilient Retirement Planning: Time for Lifestyle Design
There’s no one size fits all formula for envisioning and preparing for our retirement years especially given the challenges and realities that await us. Since we’ll all be experiencing our later years differently it becomes a choose your own retirement adventure. Some of us will be single, some with a partner; some living in the city, some in rural areas; some in co-living situations, some not; some with more retirement savings, some with less; some in temperate climates, some in tropical or subtropical (like me); and so on. That means our plans will vary, but we can certainly share ideas and learn from each other to be able to piece together a path that works for each of us.
So with that in mind let’s explore some alternative ways of preparing for our golden years in the midst of climate change.

1) Climate Resilient Retirement: Building Community
This may be the single most important thing we can focus on to design a climate resilient retirement and future for ourselves. Community and social interactions are vital for a number of reasons. Human beings are social creatures. Our connection to others have enabled us to survive and thrive for millions of years. In their excellent book Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors authors Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani demonstrate how it’s those connections to others and our involvement in community that have been one of the main strategies that helped humans navigate climate instability throughout our long history on this planet.
“…our early ancestors depended on carefully nurtured community ties, constant intelligence acquired from others, and cooperation – cooperation being one of the most enduring of human qualities for adapting to climate change. Cooperation was the glue that held life together.”
It was so heartening and amazing to see how much community spirit exists in my tight-knit town after Hurricane Helene flooded so many homes here. A local restaurant set up a grill out front the day after the storm and started serving free meals. A donation station was set up and within hours people were driving in from around the county to bring food, cleaning supplies, personal hygiene items, and more. Many of us who only experienced minimal damage at our own homes from Helene got on our local Facebook group to connect with opportunities to help other residents remove wet and damaged items and drywall from their homes. I ended up helping at the home of someone I’d never met. The homeowner’s friends coordinated the whole volunteer effort for her.
Of course community is also worth cultivating for a healthy and fulfilling retirement because there’s also numerous research studies showing how beneficial social connections are to our health, longevity, and overall quality of life. (We’re going to touch a bit more on the importance of good health shortly.) Sadly, though research and polling show that about 30 % of people 50 and older felt isolated from others at least some of the time in the past year. And this can be a big problem if an isolated senior is also immobile or needs help after a storm, but doesn’t have the social connections to easily access some assistance.
We Americans tend to want to live alone, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from living with people as you age, whether that’s with roommates in a sort of Golden Girls house, with family, or in an intentional community. I’m personally focused on building multi-generational connections because I want to learn from the wisdom of my elders and also connect with the energy and vitality of younger people that can help keep me feeling young, energetic, and vital as well.
2) Climate Resilient Retirement: Prioritizing Good Health Throughout Your Life
Health is wealth. Health is resilience. And health is cumulative. The more we lead a healthy lifestyle early on the more we do to build a healthy foundation for our later years. Sadly, conventional retirement planning has us sacrificing our physical and mental health working long hours often doing work we don’t even enjoy to save up enough money to pay for the healthcare we’ll need later in life to address the illnesses and chronic conditions we developed from leading that stressful unsatisfactory life for so many years. It’s such a convoluted and dystopian way to prepare for our futures and I hope this blog post gets you thinking a lot more about that.
Good physical, mental, & cognitive health have always played a critical role in our quality of life at any age, but especially as we get older, they’re going to be even more important on a warming planet if we want a truly climate resilient retirement. That’s because older adults (over the age of 65) are particularly vulnerable to climate change stressors and the state of our health is key here.. This abstract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) notes that “A number of physiological, psychological, and socioeconomic factors contribute to this vulnerability, including the generally higher prevalence of certain diseases, medical conditions, and functional limitations among older adults; their higher sensitivity to extreme heat; their increased social isolation; and their financial status.”

For me investing for my retirement involves things like riding my bike a lot more than I drive my car, drinking a lot less alcohol than I did in my 20s and 30s, exercising several times a week, meditating, making time to work on jigsaw puzzles at the library (for cognitive health), getting to bed on time, and eating healthy foods. And beyond the fact that dumpster diving is fun, good for the planet, and saves me money I’m going to keep doing it for many years to come because it is yet another thing that keeps me outside, physically active, and young at heart.
Yes, I want to be healthy for selfish reasons, but I also want to stay healthy so I’ll be better able to help others for a longer period of time.
3) Climatizing Your Body
So did you catch that part above about how people age 65+ have a higher sensitivity to extreme heat?
With each passing year being declared the hottest year on record, more and more of us are going to be dealing with rising temperatures no matter where we reside. And the tendency for many people as they age is to move to the warmer climates that are getting even hotter and experiencing even more extreme weather events. Living in Florida and wanting to prepare for my own climate resilient retirement this is something I think a good bit about.
Two of the factors that make many elderly people more susceptible to extreme heat are related and could be avoided if healthy lifestyle choices were prioritized earlier (or even later) in life. One of those factors is their propensity to have a chronic medical condition (the majority of which are considered “lifestyle diseases” that could have been or be mitigated with those healthier choices) that affect their physiological response to heat. The second is older people’s increased likelihood to be taking prescription medicines for those chronic medical conditions that impact the body’s ability to control temperature or sweat.
Plus, it’s worth noting that according to that same NIH article I cited in the previous section, “…studies have reported that consecutive days (typically >6 days) of passive heat exposure (above 40°C for a minimum of 60 min) resulted in physiological adaptation to heat stress in older individuals..” I’ve been doing a number of things to get more used to and more comfortable in the heat. Not only are most of them helping me climatize myself to those higher temps, they also save me money and improve my overall health.
First off, I don’t run my a/c in the summer. I only use fans and other passive cooling strategies at my house. I also continue to ride my bike as much as possible throughout the summer instead of driving my car. It helps that my boyfriend has embraced this lifestyle as well so that I’m not going in and out of a lot of air conditioning when I spend time at his house and then needing to re-adjust to the warmer temperature at my house. I also embrace the additional sweating as a free detox from all of the harmful chemicals and toxins that are everywhere these days – in the air we breathe, the soil our food is grown in, clothing, furniture, and so much more.
4) Climatizing Your Life
Just like I’m climatizing my body to higher temperatures, I’m also climatizing my life to be more prepared and less impacted by extreme weather events – in my case hurricanes. Not relying on air-conditioning in my day to day life makes it easier to endure the days and weeks we sometimes have to wait to have our electricity turned back on after a major storm in our area. In those cases, battery operated fans replace the ceiling fans I regularly use.

Similarly, because I ride my bike so much more than I drive I’m hardly impacted when there’s little to no gasoline available in the area after a hurricane. I hop on my bike and ride wherever I need to go, no gas required. I’ve also expanded my food palette to eat more foraged and less common locally grown foods that are much more nutrient dense than those sold in grocery stores and still accessible when supply chains are interrupted in the aftermath of a storm.
Recently, my boyfriend bought a solar generator so that will help us preserve our frozen foods when both our houses lose power. He also is well set up with a propane grill that has a burner on it for cooking. Since I live just one mile away, once the storm passes I can hop on my bike and ride over to his place to eat.
Climatizing your life will involve different steps and priorities depending on where you live. For example if you live in a colder climate you may want to look into strategies for increasing your tolerance to cold and wearing more appropriate/strategic clothing to keep warm.
5) Climate Resilient Retirement: Climatizing Your Home
Wherever we live there are things we can do to make our homes more climate resilient. Again, those strategies are going to vary depending on where you live. For me here in Florida it involves taking precautions so my house is less likely to flood such as (living at a higher elevation – by Florida standards), creating pathways/drainage to direct water out of my yard and into the alley, and prioritizing the integrity of my home’s roof and windows.
I do wonder if at some point living on the beach or close to the coast in places like Florida will become unappealing or unfeasible for older people, especially those with poorer health as more people start elevating their homes to avoid storm surge. Regularly climbing stairs becomes harder and riskier as we age and elevators would be impacted when the power is out after a storm or if we start experiencing brown outs in the future. These are the kinds of realities we need to start pondering as we navigate retirement planning and climate change. This MarketWatch article outlines some climate related questions potential homebuyers would be wise to find answers to before purchasing a home. I’d also advise renters to be more cognizant of these realities as well. The lives of numerous renters in evacuation zones in my part of Florida were significantly upended when the apartments and homes they were living in were flooded destroying many of their possessions and forcing them to secure new lodging quickly.

As the cost of gasoline and oil continue to increase and our electric grid falters, finding ways to heat and cool our homes that aren’t solely dependent on a supply of electricity also becomes even more imperative. The more we can design our homes (and lives) to require less energy the better. Many people are pursuing renewable energy options for their home like solar, wind, and geothermal. Another option is to harness passive heating and cooling techniques. Granted it’s much easier to do that at the time a structure is built, but that doesn’t mean we can’t incorporate some of the principles into our approach to heating and cooling the buildings we already live in. I find visiting local historic or heritage museums extremely insightful in this regard to see what building practices were employed to heat and cool buildings before a/c and central heating were so widespread.
6) A Side Note on Assisted Living Facilities
Given that so many of the retrofits and techniques that make our homes and yards more climate resilient could be in opposition to what is allowed in HOAs or deed restricted communities, it’s worth looking into what would and wouldn’t be allowed if you’re thinking of moving into one of these neighborhoods. Similarly, buying a condo, which is something that is often attractive to seniors, may be an ill advised move in certain areas. That’s because the monthly maintenance fees could increase dramatically if the condo complex experiences significant damage in a storm or as regulations are put in place forcing condo associations to increase their reserves to be able to deal with future issues. This is something we’re seeing with condos here in Florida that are 3+ stories tall and were built over 30 years ago.
Currently, only two percent of people over sixty five years of age reside in these facilities although that number is expected to grow. My vision for my retirement years does not include living in such a facility (at least as they currently exist), but I still thought it would be worth sharing a few thoughts I’ve had on this option.
If I were going to move into one here in Florida, I’d be searching for a facility NOT located in a flood or evacuation zone. I’d be looking for a building that is structurally sound and would have the best chance of suffering minimal damage during a category 5 hurricane. I’d want to know what back up systems they have in place for when the power goes out. In my area, many elderly and disabled people were left stranded in their apartments on the higher floors for days or even weeks when the power went out and the elevators couldn’t operate. For that reason, I’d be looking at a room on the second or third floor, maybe the first if I believed flooding was highly unlikely on that site. I’d also consider what food might be available if supply chains are ever temporarily interrupted in that area.
I’d like to offer one last thought on the climate resilience of assisted living facilities. Private equity firms are investing in more and more senior housing (i.e. these facilities). That means profit above all else will be the priority for each of the facilities they acquire. I can’t help but wonder how that will impact the quality of the care and services these facilities provide as well as the necessary investments in maintenance and infrastructure to ensure the preparedness of these places. Even if you initially identify an independently owned assisted living facility, there’s no guarantee it won’t eventually be acquired by a private equity firm.
7) Climatizing Your Community
Circling back to where I started with this post, building community and acting collectively are essential elements of a climate resilient retirement and future at any age. It’s not our independence or self-sufficiency that will get us through, it will be our co-operation and mutual thriving. Besides, what happens beyond your yard or apartment building impacts you (and your future) as well.
As more of our local leaders capitulate to greed and sell We the People out to corporations and profit, it’s vital that we find ways to get involved and continue to push them to adopt policies that promote local climate resilience and protect the people, not greedy developers. By starting to engage more in these efforts not only will you help bring about a better future for your town, you’ll also learn more about possible retrofits it could be good to make to your own home and connect with others in your area who are climate change aware and taking positive steps to prepare for it.
These days many cities, counties, and regions are forming resilience committees or groups. Often their meetings are open to the public and in many cases they’re eager for local residents to join these groups or at least provide their input. Attending these meetings or even just perusing the notes from them online can be a good way to get a sense of what are the major concerns, weaknesses, potential problems, as well as potential solutions in your area.


An easier first step may just be to start attending your city council meeting or neighborhood civic association. Climate related issues are making their way into discussions at these meetings as well. Either way, I’d love to see more of us reducing our participation in our capitalist society as consumers and instead reclaiming our role as active, engaged citizens. Reading Danielle Arigoni’s book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation and raising awareness about these issues in your town might be a good place to start.
Wrapping Up Climate Resilient Retirement Planning!
Wow! This two part blog post has been several years in the making. All that time I’d been gathering ideas in a Word document. As you’ve read – I gathered a lot of them. It feels like I could have turned each section of both of these blog posts into a stand alone article – there’s that much to say about all of this. Maybe some day I’ll turn this into a book. It does seem like a really important and glaringly missing part of the retirement planning discussion.
I would love it if the thoughts I’ve shared here spark more of you to engage in conversations about climate resilient retirement planning with your family, friends, neighbors, local officials, and beyond, or even with fellow readers of this blog post. Anyone is welcome to share their own ideas, suggestions, or feedback in the comments below so we can continue learning from each other.
Lastly, I know contemplating growing older on a planet experiencing rapid climate change when profit and greed often trump (pun intended) the good of the people, can feel overwhelming, futile, and scary. None of us has a crystal ball to know exactly how this will all unfold, but it’s been my experience that taking these actions that will set me up for a much more climate resilient retirement has also made my life more resilient, fulfilling, fun, and healthy in the here and now. I believe it can be that way for you as well.
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