Introduction
The world is growing older at an unprecedented rate. Global life expectancy at birth reached 73.3 years in 2024, an increase of 8.4 years since 1995, and is projected to rise to approximately 77.4 years by 2054. At the same time fertility has fallen from 3.3 live births per woman in 1990 to 2.3 in 2024, with more than half of all countries now below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. These twin shifts — declining mortality and declining fertility — are producing a structural reordering of human age distributions. By the late 2070s, the global population aged 65 and older is projected to reach 2.2 billion, surpassing the number of children under 18. Europe is already classified as a “super-aged” society, with more than 20% of its population aged 65 or older in 2024; North America is expected to cross this threshold before 2030, and Asia, Latin America and Oceania will follow in the 2050s.
These shifts have triggered considerable public anxiety. Policymakers and commentators routinely invoke imagery of a “demographic time bomb”, a “silver tsunami” or a fiscal cliff driven by rising old-age dependency ratios. Yet such framings risk obscuring both the achievements that underlie longer lives — better public health, nutrition, education and medicine — and the policy choices that determine whether ageing societies thrive or stagnate. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has argued that contemporary demographic shifts should not be treated as crises to be averted but as opportunities to build demographic resilience: the capacity of societies to understand, anticipate and shape population dynamics through evidence-based, rights-respecting policy.
But what does building demographic resilience actually look like in practice? Ageing populations prompt new thinking on three fronts in particular. The first is work: as lives lengthen and workforces shrink, the question of who works, for how long, and under what conditions becomes one of the defining policy debates of the century. The second is care: longer lives also mean more years of frailty, dependency and chronic illness, and the systems built to support people through those years are already creaking under the strain. The third is the wider architecture that holds these together — the institutions, the intergenerational arrangements, the everyday environments in which people grow older. What follows examines each in turn, drawing on evidence from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the OECD and the wider research literature to ask not only what the data say, but what works, what doesn't, and why the answers matter for the kind of societies we want to live in as we grow older.
The Demographic Transition and the Limits of “Crisis” Framing
Population ageing is the product of the demographic transition, the historic shift of human societies from regimes of high fertility and high mortality to regimes of low fertility and low mortality. Globally, the median age has risen from 22.2 years in 1950 to roughly 30.9 years in 2025 and is projected to reach 42.1 years by 2100. Whereas high-income countries reached this transition earlier and now face the slowest further ageing, upper-middle-income countries are projected to experience the most rapid increases in median age over the coming decades, with some adding more than 15 years. Sixty-three countries — including China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation, and together accounting for 28% of the world’s population in 2024 — had already passed their population peaks before 2024.
The dominant analytical tool for translating these trends into policy has been the old-age dependency ratio, typically defined as the number of people aged 65 and over per 100 people of working age (often 20–64). Across OECD countries this ratio has more than doubled since 1980, rising from 22 per 100 in 2000 to 33 in 2025, and is projected to reach 52 by 2050. One OECD analysis suggests that, in the absence of behavioural or policy change, stabilising the ratio between 2015 and 2050 would require raising the effective retirement age by approximately 8.4 years — far exceeding projected gains in longevity. The conclusion that current pension reforms fall well short of what would be needed is shared more broadly across the OECD's recent work, which finds that legislated retirement-age increases will average only around 1.5 years by 2050.
Useful as it is, the dependency ratio embeds a crude assumption: that everyone aged 65 and over is dependent, and that everyone aged 20–64 is productively engaged. Neither holds in practice. Many older adults continue to work, volunteer, provide care for grandchildren and contribute economically; many working-age adults are unemployed, studying, parenting full time or themselves disabled. The metric therefore overstates dependency in ageing societies and understates the policy levers available to alter it. Recent OECD work has accordingly emphasised functional concepts of dependency, the role of healthy life expectancy, and the importance of “untapped” labour resources — particularly older workers and women — in maintaining living standards.
UNFPA’s concept of demographic resilience responds directly to this analytical gap. The concept was formally introduced in December 2021, when UNFPA and the Government of Bulgaria launched a Decade of Demographic Resilience (2022–2032) at a ministerial conference in Sofia. Building on commitments made at the 2019 Nairobi Summit on the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, it was developed not as a critique of any single metric but as a deliberate counter-narrative to the broader framing of demographic change as crisis — a framing of which the old-age dependency ratio is one of the most visible symptoms. In this concept, resilience is defined as the capacity “to understand and anticipate, plan for, and shape population dynamics, and to have the skills, tools, political will and public support to manage them”. The framework is grounded in three premises: that demographic change is multi-causal and interacts with social, economic, environmental and political factors; that responses must be people-centred and consistent with human rights and gender equality; and that the same conceptual tools are relevant in both high- and low-fertility contexts. The 9th Global Symposium on Low Fertility and Ageing, convened in Seoul in December 2025, underscored the need to “rethink old-age dependency” and to value older persons as active contributors rather than passive recipients of social support.
Rethinking Work in an Ageing Society
If demographic resilience requires moving beyond the language of crisis, the first place it must be tested is the labour market. Two questions dominate the debate: how to extend working lives without entrenching new inequalities, and how to keep economies productive as the workforce ages.
Longer working lives and pension reform
If retirement ages remain fixed while life expectancy rises, the proportion of adult life spent outside the labour market expands inexorably. Most OECD countries have responded by raising statutory and early retirement ages and by tightening eligibility for early retirement schemes. France raised its minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 in 2023, while Sweden, the Slovak Republic and at least eight other OECD members — including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal — have indexed retirement ages to life expectancy. The 2025 OECD Employment Outlook concludes that, without such reforms, GDP per capita growth will slow substantially across the OECD over the next 35 years.
Yet pension reform alone is unlikely to be sufficient. CEPR analysis indicates that the additional retirement-age increases required to stabilise dependency ratios far exceed those legislated to date, and that mobilising older workers must be combined with greater participation by women and other under-represented groups. Reforms also raise equity concerns: workers in physically demanding occupations, those with lower educational attainment and those in poorer health typically have shorter healthy life expectancies and may be unable to benefit from extensions of working life.
Productivity, the silver economy and technological change
A persistent worry is that ageing workforces will be less productive. The evidence, however, is more nuanced. Older workers tend to compensate for any physical or cognitive decline through accumulated experience, judgement and tacit knowledge. At a macroeconomic level, however, a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) analysis of Japan — where the working-age population has been declining since 1998 — finds that sectors more affected by ageing report higher labour shortages, and that ageing in the labour force is negatively associated with productivity growth.
Crucially, labour scarcity itself induces adaptive responses. As Japan illustrates, ageing has accelerated investment in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, partially offsetting the macroeconomic drag of a shrinking workforce. Ergonomic redesign, internet-of-things-enabled manufacturing and remote-work arrangements have allowed older Japanese workers to remain in employment by substituting knowledge for physical labour. The “silver economy” — encompassing goods, services and innovations oriented to older consumers and workers — represents a substantial growth opportunity: by 2030, the global population aged 60 and over is projected to exceed 1.4 billion, outnumbering children under 10.
Realising this opportunity requires confronting age discrimination. Bruegel analysts have noted that the perception of falling productivity with age, and the assumption that employing older workers crowds out younger ones, are both empirically weak; higher employment of older workers is in fact positively correlated with higher youth employment. Policy must therefore combine longer working lives with anti-discrimination measures, lifelong learning, flexible career models, and phased-retirement arrangements that allow gradual transitions out of full-time work.
Reorganising Care for Longer Lives
Longer working lives, however, are only as feasible as the health that underwrites them. The second front on which demographic resilience must be built is care: how societies close the widening gap between lifespan and healthspan, how they sustain long-term care systems already under strain, and how they reorganise around the informal caregivers on whom much of that care still quietly depends.
The widening healthspan–lifespan gap
Living longer is not synonymous with living well. The WHO defines healthy ageing as “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age”, encompassing intrinsic capacity, the environments in which people live, and the interaction between them. Yet healthy life expectancy has not kept pace with overall life expectancy. In the Americas, life expectancy at age 65 rose from 17.1 years in 1990 to 19.2 years in 2019, while healthy life expectancy increased more modestly, from 12.2 to 13.6 years — meaning that older adults are spending a greater absolute and relative share of later life with disability or chronic illness. A global analysis published in 2024 estimated a 9.6-year mean gap between healthspan and lifespan across 183 countries, with the United States showing the largest gap at 12.4 years.
Non-communicable diseases — particularly cardiovascular disease, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders and dementias — now dominate the burden of disease in later life. The OECD has highlighted that this changing disease pattern, compounded by socio-economic inequalities accumulated across the life-course, is contributing to a stagnation in life expectancy gains in several high-income countries and to widening inequalities in healthy years between socio-economic groups.
Long-term care systems under strain
The implications for care systems are profound. The WHO estimates that approximately two in three people who reach older age will require long-term support for activities of daily living. Yet according to the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing progress report (2021–2023), only about one in three reporting countries have sufficient resources to integrate long-term care into existing health and social care systems, and only one in four have adequate resources for integrated person-centred care.
The shortfall in formal provision has shifted the burden onto informal caregivers. In Europe, approximately 76 million people provide informal care, and across OECD countries about 60% of older people who receive care rely exclusively on informal caregivers (26). These caregivers are disproportionately women — roughly 60% in OECD countries — and many are themselves older adults, with caregiving associated with sharper declines in physical health and elevated psychological distress relative to non-caregivers of comparable age. Only 16% of low-income countries, which depend heavily on unpaid family care, have training programmes for informal caregivers.
Toward a person-centred, integrated care system
The WHO’s response, articulated through the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021–2030), calls for a transformation rather than a mere expansion of care systems. Five priorities emerge from the literature. First, integration of health and social care along a continuum that supports functional ability, rather than treating discrete diagnoses. Second, investment in primary and community-based services that enable ageing in place. Third, recognition and support for informal caregivers through training, respite, pension credits and caregiver allowances. Fourth, expansion of the long-term care workforce, including improvements in pay and working conditions, given that fewer than 60% of reporting countries include long-term care in their national competency frameworks for geriatric care workers. Fifth, sustainable financing mechanisms — including public–private partnerships and social insurance — that safeguard equity and quality.
Each of these priorities also constitutes an investment in resilience: well-designed care systems buffer households against the catastrophic costs of disability, free working-age family members (especially women) for paid employment, and support older adults’ continued participation in social, civic and economic life.
Building Long-Term Societal Resilience
Beyond pension and care reform, demographic resilience requires reshaping the wider institutional environment in which people age. Four dimensions warrant emphasis.
Age-friendly environments and intergenerational solidarity
The WHO’s Global Network for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities, now active across multiple regions, frames physical and social environments as fundamental determinants of functional ability. Age-friendly design encompasses housing, transport, public spaces, social participation, civic engagement, communication and community support services. Importantly, age-friendliness is not a zero-sum competition with other generations: many features that benefit older adults — accessible transport, walkable neighbourhoods, safe public spaces, digital inclusion — benefit children, people with disabilities and the wider population.
Intergenerational solidarity has been articulated as a leading objective of European Union policy under the Treaty of Lisbon and is increasingly central to age-friendly community design, with examples ranging from co-located kindergartens and care homes to community-based intergenerational learning programmes. The third World Congress of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (San Sebastián, 2026) has explicitly placed intergenerational connectedness, digital inclusion, climate resilience and caring communities at the centre of the post-2030 agenda.
Migration as demographic adjustment
In 50 countries, immigration is now expected to partially or fully offset population decreases driven by low fertility and ageing. Between 2024 and 2050, immigration is projected to add the equivalent of 18.2 percentage points to Canada’s population, 15.2 to Australia’s, 10.8 to the United Kingdom’s and 9.7 to that of the United States. For ageing host societies, well-managed migration can ease labour shortages — particularly in care, health and construction sectors — while remittances and circular migration can support development in countries of origin. Spain offers one of the most concrete recent illustrations of this shift in thinking. Faced with a working-age population already in decline and a Bank of Spain estimate that the country will need around 25 million migrant arrivals over the next three decades to sustain its pension system, the government has moved progressively to regularise undocumented migrants already living and working in the country — a multi-year programme expected to grant legal residence and work permits to hundreds of thousands of people. The policy has been framed explicitly in ageing and labour-shortage terms by the Migration Minister and Prime Minister, and is increasingly cited as evidence that demographic resilience is being approached not only through birth rates and new arrivals, but through integration of those already present. Resilience-oriented migration policy emphasises integration, rights and skill recognition rather than purely demographic-replacement logics.
Gender equality as resilience infrastructure
Gender inequality compounds the challenges of ageing societies in two reinforcing ways. First, women undertake the majority of unpaid care work, constraining their labour-force participation and accumulating pension penalties that leave them more vulnerable to poverty in later life. Second, women generally live longer than men, spending more years in poor health and more often alone. UNFPA notes that, paradoxically, among high-income countries those with greater gender equality tend to exhibit higher fertility rates, and that gender-responsive family policies — parental leave, flexible work, accessible childcare and eldercare — simultaneously address both fertility and labour-supply concerns. Resilience therefore depends not only on policies for women but on structural redistribution of paid and unpaid work across genders and across the life-course.
Fiscal sustainability and intergenerational fairness
The fiscal implications of ageing are substantial: age-related spending on pensions, health and long-term care is projected to exert sustained pressure on public finances across the OECD over the coming decades. A purely contractionary response — cutting benefits, raising retirement ages without complementary investments — risks fracturing intergenerational solidarity and producing political backlash. A resilience-oriented response combines parametric reform with productivity-enhancing investment in education, health, technology and infrastructure, and it explicitly considers how costs and benefits are distributed across cohorts. Maintaining intergenerational equity, as the IMF has argued in relation to Japan, is increasingly difficult under “business-as-usual” approaches and requires deliberate policy attention.
From Crisis to Resilience
The evidence reviewed in this article supports three broad conclusions. First, the dominant “crisis” framing of population ageing is empirically narrow and analytically misleading. Dependency ratios capture demographic structure but not the underlying capacities, contributions and needs of older adults, and they obscure the policy levers available to shape outcomes. Second, the work, care and resilience domains are deeply interdependent: pension reform without care reform shifts costs onto (predominantly female) families; care reform without labour-market reform leaves caregivers without economic security; both without anti-discrimination, lifelong learning and age-friendly environments will fail to mobilise older adults’ capacities. Third, the resilience frame implies a shift from reactive, sector-specific responses to anticipatory, integrated, life-course policy.
Several tensions warrant further research. Healthy life expectancy gains have lagged behind life-expectancy gains in many contexts, and the assumption that longer lives can be translated into longer working lives risks placing disproportionate burdens on workers in lower socio-economic positions or physically demanding occupations. Automation may compensate for shrinking workforces but raises distributional questions about who captures the gains. Migration may ease ageing-related labour shortages but does not, in itself, resolve underlying structural issues and depends on integration capacity. And the political economy of pension and care reform remains formidable: legitimate intergenerational and intragenerational equity claims must be reconciled within finite fiscal constraints.
A research and policy agenda consistent with demographic resilience would prioritise: (i) better measurement of functional ability, healthy life expectancy and older adults’ contributions, building on the WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing framework; (ii) systematic evaluation of integrated long-term care models, including financing mechanisms appropriate to low- and middle-income contexts; (iii) labour-market policies that combine longer working lives with anti-discrimination, lifelong learning and phased retirement; (iv) life-course gender-equality policies that redistribute paid and unpaid work; and (v) age-friendly environmental and digital infrastructure that supports continued participation across the lifespan.
Conclusion
Ageing populations need not signify decline. The same demographic transition that produces older societies also reflects the historic achievement of longer, healthier lives — an outcome humanity has pursued for centuries. Whether ageing societies prove resilient or fragile depends not on demography alone but on the institutions, policies and values through which they organise work, care and intergenerational relationships. Demographic resilience, as developed by UNFPA and increasingly echoed across the United Nations system, the WHO and the OECD, offers a constructive frame: one that takes the structural realities of low fertility and rising longevity seriously, but rejects fatalism and frames older adults as contributors to, rather than burdens upon, collective futures. The new era of ageing invites us to re-examine how we allocate time, work and care across the lifespan, and what that means for the workplaces we build, the care systems we sustain, and the kind of intergenerational society we want to grow old in. It asks us to design institutions equal to lives that, for the first time in human history, routinely extend into their ninth and tenth decades — and to do so not in spite of ageing populations, but with them. Shall we?
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