UArctic TN on Health and Well-being, NDI Think Tank action project, and the project NORRUS-AGE joint effort to host a session at the UArctic Congress 2021

Press Release

The online parallel session took place on 18 May 2021 at the UArctic Congress 2021, and was entitled “The Arctic Contributing Toward WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020–2030”. This focus on Healthy Ageing is part of the priorities of the UArctic Thematic Network on Health and Well-being in the Arctic, Northern Dimension Institute Think Tank action project, and the project Indigenous and non-indigenous residents of the Nordic-Russian region: Best practices for equity in healthy ageing (NORRUS-AGE).

The Arctic population is ageing, albeit at various speed across the regions and to a different degree of “healthiness” and “inequity related to healthy ageing” in the Arctic residents across their life-course. The aim of our session was to contribute to a multidisciplinary understanding of circumstances and patterns of healthy ageing in the Arctic and share examples of new solutions as components of Arctic member states’ national policies and in accordance with principles of the new global Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020–2030.

The speakers presented several reports about actions to improve health and well-being for Arctic people in the second half of their lives at multiple levels of Arctic governance and in multiple sectors to prevent disease, promote health, maintain intrinsic capacity and enable functional ability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations:

• Anastasia Emelyanova (University of Oulu) and Elena Golubeva (NArFU) “WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020–2030 and the practices in the Finnish-Russian Arctic”
• Agneta Larsson (Luleå University of Technology) “Enlarging life-space mobility for elderly residents in the Arctic: human and environmental factors”
• Kamilla Pernille Johansen Nørtoft (University of Copenhagen) “Involvement of older people in health promotion initiatives in Greenland”

More information: Anastasia Emelyanova anastasia.emelyanova@oulu.fi

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