Chengmeng Zhang

Population aging and intensifying summer heat are increasing interest in seasonal mobility among older adults. The eastern and northeastern margins of the Tibetan Plateau contain low- and moderate-altitude valleys and foothill settlements with cool summer climates, extensive natural environments, Tibetan and Qiang cultural heritage, traditional health resources and improving rail accessibility. This Perspective examines their potential for health sojourning, defined as recurrent temporary relocation to a climatically suitable destination for extended residence to maintain health, functional ability and well-being. Its public health relevance lies in changing the environment where older adults spend part of the year. Residence for several weeks or months in cooler and greener settings may reduce heat exposure and may support physical activity, nature contact, restorative routines, social participation, and continuity of daily life. Moderate altitude is treated as an environmental context rather than a therapeutic exposure because evidence derives mainly from long-term residents and individual responses vary. Cultural participation may enrich destination life through meaningful activity, learning, social contact and place familiarity, while primary care, medication access, and care coordination are important for safe extended residence. Socio-ecological sustainability is treated as a complementary development goal rather than an assumed property of health sojourning. Rail-oriented access, longer stays, adaptive reuse of existing buildings, ecological limits, and community participation may lower environmental costs under appropriate conditions. Recent health sojourning practices across county-level jurisdictions in Sichuan and Gansu provinces illustrate established, emerging, and planned forms of this mobility while identifying evidence gaps for future research.

The peripartum period and early parenting are critical phases for maternal health, infant development, family functioning, and long-term wellbeing. Although maternal and child health services have traditionally prioritized pregnancy safety, childbirth security, and neonatal survival, contemporary public health agendas increasingly emphasize maternal mental health, positive birth and postnatal experiences, parent-infant bonding, and family-centered support. Evidence suggests that music therapy, mindful music listening, artistic expression, doula support, aromatherapy, parent-infant singing, and parental voice interaction may help reduce pregnancy related anxiety, labor pain, fear of cesarean birth, postpartum psychological distress, and neonatal pain, while also supporting early relational care. However, current applications remain fragmented, often limited to single interventions, isolated settings, short care periods, and insufficient personalization. This Perspective proposes an AI-embedded integrative arts-based care framework for promoting maternal and infant wellbeing across pregnancy, childbirth and cesarean birth, postpartum recovery, neonatal intensive care, and home and community follow up. Within this framework, artificial intelligence is conceptualized as a supportive coordination infrastructure rather than a substitute for professional care. It may assist risk identification, needs profiling, personalized intervention matching, dynamic monitoring, adaptive feedback, referral linkage, and continuity across hospital, community, and family settings. The framework further emphasizes professional oversight, human verification, privacy protection, equitable access, and ethical governance. By integrating arts-based support with responsible AI-enabled coordination, this Perspective reimagines non-pharmacological maternal and infant care as a continuous, human-led, family-participatory public health pathway for diverse perinatal care contexts.

Household carbon emissions (HCEs) are an important yet comparatively underexamined area of climate mitigation. This review synthesizes theoretical and empirical evidence on how population dynamics shape HCEs beyond the effects of aggregate population size. It develops a conceptual framework linking four dimensions of population dynamics - household size and structure, population ageing, fertility and childrearing, and migration and urbanization - to direct carbon emissions (DCEs) and indirect carbon emissions (ICEs) through household-scale, life-course, family-formation, and spatial-contextual mechanisms. The empirical evidence shows that the effects of population dynamics are neither uniform nor linear. Household size exhibits a relatively consistent scale effect: larger households generally generate higher total emissions but lower emissions per capita because of resource sharing and economies of scale. By contrast, population ageing operates through competing pathways, reducing emissions through lower mobility and discretionary consumption while potentially increasing residential energy use and healthcare-related emissions. Childrearing similarly expands demand for housing, mobility, food, education, and childcare but may constrain other consumption through financial pressures and precautionary saving. Migration and urbanization reshape emissions by relocating households across different built-environment, transport, infrastructure, and energy-system contexts, with outcomes depending strongly on urban form and development stage. Divergent empirical findings also reflect differences in emission accounting boundaries, data levels, demographic measures, model specifications, and regional contexts. Overall, population dynamics should be understood as context-dependent upstream conditioning processes rather than linear determinants of HCEs. Climate mitigation strategies should therefore move beyond aggregate population indicators and account for heterogeneity in household structure, life-course transitions, and spatial and institutional contexts.

Population aging is changing the work of public health. Longer lives require not only medical treatment, but also support for functional ability, social connection, meaning, participation, and everyday wellbeing. Arts engagement is increasingly discussed in relation to health, yet arts activities often remain treated as cultural or recreational provision rather than as part of preventive public health systems. This conceptual article develops the idea of integrated community arts engagement as a framework for understanding how arts participation can contribute to healthy aging. The framework draws on literature in arts and health, healthy aging, social prescribing, community participation, and health equity. Integrated community arts engagement proposed here refers to community-based arts activities that are meaningful to older adults, accessible in everyday settings, connected to health and social care pathways, supported by local partnerships, and evaluated as part of healthy aging systems. The framework proposes six hypothesized mechanisms and five policy pathways for system integration. Reframing arts engagement as preventive infrastructure does not medicalize the arts. Rather, it recognizes that health in later life is shaped in ordinary social and cultural settings. These pathways are conceptual propositions rather than empirical findings of this article. Integrated community arts engagement may help aging societies build more humane, locally grounded, and culturally responsive approaches to prevention and healthy aging.

Digital technologies such as telepsychology, mobile health applications, artificial intelligence (AI), and immersive virtual environments are rapidly transforming the delivery of psychological care. Despite these advances, music therapy remains weakly integrated into most digital mental health systems. In many current interventions, including virtual reality therapies and mental health applications, music is typically used as background ambience rather than as an active therapeutic mechanism. This disconnect limits the potential of music-based interventions for emotional regulation and psychological support. Advances in artificial intelligence create new opportunities to address this gap. Through emotion recognition, behavioral data analysis, and generative music algorithms, AI systems can anticipate emotional states and deliver adaptive musical interventions before psychological distress escalates. Such AI-driven proactive music therapy enables music to function as an embedded regulatory component within digital mental health ecosystems rather than as a passive environmental feature. A conceptual framework for integrating proactive music therapy into digital mental health platforms is proposed, highlighting key technological components including emotion sensing, adaptive music intelligence, and digital therapeutic delivery. Ethical considerations and research priorities for AI-enabled music interventions are also outlined. AI-driven proactive music therapy may represent an important direction for scalable and personalized psychological care in the era of digital mental health.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has traditionally been approached through a biomedical lens, focusing on neurodegenerative markers such as amyloid-β plaques and tau protein accumulation. However, clinical evidence increasingly demonstrates that social dysfunction, which includes identity confusion, emotional withdrawal, and breakdowns in social roles. This article reconceptualizes AD as a disorder in which the primary dimension of decline lies in social relationship management capacity (SRMC), while recognizing that neurobiological and cognitive deterioration remain integral to its manifestation and progression. SRMC refers to a person’s ability to identify, interpret, maintain, and regulate social ties embedded in complex networks. This article introduces a conceptual and technical framework for a socially embedded artificial intelligence (AI) framework designed to recognize and compensate for the deterioration of SRMC in AD. Drawing on social capital theory, affective computing, and neural social cognition research, this framework proposes a four-dimensional intervention model: relationship recognition, relationship learning, relationship establishment, and relationship management. By aligning cutting-edge AI techniques with the lived social reality of individuals with AD, this approach not only provides a new path for supportive care but also reorients ethical and technological discourse toward sustaining social personhood in the face of neurodegeneration.

Where climate change and population aging intersect, challenges and opportunities for society arise. While older adults are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, they can also significantly contribute to climate action and environmental sustainability [1]. 'Green Longevity' is a new framework that integrates sustainable green lifestyles with healthy aging. Green longevity highlights the importance of increasing climate resilience in older adults through infrastructure that supports them in adapting their behaviors. The framework aligns with public health strategies that promote environmentally friendly longevity and it establishes the vital role older adults can play in community climate adaptation [2, 3]. Exploring practical strategies for implementing this framework is crucial if we want to promote wellbeing in older adults as the climate is rapidly changing.Older adults are physiologically, socio-economically, and psychologically vulnerable to climate changes, and so interventions must be comprehensive and targeted. Climate change exacerbates existing health issues, particularly through extreme weather events like heatwaves and cold snaps, which aggravate chronic conditions and raise mortality rates [3]. Climate change also poses risks to the mental wellbeing and social integration of older adults [4]. Many older adults are already isolated, and extreme weather conditions can limit their access to emergency services and community support. Older adults may also suffer psychological stress from climate-related disruptions; for example, displacement or loss from natural disasters disproportionately harms older adults, exacerbating their feelings of isolation and anxiety [5]. Older adults may also be limited by socio-economic constraints that hinder their ability to recover from climate events, deepen their vulnerability and reduce their overall resilience. Interventions must thus be multifaceted approach, encompassing health monitoring, community support, and improving infrastructure [6].Several promising strategies for increasing climate resilience in older adults warrant our consideration. Among these, urban greening and wellness tourism stand out, since they address both environmental and social needs. Urban green zones have mitigated the effects of urban heat islands. Heat islands disproportionately affect older adults [7] and, along with other urban environmental characteristics, may significantly reduce their mental health [8]. Strategically placing green roofs and community gardens to reduce urban heat islands may cool the environment and increase accessible areas in which older adults can be more physical activity and interact socially, both of which are vital to mental and physical [5]. Wellness tourism is now a burgeoning market in many areas of the world [9]. While developing specialized wellness facilities for climate tourists and integrating green spaces integrated into the design could address health needs of older adults, may benefit some older climate-migrants seeking climate refuge. However, this solution would be complicated to fairly implement, such services are not affordable for all older adults, and may lead to increased housing costs and reduced access to services for older residents in climate-desirable locations.Integrated solutions can make urban areas more livable for older adults and they align with broader public health goals to support aging populations in locations vulnerable to climate change. A complementary strategy is to engage older adults in both individual and collective climate action. In the Anthropocene where human demands shape emissions patterns, aging is transforming economic structures and consumption patterns. While industrial activities serving human needs are recognized as the primary driver of increased carbon emissions, residents across societies at varying development stages have not achieved their common but differentiated responsibilities. Therefore, engaging older adults in climate action, particularly in high-consumption countries where higher contributions are expected, could catalyze broader green transitions while enhancing their own resilience. Climate action extends beyond micro-level practices like using energy-efficient appliances, prioritizing public transport or walking, and supporting local, sustainable food sources. Collective climate actions by older adults are crucial, as they often lack voice in climate response despite their vulnerability. The dual approach of combining supportive environments with active collective engagement, addresses climate vulnerability in older populations by improving their health outcomes and reducing environmental impacts, enabling them to become exemplars of sustainable living while encouraging broader societal shifts toward greener practices.Green Longevity is a transformative approach that integrates climate resilience into healthy aging, addressing the multidimensional vulnerabilities of older adults while activating their agency in climate action. Climate change's causality and attribution are key issues in climate litigation, but these are often complex, as demonstrated by the KlimaSeniorinnen case [10]. Governments have an undeniable responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from the impacts of climate change. Additionally, differential impacts (such as those related to gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) should be considered in any approach to Green Longevity, ensuring that strategies are inclusive and equitable. Coordinated efforts—such as age-sensitive environmental initiatives, integrating climate resilience into geriatric care, and encouraging active participation in stewardship—will establish a foundation for achieving sustainable and healthy aging in an era of climate change.