PRESS RELEASE
Brussels, 7 April 2012
International Health Day
WHO and AGE join forces to promote healthy ageing in Europe
“Supportive and age-friendly environments can help delay significantly the onset of old age diseases and dependency. This is why we are pleased to join forces with the World Health Organization and will submit a joint commitment on age-friendly environments in reply to the call for commitments launched by the European Commission in the framework of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing. ”says Anne-Sophie Parent, Secretary General of AGE Platform Europe.
Concretely, AGE will run a campaign to encourage local and regional authorities to join the existing WHO Age-Friendly Environment (AFE) network and will moderate an EU virtual partnership inside the WHO AFE platform to bring together EU stakeholders interested in the promotion of environments adapted for all ages.
The objective of this initiative is to enable EU stakeholders to connect with each other and use the WHO programme to go further than what they could do separately. It will also support AGE and the EY2012 Coalition’s call to the EU to create a European Covenant of Mayors on Demographic change, similar to the existing European Covenant of Mayors on Climate change. The Covenant would help mobilise regional and local public authorities looking for innovative and cost efficient solutions to promote healthy ageing and encourage them to adopt a concrete workplan based on WHO methodology and inspired by the outcomes of the various key actions that will be implemented through the EIP on Active and Healthy Ageing.
Click here to join the EU virtual network on age-friendly environments!
END
