The changing meanings of environmental action over time: Older adults' perspectives in Italy and Sweden.

Older adults in Italy and Sweden engaged in diverse private and public environmental actions whose meanings were negotiated through temporal orientations and changing social norms.

• Data drawn from 31 semi-structured interviews conducted in two cities: Turin (Italy) and Gothenburg (Sweden).
• A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data.
• Both private behaviors and public/civic forms of environmental engagement were captured.
• Social norms around environmental action were described as shifting over participants' lifetimes.

National and local contexts, including histories of environmental policymaking and civic engagement, shaped participants' environmental practices and perceptions.

• Comparison was made between Italy (Turin) and Sweden (Gothenburg), two countries with distinct environmental policy histories.
• Local civic engagement traditions influenced how participants understood and participated in environmental action.
• The study highlights that context-specificity is important for understanding older adults' environmental behaviors.
• Cross-national comparison revealed variation in how environmental practices were framed and justified.

Frugal practices rooted in economic necessity and family life were reinterpreted by participants as environmentally beneficial in the present.

• Participants described past behaviors driven by material scarcity or household necessity rather than explicit environmental motivation.
• These behaviors were retrospectively reframed through a contemporary environmental lens.
• This reinterpretation reflects the role of temporal perspective in meaning-making around environmental action.
• The finding illustrates how the same practice can carry different meanings across different historical moments.

Future orientations among older adult participants were ambivalent, with some framing environmental action as responsibility for collective futures and others discounting longer-term perspectives.

• Two distinct orientations toward the future were identified among participants.
• Some participants expressed a sense of responsibility toward future generations and collective well-being.
• Others deprioritized or discounted longer-term environmental futures, suggesting motivational heterogeneity.
• This ambivalence was shaped by personal, familial, and contextual factors.

Family relationships, local communities, and attachment to place fostered legacy-oriented thinking and intergenerational solidarity among participants.

• The study introduced the novel concept of 'environmental legacies' to frame how older adults think about their long-term environmental contributions.
• Attachment to specific places was identified as a driver of concern for environmental futures.
• Intergenerational relationships, particularly family ties, were linked to stronger legacy-oriented environmental motivations.
• Community embeddedness also supported thinking about collective environmental responsibility across generations.

Older adults occupy a distinctive life-course position that enables reflection on past social and environmental transformations, present practices, and individual and collective futures.

• The study uses a life-course temporalities framework, examining past, present, and future orientations simultaneously.
• Participants' advanced age was framed as an epistemically valuable vantage point rather than a limitation.
• The study argues for incorporating older adults' situated knowledge, experience, and agency into environmental and climate policymaking.
• Sample consisted of older adults in two European countries, though specific age range is not detailed in the abstract.