What will the horrible year of 2020 bring to the future of ageing research?

The year 2020 was very special, qualifying without doubt as an annus horribilis. For example, the cover page of the Time Magazine had “the Worst Year Ever”—crossed over in red—as theme of their December 2020 issue (Waxman 2020). First and foremost, this refers to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to numerous events that shaped the year as an extraordinary one. No matter their disciplines and research interests, most researchers around the world experience a large impact of the pandemic on their work. Not the least for those of us doing research on ageing, COVID-19 has put the light on the grand challenges and opportunities of population ageing in a multifaceted manner. With older people—rightly or wrongly defined as a risk group early on—the pandemic has uncovered deficits in healthcare services for older people, risks for social isolation, challenges regarding digital literacy and technology, etc. There are also positive examples showing that older people rapidly learned to make use of digital technology at a higher pace than ever before (Andersson et al. 2020), speaking to their agency to adapt to new situations. Such complex developments stimulate researchers around the world to generate bold research ideas and projects, crucial for the development of novel scientific lines of inquiry and of new knowledge for the years ahead. Thus, despite the negative consequences of the pandemic, the interest and need for ageing research is growing and stronger than ever before. Researchers on ageing acted on this situation from the beginning, and the European Journal of Ageing responded with a call for papers for a special section on the COVID-19 pandemic. The team of Editors-in-Chief invited Giovanni Lamura and Clemens Tesch-Römer as Guest Editors. Topics of interest could include, but were not limited to, increasing inequalities in the impact of the disease, consequences of quarantine and social distancing for older people, behavioural consequences of fear, resilience in the face of Corona, ICT communication and well-being, increasing ageism, etc. The deadline for submissions to the Consequences of the Corona Pandemic in Later Life special section was September 2020. We received more than 50 interesting abstracts and invited the twelve most promising of those to submit a full paper. The special section will be published later this year. The pandemic has further lead to many initiatives aiming to highlight and act upon challenges and opportunities that are specific for the ageing population. For example, the latest United Nation (UN) Network on Ageing Newsletter listed numerous initiatives, such as the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons policy brief, which is intended to guide countries to tackle economic and social dimensions of the pandemic, with older people as a prioritized group. The objective of the checklist provided in the policy brief is to provide guidance to evaluate whether socio-economic impact actions apply a human rights-based approach, to ensure that older people will not be left behind. The implementation of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing is getting closer, and recently the UN’s General Assembly declared 2021–2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing. Governments, international and regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia, and the media all over the world are encouraged to support the goals set for this decade. The Editors-in-Chief of the European Journal of Ageing will actively work in this direction. We foresee that during the years to come we will receive many submissions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic from a diversity of perspectives, and we are looking forward to publishing landmark papers in the spirit of the Decade of Healthy Ageing. While 2020 can be labelled a horrible year, the pandemic situation has highlighted the situation of older people and * Marja J. Aartsen [email protected]