2023 / Green spaces, Health and well-being

The Health and Wellbeing Effects of Forests, Trees and Green Space

Citation

Davand, P., de Vries, S., Bauer, N., Dayamba, D. S., Feng, X., Morand, S., … Bratman, G. N., … van den Bosch, M. (2023). The Health and Wellbeing Effects of Forests, Trees and Green Space. In Forests and Trees for Human Health: Pathways, Impacts, Challenges and Response Options: A Global Assessment Report (pp. 78-124). IUFRO.

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A growing body of research shows that green spaces are linked to better health. But the picture is more nuanced than you might think.

This chapter walks through the evidence by life stage: childhood (Section 3.2.), adulthood (Section 3.3.), and older adulthood (Section 3.4.). For each stage, it looks at specific health outcomes and rates how strong the evidence is for a positive (or negative) connection. Section 3.6. explores how factors like gender, ethnicity, and income level can change those connections. Section 3.7. puts the findings in a global context, asking whether parks and trees could help tackle some of the world’s biggest health problems.

So what does the evidence say? Quite a lot, actually. The research strongly supports a wide range of benefits. In children, that includes healthy brain development. In adults, it covers mental health, emotional well-being, and heart and metabolic health. And in older adults, it points to better mental health, sharper thinking in later years, and even a longer life.

But there are some important caveats:

Most of this research focuses on green spaces in general—parks, gardens, community green areas. The evidence specifically linking forests and trees to health outcomes is still thin for most conditions.
The vast majority of studies were done in wealthy countries, so it’s not clear whether the same benefits hold in lower-income parts of the world.
While the research shows a strong link between nature and health, it doesn’t always prove that nature causes those health improvements.

Even with those limitations, the potential is huge. Many of the health outcomes tied to green spaces — mental illness, heart disease, cognitive decline — are among the biggest drivers of illness and death worldwide. As cities continue to grow, forests, trees, and green spaces offer a practical, powerful way to improve human health at every stage of life.

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the empirical evidence regarding the association between green space in general, and forests and trees in particular, and health outcomes. The evidence is organised by life stage, and within the three life stages – early life (Section 3.2.), adulthood (Section 3.3.) and the elderly (Section 3.4.) – by type of health outcome. At the end of each of these three sections, the strength of the evidence for the presence (or absence) of a beneficial or detrimental association for a particular health outcome, as assessed by the authors, is summarised. Section 3.6. is devoted to modifiers of the aforementioned associations, such as gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. In the next section (3.7.), the evidence is placed in the context of global health challenges through elaborating on the potential of green space, and forests and trees in particular, in tackling major contributors to the global burden of disease. The final section concludes that the available evidence already strongly supports a wide range of beneficial associations including neurodevelopment in children, mental health and wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing and cardiometabolic health in adults, and mental health and wellbeing, cognitive ageing and longevity in the elderly. However, this evidence is predominantly based on studies on the health and wellbeing effects of green space, and the available evidence for such effects for forests and trees is still limited for most health outcomes. Moreover, these studies have been mainly conducted in high-income countries, with their generalisability to low- and middle-income countries not being self-evident. Furthermore, the causality of the observed associations is not always clear. Nevertheless, given that many of the involved health outcomes are among the major contributors of the global burden of disease, forests, trees and green spaces have a great potential for improving health and wellbeing of humans across all life stages in our rapidly urbanising world.