By Sarah Cafasso, Stanford University, July 24, 2019
An international team led by Stanford University and the University of Washington is working to bring the mental health benefits of nature to city-dwellers.
To do so, the team has created a way of helping city planners, landscape architects, developers and others anticipate the mental health impacts of conserving nature and incorporating it into urban areas. For people in cities, that could mean things like more neighborhood parks, trees planted along streets or better transportation infrastructure to access existing natural areas.
“We have entered the urban century. Cities are farther away from nature, with suburbs gobbling up the pockets of wilderness that used to border them,” said Gretchen Daily, senior author of the Science Advances study and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project. “In all of human history, people have never been so disconnected from nature, and we’re becoming ever more so. Alongside this trend, there is a significant increase in some types of mental health disorders worldwide. Our work focuses on the connections between these trends and what we can do about them.”
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