The Wellness Benefits of Parks and Greenspace

Introduction to Wellness through Greenspace

Contemporary health challenges require innovative solutions. 

Rising health care costs linked to chronic diseases, coupled with inadequate access to health resources in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, fuel growing concerns about wellness, morbidity, and mortality across diverse populations. 

Addressing Modern Health Challenges: The Role of Social and Environmental Factors in Enhancing Wellness and Equity Amidst Rising Costs and Pandemic Aftermath.

These challenges threaten the efficacy and financial sustainability of the health care system. 

A focus on the social and environmental determinants of wellness and well-being could help the public health community strategically address multiple objectives in a sustainable and socially equitable way. 

Decades of research have shown the variety of ways exposure to natural areas can positively impact human wellness and well-being.

Physical Wellness Benefits of Greenspace

Parks and greenspace improve physical wellness in many ways, often by creating environments that encourage active lifestyles and improve access to exercise opportunities. 

Studies have shown that park availability and park use are positively correlated with physical activity.

the physical wellness benefits of greenspace

Use of greenspace and outdoor recreation can also enhance cardiovascular wellness by influencing risk factors such as cholesterol levels, hypertension, BMI, and obesity. 

In addition to improving physical wellness through exercise, many park-based programs focus on nutrition education and fostering healthy eating habits. 

Engagement with community gardens—a specific type of greenspace often co-located in parks in public spaces—can provide access to fresh produce, promote active lifestyles, and cultivate social connections that improve wellness outcomes.

Ecosystem Services for Community Wellness

Parks and greenspace also provide ecosystem services that affect wellness in other ways, even for people who never visit them. Urban greenspace can bolster human and ecosystem wellness by improving air quality, regulating ambient temperature, and attenuating impacts of severe weather events. Some evidence even suggests that proximity to and use of greenspace may reduce population-level mortality rates, a benefit that could be particularly important during unprecedented global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Green Spaces as Vital Urban Ecosystems: Enhancing Health and Resilience in the Face of Global Challenges.

Mental and Social Wellness Benefits

Exposure to parks and greenspace can benefit mental wellness in a variety of ways. Contact with nature enhances cognitive functioning and emotional well-being by improving attention restoration and reducing stress. Nature-based experiences can decrease the incidence and severity of anxiety disorders, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), and depression. 

Green Sanctuaries: The Pivotal Role of Parks and Greenspaces in Fostering Mental and Social Wellness.

Proximity to parks and greenspace is associated with subjective well-being and happiness of urban residents, which can improve psychological wellness and longevity. These mental wellness benefits have been particularly pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connection to nature also enhances positive youth development, highlighting benefits throughout the lifespan.

Community Wellness and Social Cohesion

In addition to wellness benefits for individuals, parks and greenspace offer other assets to communities. As places where people gather and interact, parks enhance social engagement and cohesion across neighborhoods. High-quality parks and built environment features may be particularly effective at fostering positive social interactions and social capital within historically marginalized communities. 

Green Infrastructures: Catalyzing Community Wellness and Social Prosperity.

The presence of greenspace also reduces other population wellness risk factors, such as crime. Parks and greenspace provide financial advantages that should not be overlooked either. Green land cover is associated with lower levels of health care spending, and residents of cities with more parks report higher levels of financial well-being and security. Exposure to nature also inspires pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, which helps guarantee that the wellness benefits associated with parks and greenspace are sustained with minimal need for intervention.

Addressing Wellness Inequities

Despite the immense potential of parks and greenspace for wellness, these health resources often remain inequitably distributed across diverse communities. Neighborhoods with a large proportion of low-income or racial/ethnic minority residents typically experience limited access to parks and greenspaces. Even when parks are located in low-income communities of color, they tend to be of lower quality and are often used less frequently. Thus, the wellness benefits parks provide are rarely accessible to and enjoyed by all segments of society. 

Equity in Access to Parks and Greenspaces: Addressing Wellness Disparities in Diverse Communities

This reality highlights the need to consider equity and environmental justice issues when assessing the positive and negative impacts of the built environment on the health care system.

Programs Leveraging Greenspace for Wellness

Increasing recognition among health care providers of the wellness-promoting potential of parks and greenspace has inspired a number of programs, tools, and initiatives designed to leverage these opportunities in North Carolina and across the United States. Examples include the National Park Service’s Healthy Parks, Healthy People initiative, the Leave No Child Inside movement, and the rise of park and nature prescription programs (Park Rx) designed to formalize the wellness benefits of parks and other natural areas through a written prescription from a health care provider.

Green Prescriptions: Harnessing the Healing Power of Nature through Innovative Health Programs

The Park Rx Model for Enhanced Wellness

Park or nature prescriptions can make physical activity and exercise more accessible, meaningful, and sustainable for vulnerable populations, potentially boosting patient adherence to the “treatment.” Current iterations of Park Rx range from informal programs like the NC-based TRACK Rx Kids in Parks, which encourages children and their families to explore local trails, to patient-tailored clinical prescription programs such as SHINE, a formal partnership between the UC-San Francisco Children’s Hospital and the East Bay Regional Park District in California.

Nature’s Prescription: Advancing Health Equity through the Park Rx Model.

Although the Park Rx model offers a promising pathway to integrating parks and greenspace into conventional health care systems, more research and evidence are needed to assess the efficacy of nature prescription programs and expand support and investment from physicians, insurance companies, parks and recreation professionals, and other key stakeholder groups.

Partnerships Enhancing Community Wellness

Novel partnerships are also helping to strengthen connections between parks, the built environment, and wellness. For example, Let’s Move Libraries is a UNC-Greensboro-based clearinghouse and resource for connecting public libraries and active living opportunities, and a majority of its programs are outdoor-based. With StoryWalk, libraries partner with parks to physically post children’s book pages on poster boards throughout a public space, encouraging intergenerational walking as well as literacy. 

Collaborative Green Initiatives: Fostering Community Health through Innovative Partnerships.

Cooperative extension offices located in each US county are also partners in this work, perhaps best exemplified by the 4-H Youth Development programs that include a number of outdoor and agricultural activities (e.g., gardening) aimed at improving physical and nutritional wellness. In many places, including North Carolina, county extension offices are also partnering with parks and recreation providers to enhance equitable access to greenspace through shared use policies that keep school playgrounds and fields open for community activity after hours and on weekends.

Open Streets and Community Wellness

Play Streets and Open Streets initiatives represent another broad alliance of partnerships across the United States that have grown during the pandemic. Both Play Streets (generally one to a few blocks in length) and Open Streets (up to 40 or more miles in length) turn streets into public spaces for play and recreation while closing them to automobile traffic.

Revitalizing Urban Spaces: How Play Streets and Open Streets Initiatives Promote Community Health and Active Living.

Most are conducted along tree-lined streetscapes and typically incorporate parks or other public greenspaces along the route. Open Streets increase access to outdoor recreation and are associated with multiple healthy behaviors, including physical activity. The health insurance industry represents another unorthodox partner, but one that is increasingly inclined to offer financial support to park development and other projects that mitigate health risk factors by promoting active lifestyles.

Ensuring Equitable Wellness Access

As the movement to improve wellness by connecting people and nature grows, equity remains a concern. Vulnerable populations and communities that experience disproportionate burdens of both acute illnesses and chronic disease may benefit most from access to high-quality parks and greenspace. New tools such as the Trust for Public Land’s ParkServe and ParkScore indexes, as well as the newly validated ParkIndex tool, provide communities with ways to assess current park distribution patterns and identify and invest in areas of need, ultimately enhancing access to these critical wellness resources. 

Green Equity: Strategizing Park Access to Promote Health and Prevent Displacement.

Equity plans embedded in new park projects, such as the one guiding the growth of Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, help ensure that development does not fuel green gentrification and exacerbate health disparities by displacing the populations who need park-related wellness benefits the most.

Future Directions for Wellness Research and Practice

Progress continues, but more rigorous research, translation, and dissemination are needed to help health care professionals, urban planners, and other key decision-makers adopt a broader, integrated view of the critical connections between nature and human wellness. Uptake by the medical field has been slow, in part because unanswered questions abound. For example, researchers continue to debate the intensity, frequency, or “dosage” of nature needed for physical and mental wellness benefits to accrue.

Integrating Nature and Wellness: Research Gaps and Future Directions in Healthcare and Urban Planning

The influence of context (e.g., urban versus rural) on the relationship between greenspace and wellness also remains unclear. Investigations of the built environment infrastructure surrounding parks and greenspace, including factors such as neighborhood walkability and its associations with cardiovascular and psychological wellness, are another future research priority. Efforts to address these knowledge gaps could generate more support for park-based wellness promotion strategies.

Embracing Nature-Based Wellness Interventions

Despite these challenges, the wellness-related benefits generated by parks and greenspace may be more conspicuous now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, than ever before. At this critical juncture, the medical community could embrace the value of nature-based interventions. This might be as simple as expanding the Park Rx model to encourage discussions between physicians and individual patients about how to access and utilize local parks, or it could involve more comprehensive policy-oriented, community-level approaches to wellness promotion that focus on equitable access and sustained use of parks and greenspace.

Promoting Healthier Communities Through Nature-Based Wellness Interventions: A Call for Patient-Centered Research and Equitable Access

Efforts to engage and partner in more rigorous patient-centered, outcome-driven translational work focused on links between nature and wellness present ongoing opportunities. Although more research is needed, the current evidence is clear: elevating the role of greenspace access and quality in planning, policy, and decision-making across diverse contexts could ultimately lead to a healthier and happier population.