Urban Nature-Based Solutions
Background
Current and future climate change-induced stresses affect and will increasingly affect human health and the well-being of communities in urban areas of the U.S. Evidence generated over the last several decades suggests that greenspace, green infrastructure, and other nature-based solutions (NbS) can improve the health of communities in urban areas. However, local decision-makers, city planners, and community groups need a more detailed understanding of what solutions benefit whom, in what ways, and why.
The Urban NbS Project aims to provide the background information and data to empower stakeholders and decision makers to address their communities’ health challenges through the use of urban NbS. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to understand the state of the science behind the NbS/human health relationship.
We aim to address the following focal questions:
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Which combinations of NbS and health challenges have been studied to date?
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What aspects of NbS and health challenges do decision-makers want or need to know more about?
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What areas of NbS and health can be synthesized for decision-makers with available evidence and what areas require further research?
Literature Review
The Urban NbS Project team undertook the task of synthesizing recent evidence on how NbS alleviate, fail to alleviate, or worsen, climate-induced impacts on physical health, mental health, and well-being of urban communities. An EPA literature screening tool called the Living Literature Review (LLR), was used to categorize and evaluate studies from the last 20 years that address how human health endpoints are modified by NbS. From a seed of 89 papers, LLR forward citation searching resulted in 8626 papers returned. With the requirement of including a mention of at least one NbS type and human health outcome, the titles and abstracts of 5245 papers were screened and 1880 papers were found to be relevant to the scope of the project.
These papers were tagged in a structure capturing the study type, study geography, types of NbS, characteristics of NbS, human health endpoints, and community or climate dynamics that could be identified in the title or abstract of each paper.
Using the tags, visualizations evaluating the total numbers for each tag were produced, and methods for full text analysis and data extractions on specific NbS and human health relationships were established.
Data Visualizations
The visualizations below show the relationship between various greenspace types and health outcomes. Please note that these visualizations do not necessarily suggest that the studies explored specific interactions between greenspace types and health outcomes. Rather, they signify that the studies included both topics. The full data set used in the literature review is found below.
Urban Nature Based Solutions Data (xlsx)
Tips for interacting with the visualizations
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Use the "Pages" menu to explore how greenspace measures intersect with health types, mental health outcomes, and physical health outcomes.
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The entry count on the right-hand side reflect the number of entries selected based on the current filters applied. This number may surpass the total number of studies, as a single study can encompass multiple greenspace types and health outcomes.
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Use the slicer under the entry count to refine the visualizations by selecting specific health outcomes.