Participatory research of Nature's Impact on Health

With the increase in aging population, costs of health provision and the growing important of wellbeing is of increasing concern for UK policy makers and public health officials. The exponential rise in the numbers of... [ view full abstract ]

With the increase in aging population, costs of health provision and the growing important of wellbeing is of increasing concern for UK policy makers and public health officials. The exponential rise in the numbers of eco-health programmes emerging in the past decade can be seen as an attempt to address these concerns. Calls for a green agenda within the UK health care system follows the growing evidence that suggests nature’s benefits of people’s physical health and wellbeing. A key challenge in existing assessments of well-being is that they remain predominantly subjective and have yet to be scrutinised to rigorous scientific analysis. The current study is aimed to provide a longitudinal evidence to strengthen measuring the impact that connecting with nature has on people’s physical as well as mental well-being. This is done by utilizing The Conservation Volunteers’ national Green Gym volunteering programme as a case study. The study puts forward a holistic model of ‘Individual Well-being’ in the context of connectivity to nature to develop a novel mobile data collection framework and spatial mapping sampling methodology which recruits volunteers as ‘citizen scientists’ to capture nature’s impact on their health.