Abstract
Urban living limits access to nature yet spending time in nature is crucial for human health and well-being. To overcome this, urban planners and policymakers are actively looking for different ways to conserve and create more urban nature through parks, street trees, and other greening strategies. However, research shows that in most cities, these greening efforts are not equitably distributed, nor are they equal in terms of their quality or benefits they provide. Creating more equitable access to urban nature is a challenge and a priority in the next decade, and so is improving the quality of urban nature and associated benefits for urbanites. To address this challenge and contribute at both practical and conceptual levels, we propose a new Local Restorative Nature (LRN) index for geospatially assessing the “restorative quality” of urban nature that can support mental well-being. To contextualize the LRN index, we map the distribution of restorative nature in relation to social vulnerability in Vancouver, Canada. The novel LRN index provides critical insights showing that many neighborhoods with vulnerable populations in Vancouver have less exposure to restorative nature to support mental health and highlights where to strategically prioritize urban greening investment in areas that need it the most. The LRN index is scalable and can be used by urban planners in other cities and contexts to improve equitable distribution of restorative nature and better support urbanites’ well-being.
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Notes
This refers only to the population within the City of Vancouver, our case study.
For a more detailed definition of Dissemination Area, see https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/ref/dict/geo021-eng.cfm.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Master of Geomatics for Environment Management program at the University of British Columbia for providing academic support, mentorship, and research resources for this project. We are grateful to Paul Pickell and Amy Blood for their technical guidance and assistance. We would also like to thank the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation for their guidance and involvement with preceding projects, the findings of which have influenced and helped contextualize this paper. The UBC Sustainability Scholars program supported JF in preceding work. During this project, TD was funded by the Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC 435-2014-1714 and 201709BPF-393653-294704). IJ was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant reference number 165754), and MM was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.
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Devisscher, T., Lam, T., Fitzgibbons, J. et al. More than greening: Using a novel index to assess restorative nature and vulnerability relationships. Ambio 52, 1992–2008 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01889-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01889-2