Moving from features to functions: bridging disciplinary understandings of urban environments to support healthy people and ecosystems

Over half the world’s population lives in urban areas, where access to nature is limited. This poses a health and well-being challenge, given the consensus that contact with nature provides crucial health benefits. However, there are knowledge gaps regarding the specific environmental characteristics which promote these benefits. These gaps are exacerbated by the fact that between the disciplines of environmental sciences and social sciences, there are different understandings of key concepts: what constitutes “environments” and what defines “environmental quality”. The authors of this paper aimed to overcome these divisions so that future urban environments can be planned, designed and managed to benefit environmental functioning and human health.

The authors argued for the need to explore the linkages between environmental functioning, experience of environment (and in particular feelings of nature connectedness), and health outcomes (Figure 1, Supplementary Material). Their research found that there are two complementary but siloed perspectives in research on environmental thinking: the environment-oriented perspective, from the environmental sciences, and the people-oriented perspective, from human sciences.

These two perspectives need to be treated as whole interconnected systems in order to advance research on human and environmental health and well-being, as they each offer valid and important ways to interpret urban environments. The authors urged fellow researchers and planners alike to move beyond a “tip of the iceberg” approach focusing on “visible” environmental features and instead take into account the “invisible” functioning of environments (biogeochemical flows, ecological processes). (Figure 2, Supplementary Material).

The authors concluded with the following recommendations:

• Extend the focus of research on the health outcomes of engaging with nature from environmental features to environmental functioning.
• Experiment with interdisciplinary mixed methods.
• Identify synergies and conflicts between interventions to promote human health, nature connectedness and environmental functioning.
• Explore the differing temporalities of engagement with nature and environmental functioning.
• Further explore potential feedback loops between healthily functioning ecosystems, nature connectedness, health outcomes, and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours.
• Extend the range of methodologies used to assess human health in research on nature and health.
• Focus on longer-term research that can explore change over time in communities and the nature that surrounds them.