Longitudinal effects on mental health of moving to greener and less green urban areas.

By Ian Alcock, M. White, Ben Wheeler, L. Fleming, M. Depledge. Environmental Science and Technology, 2014

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite growing evidence of public health benefits from urban green space there has been little longitudinal analysis. This study used panel data to explore three different hypotheses about how moving to greener or less green areas may affect mental health over time. The samples were participants in the British Household Panel Survey with mental health data (General Health Questionnaire scores) for five consecutive years, and who relocated to a different residential area between the second and third years (n = 1064; observations = 5320). Fixed-effects analyses controlled for time-invariant individual level heterogeneity and other area and individual level effects. Compared to premove mental health scores, individuals who moved to greener areas (n = 594) had significantly better mental health in all three postmove years (P = .015; P = .016; P = .008), supporting a "shifting baseline" hypothesis. Individuals who moved to less green areas (n = 470) showed significantly worse mental health in the year preceding the move (P = .031) but returned to baseline in the postmove years. Moving to greener urban areas was associated with sustained mental health improvements, suggesting that environmental policies to increase urban green space may have sustainable public health benefits.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Speech and Hearing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8991139eaaf52751b1bf8ec7426172e40c380112

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Citations in the corpus

Health benefits of green spaces in the living environment: A systematic review of epidemiological studies (2015, methodology): “2) . chapter 2 | Health Benefits of Green Spaces: A Systematic Review 42 moved to greener areas, while for people who moved to less green areas no significant change in mental health was found (Alcock et al., 2014).”
Associations between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence (2021, background): “A study based in the UK tracked individuals’ residential trajectories for five consecutive years and showed that individuals who moved to greener areas had better mental health than before moving [52].”
Urban Green Space and Its Impact on Human Health (2018, background): “Percent green space within administrative boundary of residence [41,53,55,63]”
Benefits of restoring ecosystem services in urban areas (2015, background): “Cognitive development in urban green areas includes the development and transmission of local ecological knowledge [52,54,55].”
Exposure to Neighborhood Green Space and Mental Health: Evidence from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (2014, neutral): “While population level studies have examined the role of green space, stress and mental health in several European countries [8,10,16,43] and New Zealand [44], and several US studies have examined the health benefits of green space more generally [45–48], less is known about green space and mental h”
Nature tourism and mental health: parks, happiness, and causation (2020, background): “First, large-scale geographical pattern analyses, and longitudinal panel studies, have shown that people who live near green or blue space generally enjoy better mental health than those who do not, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors (Alcock et al., 2014; Song et al., 2018; White et al”
Mental Health Benefits of Long-Term Exposure to Residential Green and Blue Spaces: A Systematic Review (2015, background): “showed that after three years of moving to a greener area the mental health of the participants had improved compared to those that moved to less green area [22].”
Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship (2017, background): “In box 2 we give examples of these new types of collaborations that enhance trans-parency between consumers and producers (especially theBehindtheBrandscampaignandtheGlobalSalmon Initiative).”