Urban green spaces, such as parks, backyards, riverbanks, and urban farmlands, are thought to contribute to citizen happiness by promoting physical and mental health.
Urban green spaces, such as parks, backyards, riverbanks, and urban farmlands, are thought to contribute to citizen happiness by promoting physical and mental health. While a number of previous studies have reported the mental benefits of green space, most had been conducted in the affluent parts of the world like the United States and Europe, and only a few involved a multi-country setting.
Lack of data had been the main limitation in carrying out these studies because there is no global medical dataset that can provide reliable and standardized mental health surveys from different countries. Another challenge involves a systematic method to measure the amount of green space across countries. Various methods of measuring green space – questionnaires, qualitative interviews, satellite images, Google Street View images, and even smartphone technology still rely on individual-level measurements and hence are not scalable to the global level. These challenges left the question of the association between the positive effect of green space on mental health open and unanswered for many countries with different socioeconomic conditions.
Led by the Chief Investigator and an Associate Professor CHA Meeyoung at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea, an international collaboration of researchers from POSTECH, Max Planck Institute, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the National University of Singapore set out to tackle the issue. The new study which was published in the journal EPJ Data Science identified the global correlation between urban green space and happiness in 60 countries using a satellite imagery dataset.
Read more at Institute for Basic Science
Photo Credit: BruceEmmerling via Pixabay
