Green spaces in cities have a number of positive effects: they’re good for our physical and mental health, they’re good for the environment, and they can even help fight off the effects of climate change.
Green spaces in cities have a number of positive effects: they’re good for our physical and mental health, they’re good for the environment, and they can even help fight off the effects of climate change.
To explore the impact of additional green structures in cities, Katja Schmidt and Ariane Walz, affiliated with the University of Potsdam, Germany, quantified their effects on different aspects such as thermal comfort, biodiversity, carbon storage and social interaction. Their study, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal One Ecosystem, combines knowledge from health research, ecology and socio-ecological research, and shows how the better we know a particular type of ecosystem, the better we can adapt to climate change.
Pursuing a multi-method approach that ranged from local climate measurements to habitat and tree mapping, the authors compared four green residential courtyards in Potsdam. The spaces were similarly built, but had different ratios and sizes of features (lawns, flowerbeds, paths, playgrounds and allotments), as well as different tree and shrub population.
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