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

Abstract

Contact with nature can contribute to health and wellbeing, but knowledge gaps persist regarding the environmental characteristics that promote these benefits. Understanding and maximising these benefits is particularly important in urban areas, where opportunities for such contact is limited. At the same time, we are facing climate and ecological crises which require policy and practice to support ecosystem functioning. Policies are increasingly being oriented towards delivering benefits for people and nature simultaneously. However, different disciplinary understandings of environments and environmental quality present challenges to this agenda. This paper highlights key knowledge gaps concerning linkages between nature and health. It then describes two perspectives on environmental quality, based respectively in environmental sciences and social sciences. It argues that understanding the linkages between these perspectives is vital to enable urban environments to be planned, designed and managed for the benefit of both environmental functioning and human health. Finally, it identifies key challenges and priorities for integrating these different disciplinary perspectives.