Interventions on green space in urban settings can help address public health issues related to obesity, cardiovascular effects, mental health and well-being. However, knowledge on their effectiveness in relation to health, well-being and equity is incomplete. To explore the effectiveness of urban green space interventions to enhance healthy urban environments, the WHO Regional Office for Europe reviewed research findings, local case studies and Environmental Impact Assessment/Health Impact Assessment experiences, and assessed their impacts on environment, health, well-being and equity.
The report "Urban Green Space Interventions and Health: A review of impacts and effectiveness" provides the three working papers prepared for a meeting, and presents the discussion and conclusions on what intervention components have been found to be effective in maximizing the environmental, health and equity benefits derived from urban green spaces.
To access the related policy brief "Urban green spaces: a brief for action", click here.
Urbanization results in an increasing proportion of the population living in cities. Green spaces and other nature-based solutions offer innovative approaches to increase the quality of urban settings, enhance local resilience and promote sustainable lifestyles, improving both the health and the well-being of urban residents. Parks, playgrounds or vegetation in public and private places are a central component of these approaches.
The brief "Urban green spaces: a brief for action" aims to support urban policy-makers and practitioners by translating the key findings of a review of research evidence and practical case studies on urban green space interventions into implications for practice. It presents lessons learned and highlights aspects to consider when designing urban green spaces to maximize social and health benefits.
To access the related technical report "Urban Green Space Interventions and Health: A review of impacts and effectiveness", click here.
This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment structure and specialization in Mexico over the 1985-2016 period. Using geo-referenced panel data, it measures access to domestic markets from each locality as a weighted sum of surrounding populations (market access) or incomes (market potential), with weights inversely related to travel time or travel cost. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in regressions that involve access to markets, the analysis finds significant and positive causal effects of improved accessibility on employment and specialization. Heterogeneous effects are found across sectors and regions.
When a policy is evaluated, the rate at which future costs and benefits should be discounted depends upon their maturity and risk profile. When the shocks to the growth rate of consumption per capita are persistent, it is socially desirable to use a decreasing term structure of risk-free discount rates, and an increasing term structure of risk premia. These term structures are characterized when the representative agent has Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and when log consumption follows an AR(1) process. The model is calibrated for 248 countries and economic zones of the World Bank database. The research shows that the efficient evaluation rules of long investment projects are very heterogeneous across countries. Using standard estimations of the preference parameters, the country-average 1-year and 20-year risk-free discount rates −1.42% and −3.27%. The 1-year and 20-year aggregate risk premia are respectively 4.21% and 7.12%. This study stresses both the necessity to use country-specific discount rates and the importance of estimating the risk profile of long-dated investment projects.
