BRISBANE, Australia — As more humans continue to live in cities, cutting off their connection to nature, we can expect higher incidence of lifestyle-related diseases.
Little work has been done to learn how much nature people require in order to enjoy the health benefits, making it difficult for cities to plan development of green space in their planning guides.
It is expected that urban populations will account for 70 percent of human lifestyles.
The discussion with a group of biologists and public health experts will be published in the June edition of the journal BioScience.
The aim is to establish a basis for studying exposure to the outdoors in much the same way that a researcher would study a medicine, through dose-response modeling.
Researchers will present an overview exploring how “nature dose” and health response have been conceptualized. It also examines the evidence for different shapes of dose–response curves.
The study highlights the crucial need to move beyond simplistic measures of “nature dose” to an understanding of how urban nature can be manipulated to enhance human health.