Landscape and Wellbeing：future research thoughts

Abstract

Throughout history, the landscape around us has been recognised for its myriad contributions to human wellbeing. This health-enhancing (salutogenic) aspect of landscape has become ever more important as we become an increasingly urbanised society and people live in contexts divorced from access to natural environments. However, modern science and policy-making requires high standards of evidence to justify investment in enhancing access to salutogenic landscapes and this, in turn, requires new ways of understanding the pathways and mechanisms that link the experience of the natural environment to specific (and often multiple) health outcomes. This paper describes the development of innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to researching such links, drawing on experience from OPENspace research centre and its collaborators, and looking forward to where innovative approaches might offer further enlightenment in future. It describes pioneering work that draws on environmental psychology, health geography, epidemiology, expertise in psychoneuroendochrine mechanisms and neuroscience, for example, to illustrate ways that collaborations across disciplines, geographies and timescales have recently produced new ways of understanding the relationship between landscape and health. It discusses the concept of the exposome and its implications for research, including epigenetics, the lifecourse of place, and the many influences of the microbiome. It points to future challenges and research opportunities, including new methods both for collecting and for analysing data, and their potential to inform policy and practice in planning, designing and managing health-enhancing landscapes.