In a bid to become a greener city, London officially became the world’s first National Park City. Green spaces in cities are extremely beneficial to residents’ wellbeing.
Read: London becomes world’s first ‘National Park City’
According to a study conducted by Denmark’s University of Aarhus, exposure to green space like parks forests and so on during childhood reduces the risk of developing a certain number of psychiatric disorders during adolescence and adulthood.
Using data from the Landsat satellite archive and the Danish Civil Registration System, researchers traced the residential green space around nearly 1 million Danes. This was then correlated with the mental health of these individuals.
It was discovered that residents growing up with the least green spaces near to their homes had a 55% increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety and substance abuse later on in life.
The idea of making an entire city into a ‘National Park City’ (NPC) may be a tricky concept to wrap one’s brain around. The main concept of becoming an NPC is to make a city greener and wilder, and by extension healthier.
The concept was created by Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geographer and National Geographic explorer.
Jonathan Bell, director of the Being Human Initiative for National Geographic said to National Geographic, ‘Nairobi and Cape Town might be prime candidates given the high density of biodiversity of their regions. There’s an enormous global opportunity for urban settings to be places with thriving ecosystems and sustained biodiversity.’
Cape Town has seven ancient forests in its surrounds. According to WWF, the Cape floral kingdom contains 3% of the world’s plant species and 20% of Africa’s, covering approximately 90,000km2.
The Cape Floral Region is considered one of the six Floral Kingdoms of the world, and is also the smallest and richest, with the highest known concentration of plant species: 1,300 per 10,000 km2.
The fynbos constitutes about 80% of the Cape floral kingdom; of the more than 8,500 fynbos species, nearly 6,000 of them are endemic.
Read the full study, Green Space is Good for Mental Health, here.
Image: Unsplash
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