Physical and chemical environments and human health

Professor Jamie Pearce and Dr Tom Clemens are working on a project that addresses the urgent questions faced by Scottish Forestry, alongside forestry agencies across the rest of the UK, Europe, and internationally, who want to know how they can respond positively to global challenges for sustainability and human health while satisfying demands for more tree cover.  The project is being led by Catharine Ward Thompson,  OPENspace Research Centre, and also involves Professor Rich Mitchell, from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow. 

Our focus is on urban forestry and how to provide better evidence of the contributions it can make to human wellbeing, child development, and health equity.  Evidence suggests our increasingly urban population is experiencing rising levels of mental illness and non-communicable disease.  Access to natural environments such as woodlands can offer health benefits, especially concerning mental wellbeing, and support healthy child development.  It appears that more socially disadvantaged people may also gain from improved opportunities to visit and enjoy urban forests and other natural environments.  

We plan to provide evidence on the effectiveness of practical ways in which forestry can be used to benefit such populations.  Our study examines whether existing programmes for urban forestry, such as Scottish Forestry's (formerly known as Forestry Commission Scotland) Woods In and Around Towns (WIAT) programme, are effective in their aims of improving community wellbeing and quality of life by bringing neglected urban woodland near deprived urban communities into active management and working with local people to help them use their local woodland.   

The findings of this project will also assist public health policy-makers and planners, land managers, spatial planners, land development agencies, and third sector organisations explore how to invest scarce resources in ways that maximise benefits for people and the planet.    

Professor Ruth Doherty is leading a network project called HEICCAM with co-investigators, Professor Jamie Pearce and Dr Tom Clemens.  This network brings together academics and early career researchers from nine universities representing disciplines as diverse as air quality measurement and modelling, building physics, behavioural science, health, education and policy, with stakeholders from the public sector, business/industry and the third sector the general public. 

The 2019 UK Climate Change Act (net-zero by 2050) and the 2019 UK Clean Air Strategy will have important air quality implications in outdoor and indoor environments.  The transition to a low carbon economy and policies to improve air quality have important implications for exposure to air pollutants in connected indoor and outdoor environments. While the transition will generally lead to lower exposures to ambient air pollution (e.g. from power plants and vehicles) – a co-benefit for health – the effect on personal exposure indoors is unclear.   Our researchers seek to address this gap through the health and equity impacts of climate change mitigation measures on indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure network (HEICCAM). 

Measures to improve home energy efficiency typically entail reducing ventilation and hence air exchange. While beneficial in decreasing the penetration of pollutants from the outdoor environment, they may increase gaseous and particle pollutants from indoor sources.  The impact on health and equity may be net beneficial or detrimental depending on location, dwelling characteristics, and occupant behaviour (for example, ventilation, cooking).  The limited understanding of these impacts reflects an evidence gap that is especially important for vulnerable groups, including children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing illness.  

This consortium will build evidence on the consequences of exposure to air pollution of actions aimed at tackling climate change and poor air quality, focusing on the home environment, to inform and influence policy and practice to protect human health.  It will help grow long term capability in interdisciplinary research in this domain through the interactions with early career researchers, development of research plans, and linkage to other networks and existing research in the clean-air and other programmes. 

More information on this project award can be found on *ERE

Kathryn Halliday is carrying out research examining the effects on wellbeing from people’s exposure to neighbourhood-level social networks and how this might be moderated according to where they live.  

This work is allied with our research relating to physical environments and health. It examines the effects on wellbeing from people’s exposure to neighbourhood-level social networks and how this might be moderated according to where they live.  The research hypothesises that geographical remoteness may influence neighbourhoods' collective social dynamics to contribute to observable effects on health outcomes.   

Kathryn compares physical (birth weights) and mental health (depression and anxiety) outcomes across Scotland’s urban, rural, island, and mainland regions, and considers these concerning measures of neighbourhood social characteristics. In addition to health analysis, a new method for more direct small area measurement of neighbourhood social characteristics is developed, responding to the lack of such tools currently available to researchers.  Data and analysis techniques used throughout the different analyses are at the forefront of this research, drawing on a large scale linked administrative data sources including the Scottish Longitudinal Study, prescription and maternal health records, and various Government surveys.   

This project forms part of Kathryn's PhD and her supervisors are Professor Chris Dibben and Dr Tom Clemens.