Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Green Spaces: A Path to Recovery and Resilience -- CARDI Research & Policy Brief Series

Access to green space and the act of creating green spaces is well understood to promote human health, especially in therapeutic contexts among individuals suffering traumatic events. Less well understood, though currently being studied, is the role of access to green space and the act of creating and caring for it in promoting neighborhood health and well being as related to social-ecological system resilience. An important implication of this work lies in specific instances of greening and the presence of greened spaces in promoting and enhancing recovery, and perhaps resilience, in social ecological systems disrupted or perturbed by violent conflict or other catastrophic disaster. Despite the well documented importance of "interaction with nature" in post-traumatic stress management, examples of community based natural resource management are often overlooked in the hazard and vulnerability context.