Contemporary ecological models of health prominently feature the natural environment as fundamental to the ecosystem services that support human life, health, and well-being. The natural environment encompasses and permeates all other spheres of influence on health. Reviews of the natural environment and health literature have tended, at times intentionally, to focus on a limited subset of ecosystem services as well as health benefits stemming from the presence, and access and exposure to, green infrastructure. The sweeping influence of green infrastructure on the myriad ecosystem services essential to health has therefore often been underrepresented. This survey of the literature aims to provide a more comprehensive picture—in the form of a primer—of the many simultaneously acting health co-benefits of green infrastructure. It is hoped that a more accurately exhaustive list of benefits will not only instigate further research into the health co-benefits of green infrastructure but also promote consilience in the many fields, including public health, that must be involved in the landscape conservation necessary to protect and improve health and well-being.

We examined whether neighborhood urban form, along with the social environment, was associated with depressive symptoms in a sample of Miami residents. Using a validated measure of depressive symptoms, we found that living in neighborhoods with higher housing density was associated with fewer symptoms. A larger acreage of green spaces was also linked to fewer depressive symptoms but did not reach significance in the full model. Our results suggest that how residents use the environment matters. Living in neighborhoods with a higher density of auto commuters relative to land area, an indicator of chronic noise exposure, was associated with more symptoms.

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The loss of green space in an increasingly developed landscape may not only have negative environmental impacts but may also be detrimental to human health. The relationship between green space and health is dependent on not only the presence but also access to green space. This cross-sectional ecological study uses a geographical information system to examine the relationships between the presence and accessibility of green space and county-level mortality in the state of Florida. After controlling for some of the leading influences of mortalityincluding the levels of obesity, smoking, old age, and education -we found that the amount of green space within defined distances of census tracts in each county was associated with both all cause and cardiovascular mortality. Neither the gross amount of green space in a county nor the average distance to green space from census tracts in a county were significantly associated with our mortality measures.

The results suggest that there is an association between the accessibility created by having more green space closer to home and MVPA, but this holds only for areas up to and including 1 mile from home.