Promoting human health through forests: overview and major challenges

Abstract

This review aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about human health, global change, and biodiversity by concentrating on the relationships between forests and human health. This review gives a short overview of the most important health benefits that forests provide to humans, and the risks that forests may pose to human health. Furthermore, it discusses the future challenges for the research on the links between forests and human health, and for delivering health through forests in practice. Forests provide enormous possibilities to improve human health conditions. The results of a vast amount of research show that forest visits promote both physical and mental health by reducing stress. Forests represent rich natural pharmacies by virtue of being enormous sources of plant and microbial material with known or potential medicinal or nutritional value. Forest food offers a safety net for the most vulnerable population groups in developing countries, and healthy forest ecosystems may also help in regulation of infectious diseases. Utilizing forests effectively in health promotion could reduce public health care budgets and create new sources of income. Main challenges to delivering health through forests are due to ecosystem and biodiversity degradation, deforestation, and climate change. In addition, major implementation of research results into practice is still lacking. Inadequate implementation is partly caused by insufficient evidence base and partly due to the lack of policy-makers' and practitioners' awareness of the potential of forests for improving human health. This calls for strong cooperation among researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners as well as between different sectors, especially between health and environmental professionals.

Green Infrastructure as a tool to support spatial planning in European urban regions

“…Recent studies demonstrated how human well-being is dependent upon multiple and often interrelated ecosystem services (Tzoulas et al 2007, Karjalainen et al 2010): for example changes in regulating services, such as climate fluctuation, could affect the rate of floods and landslides thus having negative effects on people's sense of security and well-being.…”

Nature Therapy and Preventive Medicine

“…There is also an increasing understanding that wider application of forest therapy and provision of easily accessible nature-based health services could significantly reduce public health care budgets. However, putting research into practice calls for stronger cooperation between different sectors, especially between forest, health, and environmental professionals (Karjalainen et al, 2010).…”

Trade-Offs in Multi-Purpose Land Use under Land Degradation

“…Biodiversity is important as a safety net during times of low agricultural production due to seasonal or cyclical food gaps or climate-induced hazards [88,90,91]. Many rural communities, particularly those that lack domesticated farm animals as sources of protein, derive 30-80% of their protein and micro-nutrient intake from bush meat [92].…”