Biodiversity is culturally important, but we have little idea how biodiversity loss affects health through these cultural pathways. Human health is sensitive to apparently trivial psychological stimuli, negatively affected by the risk of environmental degradation, and positively affected by contact with natural spaces. This suggests health should be affected by biodiversity change, but few studies have explored these relationships.

There is a growing evidence-base that healthy accessible environments support individual physical and mental health in urban society.  The majority of evidence points towards these effects arising from individual direct contact and use of nature: environmental utility. This paper explores whether health and wellbeing of predominantly urban populations is incidentally effected by a healthy natural environment.

Both health and conservation sciences have called for greater clarity regarding the role of the environment in determining human health and wellbeing. We systematically identified and examined existing evidence linking biodiversity to good health. While the body of evidence indicates a positive relationship, strength and direction of relationships is uncertain.

Today’s mostly urban society is becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. This comes at a time when a growing body of evidence suggesting that interactions with the natural environment are important for human health and wellbeing. We use multiple measures of preference, value, motivation and benefit to quantify what role biodiversity may play in ameliorating the urban experience for city dwellers.

Data from the RELU SEIRA and SECRA projects for 6,027 Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) were analysed to assess relationships between indicators of environmental quality and variation in population mental health. Populations living in LSOAs with greater bat species richness had better mental health, which persisted after adjustment for other ecological and socio-economic factors.

It is widely acknowledged that biodiversity is culturally important but we have little idea of the effects that ecological population change may have upon our health. Using postal surveys, we explore this relationship by assessing the effect of wild birds on people’s subjective well-being in various sites across the UK. 

Protected Areas constitute a major conservation intervention but there is policy concern over their impact on local human populations. We describe a systematic review of evidence on the impacts of protected areas on human wellbeing. The resulting evidence base is presented in terms of its implications for policy and future research.

Landscape aesthetics are cultural ecosystem services contributing to human wellbeing; but are poorly theorized in inter-disciplinary research, and little is known about the aesthetic apprehension of biodiversity or its effects. This paper will review the evidence and differentiate the functions of the aesthetics of biodiversity in mental health and wellbeing.

Evidence illustrating the beneficial impact of natural settings on health is widely documented. However little is known about the impact of the quality of landscape and its biodiversity value. This paper posits that biodiversity can offer objective quality evaluations of differing landscapes to build further understanding of ‘green health’; it also points to some of the potential problems with this.  

Citation analyses of published evidence in the field of biodiversity and human health were undertaken. In the last forty years 173 articles have been published in 104 different journals.  The range of disciplines includes health, psychology, architecture, forestry and ecology. The results indicate that knowledge is diffusing between the disciplines.