Green Infrastructure and Public Health in the Florida Communities Trust Public Land Acquisition Program

Abstract

The Florida Communities Trust (FCT) program provides grants to local governments to preserve open space. In doing so, this program plays an important role in supporting public health. A total of 617 FCT applications submitted between 2001 and 2006 were examined to determine in what ways the FCT is supporting public health. Results revealed that the FCT is supporting health most notably through the provision of park and greenway settings for physical activity and the protection of water quality. These findings are important because they reveal that programs such as the FCT have a latent ability to support public health. Making the important social benefit of public health more explicit can provide further justification for public land acquisition.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, evidence for the following sections was derived from evidence summaries provided by the Metropolitan Design Center's Design for Health initiative (Metropolitan Design Center 2007), the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO 2003), and the Trust for Public Land (2006), and from reviews of environmental audit tools and guides that capture the public health impacts of development. These latter include the Design Guidelines for Active Michigan Communities (Alaimo et al. 2006) and the Healthy Development Tool (San Francisco Department of Public Health 2007). Specific to land conservation and health, a recently published literature review by Tzoulas et al. (2007) provides more references that support many of the health considerations listed in the individual subsections.

2. From an environmental sciences perspective, passive recreation involves low-impact activities such as walking or hiking while active recreation involves climbing, hunting, horseback riding, and bike riding. This is very different from a public health perspective where recreation is considered ‘active’ if physical activity results. Walking or hiking qualifies as passive within the rubric of environmental science but is active from a public health perspective. Conversely, horseback riding, considered active or invasive from an environmental sciences perspective, would be termed passive from a public health perspective because no physical activity is being achieved. For the purposes of this paper, we will adopt the public health perspective of active and passive use.