Health and wellbeing benefits of urban forests in winter: a narrative review

ABSTRACT

Urban trees and green spaces, hereafter, urban forests, are known to contribute to human health and wellbeing. However, research has predominantly focused on warm seasons. To understand whether these benefits extend to winter months, when vegetation is dormant, we conducted a narrative review of the health outcomes associated with urban forests in winter in cities with cold climates. We synthesized findings from 21 studies originating from Asia, Europe and North America. The most studied health outcomes were mental health, physical activity and physiological relaxation, all showing a positive relationship with urban forest exposure. These finding appear similar to those observed in warmer seasons. However, more studies are needed, on a diversity of health outcomes, to draw more robust conclusions in this emerging research field. Future research on urban forests should therefore consider winter and the effect of seasonality to improve health and wellbeing of urban dwellers in all seasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold climate
• seasonality
• green space
• mental health
• physical health

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues at the Quebec National Institute of Public Health (INSPQ) who contributed to this research in various ways. More specifically, we would like to thank Virginie Houde for helping to develop the search strategy, Mélanie Beaudoin for helping initiate the project and Pierre Paul Audate for reviewing an earlier draft of this article. We would also like to thank Audrey Smargiassi for her help supervising during the early stages of this project. Finally, we are grateful to the editor and reviewer for providing insightful comments on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.