Understanding and enabling health outcomes from Nature-based Solutions

Detalles

Nature is fundamental to health. A growing body of scientific evidence, coupled with millennia of traditional knowledge, highlights that nature makes essential material, psychological and regulatory contributions to health. The loss and degradation of nature and the services it provides impose, among many other challenges, significant health impacts both locally and globally. In addition, the health consequences of nature loss and degradation are not equally distributed and are often more pronounced for vulnerable groups, particularly indigenous peoples and local communities.

Understanding the importance of the links between thriving nature and health is not as much taken into account as it should be when structuring the foundations and actions to protect, restore and regenerate biodiversity and the services that nature provides. Nature-based solutions (NBS) offer great opportunities to address the challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change, as well as to create resilient livelihoods and improve the health of indigenous peoples and local communities. NBS projects can be key to improving health, and therefore it is imperative to integrate health considerations into the design and implementation of NBS projects.

This toolkit, developed by Pollination and GSK, was created to: catalyze awareness of the fundamental links between health and nature; provide scientific and evidence-based guidance on the design and implementation of projects to enhance health benefits; and mobilize a group of leaders who can drive support for the best NBS projects that incorporate health considerations.