In a new paper published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, authors from the U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center (ERDC) explore the psychological, physiological, medical, and social benefits to humans of exposure to nature, and how natural infrastructure (NI) projects can take these into account to continue to deliver those benefits.
The authors describe the need for a framework to capture the diverse and holistic benefits of NI, optimizing new NI projects for human and structural benefits. The paper describes the components necessary for this framework, as well as methodological examples of well-being accounting tools that can assist the planning of NI projects.
The author team includes Ellis Kalaidijan from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science & Education, Margaret Kurth, John Kucharski and Stephanie Galaitsi from ERDC’s Environmental Laboratory, and Elissa Yeates from ERDC’s Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory and UGA’s Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems.
The paper presents a roadmap for building on existing research on the benefits of proximity and access to nature. This plan prioritizes flexibility for future advances and aims to better account for community context in quantifying prospective project benefits.
“The fact that nature is essential for human well-being is generally known, and the inclusion of nature benefits in economic analysis of public investment, particularly in infrastructure, is relatively new and still developing.”
(Human well-being and natural infrastructure: assessing opportunities for equitable project planning and implementation. Kalaidijan et. al., 2024.)
Check out the full paper here.
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