Healthy Cities by Nature: How urban nature can become public health infrastructure

Cities inevitably shape the health of the people who live in them. Around a quarter of the disease burden and premature mortality is linked to environmental factors, many influenced by poor urban planning, unsustainable transport, and limited access to green and blue spaces. Yet many cities are still designed around built infrastructure and motorised traffic, rather than around people, nature, and public health.

This action brief, based on the EFI Biocities webinar Healthy cities by nature: integrating public health and the environment, examines how cities can move from recognising the health value of urban nature to embedding it in their infrastructure, institutions, and everyday routines.

Featuring insights from Mònica Ubalde (ISGlobal), Päivi Sieppi (City of Lahti), and Liisa Tyrväinen (Natural Resources Institute Finland), it combines evidence linking greener cities to healthier populations with practical lessons from Lahti, Finland's European Green Capital 2021, including health forests, outdoor learning, and nature-based prescriptions.

The brief distils four transferable lessons: 

1. Treating nature as health-promoting infrastructure
2. Starting from modifiable health determinants
3. Mainstreaming action through institutions
4. Building lasting routines rather than isolated projects.

Its central message is that cities need not wait for the health sector to act: by making contact with nature easy, equitable, and systematic, they can improve public health, climate resilience, and biodiversity together.

This publication is the first in a collection accompanying the EFI Biocities webinar series.