Authored by Ben Wheeler

One of the Centre’s core founding missions was to embed an understanding of the interactions between environment and health in national and international policies.

But the route to having a meaningful impact on the decision-making process is often highly circuitous and relies on high quality research, clear communication, and steady relationship building.

Undaunted by the task ahead, in 2011 we decided to aim for the top.

When it comes to human health, there is no authority more influential on a global scale than the World Health Organisation. Consisting of 194 member states, the WHO aims to “coordinate the world’s response to health emergencies, promote well-being, prevent disease and expand access to health care.”

To achieve that aim, the WHO connects people and nations with robust evidence that can underpin public policies. Yet 15 years ago, the positive links between natural environments and health had only an embryonic presence on government agendas.

We believed there was enough research evidence to begin to change that.

In 2015, Prof Mike Depledge and I travelled to Bonn for a workshop on urban green space and health, catalysed by the 2010 Parma Declaration on Environment and Health, which included a goal on children’s access to green spaces.

Alongside other internationally leading research institutions, we were asked to contribute to an influential 2016 WHO report focused on urban green spaces and health, reviewing the state of the evidence and proposing an expert consensus-based indicator that still has pertinence today (the proportion of population living within 300m of a green space of minimum size 0.5 or 1 hectare).

Following on from that early work, we helped to deliver a growing WHO focus on nature and health, including a vital review of urban green space interventions, and an action brief aimed at local authorities and others with an interest in delivering healthy green spaces.

As our collaborations deepened, we began to work ever more closely with the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health (no relation!) and broadened our scope to include a greater focus on aquatic environments through the groundbreaking BlueHealth programme.

These efforts were rewarded in 2019 with our formal designation as the WHO Collaborating Centre on Natural Environments and Health, recognising our substantial and continued contribution to the WHO mission.

Since then we have worked with our Bonn-based colleagues to deliver three major reports, each launched on International Day for Biological Diversity (22nd May), and focused on specific topics:

Nature-based solutions
Valuing green and blue spaces
Biodiversity and health

We are particularly proud that our work has directly informed the most recent Ministerial Environment and Health Declaration in Budapest in 2023: making clear, for the first time, that we have to tackle the ‘triple crisis’ of biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and climate change to deal with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time.

With WHO partners we have also designed and led an online school on nature and health for colleagues from the government ministries of member states. In autumn 2025 we were joined by ministerial staff from 28 countries across Europe and Central Asia for five weeks of sessions led by experts from the Centre and beyond – learning that will continue in a forthcoming masterclass available across the WHO Europe region.

Demand for these sessions marks an incredible shift over the last decade in the appetite for evidence that can underpin decisions about nature and health and is testament to the huge efforts of the Centre’s researchers past and present, wider academics across myriad related fields, and our colleagues at the World Health Organisation.

Where next? As the gap between the poor and wealthy deepens, we’re focusing on how natural environments might begin to address widening inequalities in health, a relationship that could have far-reaching implications across the world.