Frontiers in Public Health, 21 November 2024

The environmental health citizen interview tool: towards an inclusive qualitative environmental wellbeing approach in support of planetary health

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) play an important role in mitigating pressing societal challenges such as climate change adaptation, equity, environmental change and, biodiversity loss. Moreover, they can improve environmental conditions in both urban and rural areas.

These improvements are however not evenly distributed among the population. Therefore, designers and implementers of NbS must consider issues such as by, for and with whom the NbS are implemented and who benefits from the NbS. To operationalize these questions means to develop pathways and instruments that enables an understanding of how local communities experience their environment, which environmental conditions burden and/or support them and which changes they detect. There is thus a need to inquire how diverse populations experience their wellbeing in relation to the environment. Developing culturally sensitive tools that account for epistemic justice could be such a pathway.