Scenic views are good for your health, say researchers

People feel healthier when they live near and look out over scenic areas

THE hills are alive with the vibrancy of wellbeing

 

Scientists have discovered that people feel healthier when they live and look out over scenic areas.

Yet don’t worry if you are a townie. Research shows the same theory is true for those living in suburban and even inner city areas.

Even the amount of green you perceive across the landscape is not vital to get the scenic effect. Seeing browns, blues and greys across an urban view – perhaps a suggestion of mountains and lakes – also seems to have positive impacts.

The science of “scenicness” has been explored by Warwick Business School academics Chanuki Seresinhe, Dr Tobias Preis and Dr Suzy Moat, who used crowdsourced data from an online game that saw players studying 212,000 pictures of Britain.

Scenic-or-Not participants had to rate the “scenicness” of the views and, after collecting more than 1.5 million ratings, researchers found people who lived in areas rated as more scenic reported their health to be better when answering a question about their wellbeing in the 2011 census.

The researchers combined the data collected from Scenic-Or-Not with data from the 2011 Census for England and Wales, where people reported their general health as “very good”, “good”, “fair”, “bad” or “very bad”.

 

Chanuki Seresinhe, a PhD student in the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School, explained: “To explore how scenicness relates to people’s health, we had to account for a wide range of factors.

“Richer people may live in more scenic areas, cities may be less scenic due to the lack of nature and higher population density, and scenic areas may be less polluted.

“Our analysis considers whether an area is urban, suburban, or rural. We also control for socioeconomic characteristics that may be linked with health, such as income and employment. On top of this, we ran an additional analysis to account for levels of air pollution.

“After building all these factors into our analysis, we find that across all of England, people report better health when living in areas of greater scenicness.”

One of key findings is that scenic areas do not have to be green. The research team’s findings imply that differences in reports of health can be better explained when considering ratings of how scenic an area is, rather than just measurements of green space.

Ms Seresinhe added: “This is a fascinating finding. Just because a place is green does not compel us to feel better on its own. It seems to be that the beauty of the environment, as measured by scenicness, is of crucial importance.

 

Seeing mountains and lakes also has a positive impact

However, introducing greenery without taking in the whole environment will have little impact

Across all of England, people report better health when living in areas of greater scenicness

Chanuki Seresinhe, Warwick Business School

“We also found that the most scenic photos do not contain the highest proportion of the colour green. Instead, very scenic photos also tend to contain large proportions of grey, brown and blue – perhaps corresponding to mountains or lakes.

“We saw that less scenic images tend to be mainly grey with higher proportions of black and white, but interestingly, also contain more green than the most scenic photos.”

The benefits of having invigorating and inspiring views is something that should not be overlooked by developers.

“Our results suggest that the beauty of our everyday environment might have more practical importance than was previously believed,” added Ms Seresinhe.

“In order to ensure the wellbeing of local inhabitants urban planners and policymakers might find it valuable to consider the aesthetics of the environment when embarking upon large projects to build new parks, housing developments or highways.

"Our findings imply that simply introducing greenery, without considering the beauty of the resulting environment, might not be enough.”

The study, Quantifying the Impact of Scenic Environments on Health, is published in Scientific Reports today.

Dr Moat, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and co-director of Warwick Business School’s Data Science Lab, explained how the team were able to carry out their research because of the power of the internet.

“Until recently, it would have been difficult to investigate the relationship between our health and the beauty of the environment we live in, due to the cost of running a survey to gather such large amounts of data on how scenic people considered different parts of the country to be,” she said.

“The internet offers a new solution to this problem, because it allows us to build games and services which provide incentives for citizens to submit these sorts of ratings.”

Dr Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance Science and co-director of Warwick Business School’s Data Science Lab, added: “The huge volumes of data we are now generating on an everyday basis are opening up intriguing new possibilities to quantify and test intuitions about the social world around us.”