In October Oxford Ecosystems welcomed postdoctoral researcher Dr Wenjing (Wendee) Zhang to the Environmental Change Institute (ECI). Wendee is a postdoctoral researcher in nature, health and wellbeing at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Flourishing and Wellbeing Theme of the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. Her past and on-going research focuses on how environmental policies and urban planning practices impact subjective and objective mental health and wellbeing.
Before joining the ECI, Wendee worked on projects investigating the health impacts of urban green and blue spaces, water management of urban green and blue space and carbon emissions of urban land cover change. Wendee completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Melbourne in 2022, where the thesis explored sustainability transitions in urban planning for future cities. Alongside her research, she is also the secretary of the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG).
During her postdoctoral position here at Oxford University, Wendee's research will focus on testing the co-benefits of green infrastructure and nature-based interventions on mental health and human wellbeing at different scales in the UK and and in the Global South. Her research interests are three-fold. Firstly, Wendee will start by quantifying how much green space is needed to provide justified mental health benefits in the UK and Global South, as well as determining the format in which those benefits should be. To answer this question, Wendee proposes an assessment of the impact of the 3-30-300 rule on population mental health outcomes. The 3-30-300 rule sets guidelines for cities to ensure fair access to nature. It suggests that people should be able to see three trees from their home, have a neighborhood with 30% tree coverage, and be within 300 meters of a quality green space. Wendee plans to test whether the different components of these three rules make a difference in mental health outcomes and if tree canopy density might have a threshold in impacting mental health.
Secondly, Wendee will investigate questions on multiple scales about green infrastructure and mental health and wellbeing in the UK. Here she will test whether different types of green infrastructure might have different impacts on mental health and how the relationship differs when looking at self-reported mental health and wellbeing status versus NHS diagnosis records. The national, regional, and community-level findings from the initial research plan will then lead to the third stage of her postdoctoral fellowship which will focus on a local case study of the co-benefits of green infrastructure.
Wendee is passionate about improving urban sustainability and believes that equitable access to high-quality green infrastructure is crucial for addressing health inequalities in both the UK and the Global South. Her postdoctoral research will provide an evidence guide for an environment improvement plan for England, green infrastructure framework, and Public Health England strategies. Read more about her work on her Environmental Change Institute profile.
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