COS 203-5 - More green, fewer problems: Nearby landcover relates to perception of environmental problems across a metropolitan region

Background/Question/Methods

The relationship between the structure and composition of the landscape around an individual’s home, and environmental perceptions and health outcomes have been well demonstrated (e.g., vegetation cover to wellbeing). Few studies, however, have examined how multiple landscape features, such as vegetation and water cover, relate to perceptions of multiple environmental problems, such as air or water quality. Additionally, studies are often conducted at a single time point and thus it is not clear whether those relationships hold over time. Utilizing a long-term dataset of landcover and geolocated telephone surveys in Baltimore, MD, we examined relationships between residents’ perceptions of multiple environmental problems and nearby landcover over a 15-year period. Specifically, we conducted a logistic regression to examine how vegetation, bare ground and water cover, and proximity to streams within a 1.6 km buffer around residents’ homes related to their perceptions of problems with air quality, water quality, safety, street cleanliness and availability and quality of parks.

Results/Conclusions

Despite the broad landcover categories used in this study, we found residents were less likely to perceive environmental problems when their neighborhood was more vegetated and had more water cover. One exception to this trend was for water quality; people were more likely to perceive problems with water quality when nearby water cover was greater. Notably, several of the relationships between landcover and environmental perceptions were non-linear, suggesting the need to better define thresholds of vegetation or water cover that affects residents’ environmental perceptions and well-being. Finally, the proportion of residents that perceived environmental problems did change over time; however, the direction of the relationship between landcover and the perception of problems did not change over time suggesting these relationships are stable (e.g., an increase in vegetation cover was always associated with a decrease in perceptions of environmental problems). This work is useful for informing policy aimed at minimizing perceived environmental problems, but also highlights the need for more work on whether perceptions environmental problems align with objective measures of environmental quality.