The significance of green spaces for protecting health of urban population

Green spaces (green infrastructure, green areas) are important components of urban environment. They are able to mitigate health outcomes of climatic risks, exposure to urbanization and adverse environmental factors. Bigger areas covered with plants should increase their accessibility for people living in cities. Analysis of the results reported in foreign studies that addressed influence of green spaces on public health proves that they promote physical activity by urban citizens, sports included, development of interpersonal communication and social interactions, improve mental health, and reduce prevalence of diabetes mellitus and other diseases. In some cases massive construction of residential housing and public buildings in Russian megacities and large cities led to reduction in green areas. The existing construction standards in Russia do not consider the recommendation of the WHO/Europe that requires accessibility of green spaces within a 15–20 minute walking distance and provision of 9 m2 of green spaces per person. Utility of green spaces for public health depends on evenness of their distribution. In case their distribution is mosaic, their benefits for public health and protection capacities are reduced. The present review shows the importance, needs and advantages of developing green infrastructure with continuous canopy that create potent green shading

Selected health parameters of people living in cities included into «clean air» federal project

Our research goal was to assess expected efficiency of «Clean air» Federal project with its activities aimed at reducing ambient air contamination and population health risks. We revealed that finding solutions to the project tasks on emissions reduction that had been set without taking into account peculiarities of city design, development, landscapes, meteorological conditions, and other factors, would not result in improved ambient air quality. Road and transport systems are to be modernized basing on transport flows modeling and application of calculations taking into account transport flows structure, speed, and intensity as well as some other parameters. Analysis of standardized death rate (SDR) in 2000-2018 revealed the highest total mortality in Chita against a reference city, Lipetsk; mortality due to respiratory diseases was higher in Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Magnitogorsk, Nizhniy Tagil, Novokuznetsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Cherepovets, and Chita. Mortality caused by these diseases has been going down since 2007; starting from 2013, the highest mortality due to respiratory diseases has been registered in Krasnoyarsk. Long-term annual average SDR due to neoplasms is rather chaotic in most cities but it is persistently higher than in Lipetsk, the reference city; asymptomatic parameter (

On some approaches to calculation of health risks caused by temperature waves

The paper dwells on techniques applied for assessing impacts exerted by environmental factors on population health which have become conventional all over the world over recent years. The greatest attention is paid to up-to-date approaches to calculating risks of additional mortality which occurs in big population groups during cold and hot temperature waves. The authors consider basic stages in direct epidemiologic research: temperature waves definition; statistics hypotheses formulation; models specification; statistical criteria sensitivity, and statistical validity of the obtained results. As per long-term research performed by us in various Russian cities, we constructed logistic curves which show probability of obtaining significant risk assessment results for small samplings. We recommend to apply percentiles of long-term average daily temperature distributions as temperature thresholds when identifying temperature waves; in our opinion, such thresholds correspond to perceptions of extreme (for this or that region) temperatures and provide comparable results in terms of expected waves quantity in different climatic zones. Poisson's generalized linear model for daily mortality is shown to be the most widely spread technique for calculating risks caused by hazardous environmental factors. It is advisable to allow for an apparent correlation between mortality and time and air contamination in any regression model. We can allow for meteorological conditions which influence heat balance (air humidity and wind speed) either via including them apparently into a model or via bioclimatic indexes application; research in this sphere is going on. When calculating risks, it is advisable to allow for time lags between extreme temperatures waves and changes in mortality. We revealed that minimal population of a typical city for which it is possible to obtain statistically significant assessment of risks caused by heat waves ensembles is about 200,000 people