Sustainable Ecological Infrastructures and Human Well-Being: Regional Landscape and Socioeconomic Contributions

Dear Colleagues,

We are living in a world deeply entwined with ecological infrastructures (EIs). Our lives interact with a network established by green and blue spaces (GBSs), where we access well-being by enjoying natural products and stress relief without worries about danger or threat. Air, sunlight, soil, water, plants, and biodiversity in EI all become meaningful if we are aware that the contact with, or the thought of, them will confer us wellness and satisfaction. This is the route we need to take in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) III, that is, to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. The efficacy of SDG achievement is of high concern to policy makers, who wonder to what extent should GBS be planned and managed to activate full functional services of EI. The assessment needs data to evaluate scientific metrics about the dose of naturalness in regional landscape and spatiotemporal distributions of topographic and climatic factors. More controllably, financial budget can be a flexible tool to adjust regional socioeconomic structure at its immediate necessity. Regional financial status matters for the trade-off of a construction target between economic income and functional outcome in EI’s landscape. In developing regions, the increase of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) may need to depend on production value from resource-consumption industries at a high cost of environment pollution. Local people can perceive health and well-being, but joint environment condition and financial stress may degrade both. It is time to gauge the well-being of people experiencing EI, and more dimensions need to be considered than before across regional landscape metrics and socioeconomic factors. Scholars from many fields in an interdisciplinary effort are essentially needed to to contribute to a synthesis of findings that help explain well-being response complicated conditions such as those described here.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Design and planning of urban green and blue spaces to improve resident well-being;
• Approaches and instruments evaluating services of ecological infrastructures;
• Spatiotemporal distributions of ecological infrastructures and their functions;
• Regional socioeconomic factors in association with ecological landscape;
• Financial status of regional green and environmental sustainability;
• Population urbanization and associated resident health and well-being;
• Big data used for quantifying the well-being of urban Nature experiencers;
• Production value of regional agroforestry ecosystem.

Dr. Hongxu Wei
Prof. Dr. Ping Liu
Dr. Changwei Zhou
Dr. Peng Guo
Guest Editors

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