Children and Youth Engagement with Nature and their Health: A Scoping Review of Interventions

Interventions for engaging young people with nature are multiplying and competing with traditional interventions for resources. However, knowledge on such interventions, including the degree and range of outcomes urgently needs to be methodically synthesized. It is, therefore, timely to produce a scoping review that will generate results that will be highly pertinent to knowledge users, the broader community and organizations around the world. Using a population health model, the scoping review will allow us to compare interventions and how they are applied in diverse settings and contexts, and to describe the positive and negative outcomes and absence of outcomes of the interventions, alongside the barriers and facilitators to intervention use. It will also help us to identify where sufficient evidence exists so that action plans and future policy recommendations can be made about interventions to engage children and youth with nature for health purposes. Gaps and contradictions in evidence will also be identified along with areas where knowledge translation strategies would be useful, where further knowledge synthesis is needed, and where more primary research is required. Additionally, this review will generate publications and presentations alongside other creative knowledge translation strategies for knowledge users and stakeholders in local communities as well as the scientific community. This process will build a strong multidisciplinary partnership between knowledge users and researchers, useful for future knowledge translation strategies, action plans, policy development and research.

Collaborator: Patti Hansen-Ketchum (PI)