Report: New Approaches to Understanding Equitable Access to the Outdoors
Person walking through an urban park in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Mason Cummings
Authors: Jon Christensen, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Dan Rademacher, GreenInfo Network (based on research by a broader team from The Wilderness Society and GreenInfo Network).
Research project maps where policies can be applied to expand equitable access to the outdoors
Some 3.8 million square miles of public parks and open space exist across the United States, but access to that nature is not equitably distributed. A new report examined six states—Arizona, California, Georgia, Montana, New Mexico and Washington—and found that nearly 23 million people across all six states can’t walk to a neighborhood park within 10 minutes from their homes.
The report explored three policy solutions:
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Building new neighborhood parks.
Improving equitable access to nature for everyone, especially people who have been historically underserved, requires investments to build new parks and green spaces in neighborhoods without them.
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Improving infrastructure and programming.
Amenities like parking, restrooms, trash cans, recreational equipment, fields, playgrounds, trails and multi-language signage foster public spaces that are welcoming, safe and worth coming to.
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Increasing public transit connectivity.
In the six states examined, the report found that a significant number of people in neighborhoods without parks have limited access to personal vehicles, making regional parks or open spaces hard to reach.
Researchers developed a tool to provide nonprofit advocacy groups and state and local governments with detailed mapping and demographic data to inform policy and financial decisions for improving park access where gaps persist. The project was a collaboration between the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and GreenInfo Network, supported by The Wilderness Society and Resources Legacy Fund.
