Health and landscape approaches: A comparative review of integrated approaches to health and landscape management

Landscape approaches are integrated place-based approaches and provide cross-sectoral opportunities to facilitate sustainability transformations. The COVID-19 outbreak has profound ramifications for multiple dimensions of landscapes, ranging from mobility and lifestyle to value to environment and society. Therefore, integrated approaches to “health” have been more vigorously promoted in the policy arena dealing with human–nature interactions. The ecosystem principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which resonate with landscape approaches, are generally aligned with integrated approaches to health. However, commonalities and distinctions between these integrated approaches in both political and scientific domains have not been clarified. Drawing on a narrative review of the literature on “One Health,” “Ecohealth,” and “Planetary Health” as major health-oriented approaches in comparison with landscape approaches, the aspects of landscape approaches to be complemented in addressing health-related challenges were examined in this study. In addition to the review on the intellectual roots and evolutionary pathways, a comparative analysis of these relevant approaches was conducted in terms of three realms including theoretical assumptions, knowledge bases, and research paradigms. The results of the comparative review show that all approaches share systems thinking, interdisciplinarity, cross-sectoral collaboration, and holistic paradigm but differ with respect to their focused management problems, disciplines, and sectors as well as ontological and epistemological underpinnings. Pointing to the recent theoretical and methodological development in integrating health in placemaking, the results of this study suggest that pragmatic landscape approaches could be strengthened by using health-related research paradigms to achieve better constructivism–positivism meeting grounds regarding health–landscape intersections.