Assessing city-wide and local health and well-being benefits

In this chapter, Lewis R. Elliott, Mathew P. White, Cristina Vert, Wilma Zijlema and Peeter Vassiljev summarise the development and application of the two survey tools, the Blue Health Survey (BIS) (international but could be applied at a national level) and the BlueHealth Community Level Survey (BCLS) - a questionnaire for use in local areas to capture the benefits of the presence of and access to blue spaces (based on a synthesis of a number of existing survey instruments and validated questions), with an overview of the results from Bulgaria (for the BIS) and Plymouth (for the BCLS) as illustrative of the efficacy of the tools, their ease or difficulty of application and the limitations of what they can tell us, together with information on protocols. The idea is that local authorities, communities and others could use the survey tools to gather their own data and interpret their own results.