Green Cities, Healthier Children: The Effect of Expanding Urban Green Space on Body Weight for Primary School Starters.

ABSTRACT: The discussion on tackling childhood obesity is often centered around fostering physical activity. A potential relationship yet overlooked could run from providing the proper environment for healthy lifestyles to reduced weight problems. A unique quasi-experimental setting of transforming former airport grounds to a large urban green space allows me to apply a difference-in-differences approach within an intention-to-treat framework, comparing several weight outcomes of residential children to children living further away before and after park opening. I use new administrative data on the Berlin district level from mandatory school entrance examinations and provide robust evidence of a lower probability by 4.3% points for treated children to be overweight (BMI > 90 P.), driven entirely by

SUBMITTER: Koebe J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11786947 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature