BlueHealth Toolbox

Having access to quality blue environments can benefit our health and wellbeing. The BlueHealth Toolbox has been created to help maximise these benefits while protecting the environment.

By collecting information about places and the people using or affected by them, blue space assessments provide evidence to enhance urban planning and design. This can help to tackle public health challenges linked to disease, mental health and climate change.

Read below for more details about each of the tools, you can also download the BlueHealth Toolbox for full details.

The Toolbox consists of six online tools. Each provides information linked to a site’s characteristics and works at a particular spatial scale – from site to country-level.

The tools can be used at any point when a blue space is being modified, but are most effective when used pre, during and post-intervention.

Download the toolbox for a full description of each tool or click on the links below:

• Environmental Assessment Tool (BEAT)
• Decision Support tool (DST)
• Behavioural Assessment Tool (BBAT)
• Community Level Survey (BCLS)
• SoftGIS
• International Survey (BIS)

Used in combination within a single and integrated assessment framework, the tools provide a variety of rich data sets.

We recommend considering three core dimensions when selecting which tools to employ in a specific intervention:

1. The spatial scale relevant to the effects of an intervention;
2. The timing of an intervention evaluation;
3. The population that may be impacted by an intervention.

The Toolbox does not account or explain the governance processes that inform the planning and management of blue spaces or their location. Additional stakeholder engagement, through scenario workshops for example, should be completed to identify and communicate the societal benefits of any intervention.

BlueHealth researchers have used the Toolbox to assess and measure the impacts of various blue space interventions.

Read our case studies from Plymouth (UK), Tallinn and Tartu (Estonia) to find out more.

If you have any questions related to the Toolbox or how to use it in your work, please contact us via bluehealth2020@exeter.ac.uk.