The Green Spaces and Parks within our Biosphere are managed to a high standard with many earning Green Flag Status, an award granted by An Taisce.

Our parks aim to be welcoming places, promoting healthy lifestyles, to be safe and secure and with a focus on sustainability, conservation and heritage and community involvement.

These green spaces have become essential to Dubliners during the Covid-19 lock down and have offered opportunities to reconnect with nature.

Gardens and green spaces are of great benefit throughout our built environment, from street trees to private gardens, but it is within our parks where we can come closest to what may be considered natural habitat. Here within continuous, and often interconnected tree cover, the greatest refuges for wildlife can be found within towns and cities.

The positive effect of public parks on our health and wellbeing has been accepted since they first began to appear in towns and cities back in the 19th century.

As well as the obvious and long-established benefits of healthy exercise and leisure for those of us living in an urban setting, park trees and foliage also contribute significantly to the removal of airborne pollutants that have led to a global epidemic of Asthma.

Because parks serve as a bridge from the countryside to urban life, they reconnect us to nature, both on an individual and at societal level. It might be because of this that access to parks and green spaces also has a strong although harder to define benefit to our psychological wellbeing, as well as our physical health.

Thanks to Robert Moss of An Taisce for allowing us to reproduce elements from his report on the progress of Green Flag Parks in Ireland over the last 5 years.