How do ecosystem service flows mediate the impact of urban greenspace on elderly health? The case of Shanghai

Abstract

While extensive research has demonstrated the positive association between urban greenspace and elderly health, the mediating role of ecosystem service flows (i.e., the actual supply of ecosystem services accessible to residents) remains poorly understood. Drawing upon data from 215,199 elderly participants in Shanghai’s Seventh National Population Census, this study employed structural equation modeling and bivariate Moran’s I analysis to investigate how three critical ecosystem service flows—air purification, temperature regulation, and outdoor recreation—mediate the relationship between greenspace exposure and elderly health. Our findings indicated that: (1) ecosystem service flows exhibited a significant mediating effect (β = 0.041, p < 0.05), surpassing the direct effect of greenspace alone (β = 0.038, p < 0.05); (2) this mediation varies by baseline health status, with the strongest effect observed among healthier individuals and the weakest among those with severe disabilities; and (3) outdoor recreation exhibited the strongest spatial association with elderly health (Moran’s I = -0.04 to 0.18), outperforming temperature regulation (Moran’s I = -0.05 to 0.14) and air purification (Moran’s I = -0.03 to 0.11). These results highlight that enhancing elderly health through urban greening requires not only expanding green infrastructure but also strategically strengthening the delivery of ecosystem service flows most critical to health outcomes.

Keywords

Landscape sustainability / Green infrastructure / Nature-based solutions / Elderly health / Ecosystem service flows

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chaoqiang Liang: Writing - original draft, Validation, Software, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Xuening Fang: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Project administration, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Ju Shen: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Data curation. Yaodong Fang: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Formal analysis. Shiqiang Du: Writing - review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Xuening Fang is an Young Editorial Board Member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42201101). We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100423.

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