Research Council of Finland awards nearly €700,000 to Marja Roslund for research on children’s environmental health
The Research Council of Finland has awarded Marja Roslund, a researcher with a distinguished record in the BIWE project since 2021, funding of €699,714 for an Academy Research Fellowship. Her new project, AI-PlayHealth, expands the line of research begun in the Finnish nationwide daycare yard rewilding study (Vahvistu), which is part of BIWE. In Vahvistu, more than 70 daycare centres across Finland are already investigating how making daycare yards more natural affects the health and wellbeing of children and of the yard ecosystems themselves.
“Roslund’s funding is a logical next step in studying the benefits of multispecies urban ecosystems for humankind,” says Aki Sinkkonen, Principal Investigator of the BIWE project at the University of Eastern Finland. He adds: “An Academy Research Fellowship is the most prestigious position a researcher starting an independent career can obtain in Finland.”
The five-year project (2026–2030) is titled Planetary Health Toolkit: Climate-Resilient Play Areas to Support Environmental and Child Health (AI-PlayHealth).
The project will increase biodiversity in urban daycare centres and use intervention trials to study how climate-resilient play environments can promote planetary health. On the environmental side, the aim is to support the functioning of soil microbiota, improve carbon sequestration, and reduce pollutant concentrations and heat load. For children’s health, the goal is to enrich the body’s microbiome, improve the regulation of immune defence and stress hormones, and enhance perceived wellbeing. By combining environmental, microbiome and health data, the project seeks to identify cause-and-effect relationships and to forecast long-term benefits for public health, climate change adaptation and sustainable urban development.
“Earlier studies have found that increasing biodiversity in children’s everyday environments can have a positive effect on the microbiome and the immune system. Now, for the first time, we can link these health effects to environmental benefits such as reducing pollution, sequestering carbon and cooling urban environments,” Roslund says.
AI-PlayHealth, led by Dr Marja Roslund of the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), deepens the work begun in BIWE by focusing on climate change adaptation. Together, the projects are building an ever more comprehensive picture of the many ways in which biodiversity in urban environments supports planetary health, on which human wellbeing depends.
Warmest congratulations to Marja!
