ESTIMATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT TO HUMAN HEALTH BY ASSOCIATING GREENNESS AND CANCER

摘要

It has been constantly increased to estimate the impact of natural environment to human health and welfare, and suggested that the proportion of complex disease risk would be resulted from differences of environmental exposures. On recent study, the exposure of neighborhood greenness may impact health and reduce diseases by illustrating the relation between the greenness and various diseases. Thus, in this study, we tried to figure out the relation between the greenness and cancer, and investigate a relevant con-elation with specific cancer type. Study area is Seoul city, which is the capital of S. Korea. Landsat 8 image was used to calculate NDVI and statistical data of the number of cancer patients in 2009-2013 was used. In addition, other social statistics such as population, gender, age were also combined to analyze the complex relation. As a result, all types of cancer didn't show: any relationship with NDVI. However, population was the strongest reason for the cause of cancer. This could be resulted from a lack of sample number, a bad choice of study area, and a lack of accumulated data. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the natural environment impacts human health, and there are many on-going studies to estimate the relationship between them. In the future, more specified and accumulated data as well as a selection of proper study area are needed to verify the relationship between greenness and human health, and it is expected that the final result of the study would be useful to the stakeholders to improve the quality of life.