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Efforts to reduce the impacts of impervious areas through revegetation and preservation of existing vegetation will increase the ability of the City to achieve and maintain healthy watersheds. The City of Portland's Revegetation Program is an essential part of the City's effort to restore our urbanized and degraded ecosystems, and to improve the functionality of healthy watersheds. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that revegetation will improve physical-biological elements of the urban environment such as water quality, stream integrity, and fish and wildlife habitat. It will also improve social-economic values within the urbanized community. To provide support for this understanding the evidence summarized here, over 100 articles and papers of available scientific literature, was reviewed to establish a defensible basis for the restoration of the functional value of vegetation in the urban landscape.
The primary focus of this review is to identify and discuss the functional value vegetation provides for:

KEy MESSAGES OF OUR REPORT
Economic and social objectives have to be achieved in ways that safeguard and enhance the environment. Alongside other legislation dealing with particular aspects of the environment, town and country planning is of central importance in ensuring this.
The present arrangements do not provide an integrated, accountable and transparent way of setting and achieving environmental goals at different levels. There is a complex variety of legislation. Responsibilities are divided between the UK government, the devolved administrations, local authorities and specialist gencies. There is a multiplicity of often overlapping and sometimes conflicting plans and strategies. Nowhere is the whole picture brought together and the respective responsibilities of all the different bodies clearly
assigned. There is no succinct statement of priority objectives for the environment.
There is a widespread view that the town and country planning system is in need of reform.
In the June 2001 UK election the three main parties all promised to reform it. There is much less clarity about the nature of that reform, or indeed about the objectives it should be designed to achieve. Business has a clear agenda, in that it wants quick and predictable
decisions on planning applications. The government has accepted that view. As a result, attention has focused on development control, the regulatory dimension of the system, to the neglect of the other essential dimension, planning for the future. Yet a greater concern
for the future of the environment is one of the major messages of sustainable development.
The town and country planning system is typical of many British institutions. Rorn of idealism at the end of the second world war, it now faces a very different world, to which it has yet to adjust. In the 1950s it had to confront a growing population, a severe shortage
of housing, large areas of industrial dereliction and the beginnings of the new mobiliry brought by mass car ownership. Fifty years later the pressing problems we face include finding ways of living which require fewer natural resources, reducing carbon dioxide
emissions from transport and other uses of energy, the growing numbers of small households, the difficulties of creating sustainable communities in inner cities and outer
estates, and the future of a countryside now widely perceived to be in crisis.
Rather than being seen as an essential instrument for tackling such problems, town and country planning has come to be perceived in many quarters as a bureaucratic structure of doubtful relevance. Central government's priorities for the system have shifted repeatedly,
and those operating it are no longer sure what they are expected to achieve. There is no clear statutory statement of its purpose. Planning policies are often obscure, inconsistent and out of date. Even where they are timely and relevant, they are not necessarily widely
known or understood. Yet, if the town and country planning system had not existed, widespread damage to the environment would have occurred over the last fifty years,
probably with serious economic and social consequences.

According to an EU soil quality report, Cyprus is “under enormous land use pressure”.

The report, says the rate of soil sealing on the island is “considerably faster than population growth” that the authorities have no specific measures or targets in place to tackle it:

An estimated 4.4 million children in the United States suffer from Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and most would benefit from a low-cost, side-effect-free way of managing their symptoms. Previous research suggests that after isolated exposures to greenspace, children's ADHD symptoms are reduced. This study examined whether routine exposures to greenspace, experienced through children's everyday play settings, might yield ongoing reductions in ADHD symptoms. Methods: Data on 421 children's ADHD symptoms and usual play settings were collected using a national Internet-based survey of parents. Results: Findings suggest that everyday play settings make a difference in overall symptom severity in children with ADHD. Specifically, children with ADHD who play regularly in green play settings have milder symptoms than children who play in built outdoor and indoor settings. This is true for all income groups and for both boys and girls. Interestingly, for hyperactive children, the apparent advantage of green spaces is true only for relatively open green settings. Conclusions: These and previous findings collectively suggest that it is time for randomised clinical trials testing the impacts of regular exposure to greenspace as a treatment for ADHD.