Dr Charlotte Wendelboe-Nelson
Job title:
Research Associate
Role:
Research Associate with the GroundsWell Research Consortium
Office:
M01, North-East Studio Building
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Dr Charlotte Wendelboe-Nelson is a Research Associate at the OPENspace Research Centre within the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA).
Her research focuses on public participation and community engagement, particularly exploring how to better involve underrepresented voices in democratic processes. Charlotte works with structurally disadvantaged communities through co-design approaches and has developed a community researcher model that examines participation relationships between academia, communities, and policymakers.
Her work spans environmental health, nature-based health interventions, and knowledge exchange between research, policy, and practice. She has experience facilitating participatory processes with diverse groups including refugees and asylum seekers, farming communities, and residents from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
Charlotte was educated at the University of Copenhagen and Heriot-Watt University, where she completed her PhD in plant breeding for sustainability. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and served as Course Organiser for the Landscape and Wellbeing MSc programme at Edinburgh (2021-2023). Prior to academia, she worked as a nutritionist and team leader in the Danish National Health Service.
Charlotte has led strategic partnerships across multiple institutions as part of the GroundsWell Research Consortium and served as Knowledge Broker for the UKPRP-funded SPECTRUM Consortium, facilitating collaboration between researchers and government policy teams. She currently serves as Board Adviser for Greenspace Scotland. Her work has directly influenced policy implementation, including Edinburgh's 30-year sustainable landscape strategy and the Linking Leith's Parks regeneration project.
Research interests
- Public Participation and Community Engagement
- Nature-based Health Interventions
- Participatory Research Methodologies and Co-design
- Knowledge Exchange and Research-Policy Translation
- Health Inequalities and Environmental Justice
Charlotte's research centres on public participation and community engagement, with particular focus on understanding how urban salutogenic spaces can promote public health and wellbeing for structurally disadvantaged communities. Her work aims to ensure equitable access to nature-based health interventions (NBHI) for communities facing the greatest health challenges.
A significant contribution has been developing a community researcher model implemented through partnerships with organisations including The Welcoming (supporting New Scots) and Edible Estates, who trained community researchers in climate adaptation work and community gardening. This approach enables communities to evaluate their own experiences of green and blue spaces whilst building local capacity for ongoing health promotion and advocacy.
Charlotte has contributed to developing evaluation frameworks for NBHI, including work on establishing a minimum set of core indicators to measure health outcomes and community impact across diverse contexts. This methodological work ensures that nature-based interventions can demonstrate tangible wellbeing benefits whilst accommodating the varied needs of different communities.
Recent work includes analysis of Edinburgh Communities Climate Action Network's (ECCAN) GreenLight programme, examining 32 community-led climate projects. Her findings demonstrated that projects with high green and blue space engagement showed significantly higher rates of spontaneously reported health co-benefits, providing evidence for nature-based approaches to community health programming and identifying factors that enhance accessibility for disadvantaged populations.
Through collaboration with the organisation ‘Parents for Future Scotland’, she is developing citizen science approaches to monitor air pollution and wellbeing impacts in primary schools, exploring how active travel through urban green networks can serve as a pathway to wider nature engagement and health benefits.
Current PhD students
Annie Gallagher
Towards Building Dùthchas: Embodied Landscape Conservation Volunteering in the Cairngorms