Rather than telling children to stay out of the sun, Lincoln University researchers propose laying out play areas so that the sheltered zones are where the good equipment is.

Getting children to protect themselves from the sun by asking them to is not a strategy with a strong record. Hats come off, shade gets ignored, and the best equipment is usually in the middle of an open asphalt yard.

A paper in Cities & Health from Lincoln University in New Zealand, with collaborators at Texas A&M University, proposes handling it as a design problem instead. The method is called sun protection behaviour design, and its premise is that children will seek shade if shade is where they want to be anyway.

Dr Anupriya Sukumar, the lead author, from Lincoln’s School of Landscape Architecture, draws the analogy from food. “It is difficult to force a child to adopt any healthy behaviours,” she said. “For example, eating healthily; if the table is already set with the right mix of foods, it makes it more appealing and accessible for them to choose and eat healthily. The same idea applies to playground design, with the right landscape elements, we can naturally encourage children to seek shade and develop healthy sun protection behaviours.”

Why New Zealand

The country has a particular stake. New Zealand and Australia have the highest rates of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers in the world, and around 100,000 New Zealanders are affected annually.

The reasons are a combination that is hard to design around: a largely fair-skinned population living at latitudes with intense ultraviolet exposure, under a summer sky with thinner ozone and less atmospheric pollution than the northern hemisphere equivalents, in a culture organised around the outdoors. Childhood exposure matters disproportionately, because sunburn in childhood is among the stronger predictors of melanoma decades later.

Three objectives at once

The method works by dividing a playground into activity zones and assessing each against three objectives: protection from ultraviolet radiation, play opportunities, and microclimatic comfort — temperature, wind exposure and solar protection together.

Holding all three is what distinguishes it from simply building shade. A shade sail over an unappealing corner protects nobody, because nobody plays there; a shaded structure that becomes a wind tunnel or a heat trap is abandoned for the same reason.

“Through our research, we learnt that simply adding shade structures isn’t enough — playgrounds must integrate protection, comfort, and play opportunities to ensure children actually use safer spaces,” said Andreas Wesener, a co-author at the same school.

Sukumar makes the related point about vegetation. “Simply increasing the amount of green space is not enough alone to mitigate against solar ultraviolet light radiation (UVR), a major cause of skin cancer and other health conditions,” she said. A tree casts useful shade only where and when it casts it, and a lawn casts none at all.

Retrofit, redesign, relocate

The remedies come in three grades, which the paper presents as a staged approach. A zone can be retrofitted, redesigned, or relocated and removed — the last of these, the authors say, “may be appropriate” for zones lacking protective factors altogether.

The staging is the practically useful part. Schools do not have the budget for complete overhauls, and a method that identifies which zones need the cheapest intervention and which are beyond saving lets changes happen over several years rather than waiting for a capital project that never comes.

The method was applied to an existing school playground in a suburb of Christchurch, and the release says it is already in use at a school playground in New Zealand.

The data that is missing

This is a methodology paper, and the gap in it is substantial: it includes no data on increased use of the space, and none on how much ultraviolet exposure was actually reduced.

Those are the two outcomes the entire approach is built to produce. Without them the claim rests on the plausibility of the design logic rather than on evidence that redesigned playgrounds change where children play or what dose they receive — and the behavioural literature is full of interventions that were plausible and did nothing.

Sukumar’s statement that “our new design mitigates immediate and long-term risks of UVR overexposure” should be read in that light. It describes what the design is intended to achieve, and the paper does not demonstrate it.

The authors are not hiding this. Their own conclusion notes that while modelling informs the assessment step, “field monitoring remains essential for validation.” Ultraviolet exposure in a playground can be modelled from geometry and sun angles, which is how the zone assessments are presumably derived, but modelled exposure and received dose are different quantities, and the second requires measuring children rather than places.

Whether it travels

The method can be adapted to other climate zones, the authors say, with further testing needed.

That caveat has teeth. The three objectives can conflict differently elsewhere: in a hot dry climate the shade and comfort goals align, while in a cool temperate one children and teachers actively want sun for much of the year, and a playground optimised against ultraviolet exposure in Christchurch may be an unpleasantly cold one in Edinburgh. The weighting between protection and comfort is a local judgment the framework structures rather than settles.

Wesener frames the contribution in terms of method rather than result. “Our methodology moves beyond abstract calls for evidence-based practice by offering a pragmatic, transferable approach to enhance spatial design as a tool for solving real-world health challenges,” he said.

On that narrower claim the paper is on firmer ground. Turning a general injunction to design for sun safety into a zone-by-zone assessment with three named criteria and three grades of remedy is a real contribution, whatever the eventual evidence on exposure shows.

The release does not name the Texas A&M co-authors, provides no image, and does not state the study’s funding sources.

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Notes

1. Sukumar, A., Wesener, A. “Mind the sun: an evidence-based approach to designing sun-safe and play-friendly school playgrounds.” Cities & Health, 2026. DOI: 10.1080/23748834.2026.2694762.
2. Taylor & Francis Group. “Revamped playground design could protect children around the world from dangers of the sun.” EurekAlert!, 22 October 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1148238.