Finding Nature

Part 1 of 2: How data from dozens of countries and across 200 years reveal the hidden cultural and historical forces shaping our relationship with nature.

For decades, research into our connection with nature has focused on individuals—like how noticing nature can help people build a closer relationship with nature. That work has been important and has shown that a stronger relationship with nature benefits both people and the planet.

Our latest paper in the journal Ambio looks at something that has received far less attention: the wider forces that shape our relationship with nature. Rather than asking why one person is more connected to nature than another, we ask why entire countries, cultures and generations differ in their relationship with nature. The paper brings together a ‘first wave’ of studies published over the past two years that have started to explore nature connectedness from a macro perspective. It examines the wider drivers of the human-nature relationship, but also considers how the field is developing, the key priorities for future research, and what the findings mean for policy and transformative societal change. Together, these studies suggest that nature connectedness is not simply a personal characteristic, but is shaped by the society we live in, the values we inherit, and the world around us.

The full paper is available to read and relatively short, here in the Part 1 blog, we focus on what the first wave studies reveal about the wider drivers of our relationship with nature—before exploring what they mean for future research and societal policy in Part 2 (next week).

We found that across the six research papers in the first wave several recurring influences stand out. Urbanisation is one. Across studies, societies with higher levels of urbanisation tend to have lower levels of nature connectedness. Economic development also appears linked to a more distant relationship with nature. These are not arguments against cities or prosperity. Rather, they highlight that many of the changes associated with modern life may unintentionally reduce opportunities to experience nature as part of everyday life.

Cultural factors also matter. Differences in spirituality, religious values, scientific worldviews and secularisation were all linked to how closely people feel connected to nature. When comparing countries across the world, cultural values often explained more variation than economic or environmental measures alone. For example, comparing 61 nations shows that countries in the Global South have significantly higher nature connectedness than those in the Global North—a difference best explained by cultural and spiritual worldviews rather than wealth or local biodiversity alone.

Perhaps most interesting is the role of time. Two studies examined the human-nature relationship over more than 200 years. Both suggest that declines in nature connectedness are linked to long-term societal changes rather than short-term events. Urbanisation, economic growth and changing cultural values appear to have slowly shaped the relationship with nature across generations. One modelling study found that intergenerational transmission, the passing of values and attitudes from parents to children, may be among the strongest influences of all. Because these shifts are locked in across generations, future simulations suggest that even ambitious policies may not fully reverse the downward trend until after 2050—making early, sustained action essential.

This matters because it changes how we think about solutions.

Much of the existing research has focused on helping individuals reconnect with nature. That remains important. However, these findings suggest that personal interventions alone are only part of the story. If disconnection from nature is also driven by long-term cultural and societal forces, then addressing it requires broader action too.

The first wave studies point towards the importance of nature-rich neighbourhoods, childhood experiences of nature, cultural narratives that value the natural world and policies that embed nature within everyday life. In short, reconnecting people with nature is not only about what individuals do. It is also about the kind of society we create.

This first wave of research represents an important shift. Nature connectedness should be viewed not only as an individual trait, but also as a societal property that changes across places, cultures and generations. Understanding those deeper influences may be essential if we are to achieve the transformative change in our relationship with nature that organisations such as IPBES and the UN increasingly call for.

The message is simple: if we want a closer relationship with nature, we need to look beyond the individual and consider the wider systems that shape the lives we lead. Looking beyond the individual has implications not only for policy and practice, but also for how nature connectedness is understood as a field of study.

Coming in Part 2: Looking beyond the individual changes both how we study nature connectedness and how we design solutions. In the second part of this blog, I explore how these findings can bring fragmented academic disciplines together into a new integrated science—and why rebuilding our relationship with nature requires shifting both the cultural “software” and physical “hardware” of society.

Richardson, M., Lengieza, M.L. The first wave of macro-level nature connectedness research: Convergent insights and emerging directions. Ambio (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02507-7

Four years ago, in August 2022, I published the first Biodiversity Stripes. Inspired by Professor Ed Hawkins’ climate stripes, the idea was simple: create a visual language for biodiversity loss that transformed data into something that caught people’s attention and told a story in an instant.

Since then, there have been updates in 2024 and now again in 2026, with the release of the latest WWF Living Planet Report. As a result, two additional stripes have been added to the suite of biodiversity stripes, extending the visualisation with the latest available data.

The Latest Global Biodiversity Stripes

When I created the original stripes, I hoped they might help raise awareness of biodiversity loss, a crisis that receives far less attention than climate change despite being every bit as important. The concept was intentionally simple: a journey from green to grey, visualising the decline in wildlife populations recorded by the Living Planet Index.

What has happened since has been something of an unexpected journey, and one that keeps on growing. The stripes were adopted by the global Nature Positive campaign and featured prominently around the world at several COPs. They have appeared at the Natural History Museum, on television and in newspapers, on products, artwork and educational materials. Together, these uses demonstrate a strong appetite for new ways of communicating the biodiversity crisis.

Year 1 Stripes Story

That would be success enough, but more recently the biodiversity stripes have found an enthusiastic champion in the Desert Vipers cricket team (see video summary). First appearing on their Sustainability Match kit in 2025, the stripes have continued to feature in the team’s sustainability work, including the 2026 Global Super League in Guyana and the team’s growing involvement with the Global Biodiversity Alliance. By wearing the updated biodiversity stripes, they’re helping bring one of the world’s most important environmental stories to new audiences and showing how sport can inspire action for nature.

King Charles III examines the Sustainability Match Jersey

Perhaps the most unexpected moment came recently, when King Charles III was presented with the Desert Vipers 2026 biodiversity stripes themed jersey during sustainability events linked to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua. Seeing a visualisation that began as a blog post created at home in Derby being used by a professional sports team and presented within international sustainability discussions illustrates how widely the message has travelled beyond traditional environmental circles.

Guyanese cricketer Shimron Hetmyer launching the stripes themed  Sustainability Kit with Guyana’s President, Dr. Irfaan Ali, at the Global Biodiversity Alliance Summit in Georgetown, Guyana.

Yet despite the awards, media coverage, international events and growing recognition, the purpose of the Biodiversity Stripes remains exactly the same as it was in 2022: to help people see the scale of biodiversity loss and better understand what it means. The stripes have travelled much further than I ever imagined, but they continue to tell a simple story. Wildlife is declining, our relationship with nature needs repairing, and greater awareness is an essential step towards positive change.

The updated Global Biodiversity Stripes can be viewed at biodiversitystripes.info.

New report reveals the state of nature connection practice across the UK

The past decade has seen a marked shift in awareness and understanding about nature connection. There has been exponential growth in number of research papers referring to nature connectedness – from 150 papers a decade ago to over 2900 in 2025.

With clear evidence of the links between human-nature relationships, biodiversity, and wellbeing, nature connection now features in policies, strategies, interventions, spaces, and events around the world. The growth of the cross-sector Nature Connectedness Network (NCN), with over 650 members whose work focuses on connecting people with the rest of nature, is indicative of an expanding group of professionals working in this area. However, we know little about the range of work being done, the opportunities and challenges faced, and the perceptions and hopes of these professionals.

The State of Nature Connection in the UK report sets out to fill in some of these gaps, to explore the practices, perspectives and visions of professionals with a shared ambition to help more people feel more deeply connected with the rest of the natural world.

Based on responses from 199 professionals working across the UK, the report reveals an active, collaborative, and optimistic field. It spans research, practice and policy, with professionals working within and across environmental, health, education, arts, business and community sectors at multiple scales – from supporting individuals to connect with nature, through to global initiatives working towards deep cultural shifts in human-nature relationships. Connecting people with nature was a purpose and mission for many organisations, and most organisations use evidence-based frameworks, work collaboratively with others, and are part of networks and communities of practice.

Respondents perceive increased nature connectedness amongst those they work with, and many report increased demand for services. While most respondents are optimistic about the direction of societal nature connectedness, there are indications that they overestimate the gap between their own levels of nature connectedness and those of the general public.

While there is evidence of collaboration already happening across the field, stronger collaborations and connections across organisations and between sectors were identified as key opportunities, while limited time and funding were key barriers.

We also asked respondents how they would spend £10 million over two years. Responses focused heavily on community-based initiatives, alongside education and health related programmes. There was an emphasis on growing capacity, creating spaces and infrastructure to bring people and nature together, public campaigns, and awareness raising. Invitations to share visions of a more deeply nature-connected society resulted in rich accounts of changes in people’s ways of being, everyday life, places and systems, supporting stronger communities and nature connection embedded across education, health and wider society.

The results paint a picture of a diverse ecosystem of professionals and practitioners, with many working like mycelium to connect and nourish people and the wider natural world, like trees and woodland offering shelter, support and community, like pollinators who share and fertilise knowledge and practice, like rivers that move, carry and connect, and like compost who regenerate and create conditions for growth and renewal.

Erasmus Darwin moved to Derby in 1781, and the garden to his townhouse on Full Street, stretched back to the banks of the River Derwent, with a further orchard on the opposite riverbank. Darwin found great delight in plants, both in gardens and beyond, and the garden and orchard were used to study plant physiology, growth and reproduction.

The house and garden are long gone, but his writing from that time remains. The Temple of Nature published posthumously in 1803 was a long poem written while living in Derby. The work outlines Darwin’s belief that all living things share common origins and developed progressively from simple aquatic life. Such ideas anticipated aspects of evolutionary thinking later associated with his grandson Charles Darwin.

Ideas in The Temple of Nature are remarkably close to the contemporary definition of nature connectedness as a sense of being part of nature and experiencing an emotional relationship with it. Erasmus Darwin repeatedly argued that humans are part of nature, not separate from it, describing how “Organic Life began beneath the waves” and ultimately gave rise to “Imperious man“.  The poem suggests that wellbeing and meaning emerge through engagement with the living world, as we found in our 2019 research. He also describes a mechanism that echoes contemporary research on beauty, emotion and the “soft fascination” central to Attention Restoration Theory, writing that “Beauty’s fine forms attract our wondering eyes, / And soft alarms the pausing heart surprise,” linking encounters with natural beauty directly to emotional response as we do in research papers on beauty and emotion.

The Temple of Nature goes further still to suggest that love, sympathy, and social connection emerge from the same natural processes that produce life itself, mirroring research on nature and pro-social behaviours. Darwin presents sympathy as a natural force that helps us understand others and “teach the selfish heart what others feel“, leading on to the notion that society is founded on emotional connection, with nature providing the template for connection between people – ideas explored in our 2024 research paper. Darwin portrays the natural world as a system of relationships in which forces bind atoms, minds and societies together. Taken together, these ideas suggest a world where people, communities and nature are connected through the same underlying processes.

If one were looking for an eighteenth-century intellectual ancestor of the nature connectedness work developed in Derby, The Temple of Nature could almost be read as an early philosophical poem about nature connectedness, two centuries before the construct was formally defined.

Excitingly, the Derby Riverside Phase 2 proposal includes gardens on the site of Erasmus Darwin’s former riverside orchard, referred to in the brochure, as the Erasmus Darwin Gardens. The vision already includes themes around innovation, engineering, medicine and botany, creating an opportunity to celebrate one of Derby’s most remarkable scientific thinkers while connecting his ideas to contemporary research and innovation.

From atoms to ecosystems, from steam engines to systems thinking, Erasmus Darwin recognised that the world works through connections.

Darwin’s Temple of Nature provides a remarkable historical bridge between Enlightenment science and contemporary research being conducted in Derby. Long before modern ecology, systems science or evolutionary biology, he described humans, animals and plants as part of a single living system. In one of the poem’s most famous passages, he challenges readers to recognise their place within nature: “Stoop, selfish Pride! survey thy kindred forms, / Thy brother Emmets, and thy sister Worms!”

So, it’s interesting to consider ideas for how a garden could reflect this historical bridge. A Living Chain Walk could connect the different areas of the site, telling the story of how Darwin linked engineering, botany, medicine and natural philosophy. Inspired by his description of the forces that “Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind“, the trail could explore the science of connections, from rivers and ecosystems to communities and innovation. This would provide a contemporary interpretation of the human-nature relationship, one of the defining environmental challenges of our time according to the UN’s  Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Darwin’s view of the ‘social chain’ where society emerges from natural relationships, suggests an Orchard of Relationships where each tree represents aspects of connection, to nature, family, community and future generations. Or a place to demonstrate the links between pollination, food production, biodiversity and human wellbeing.

A Temple of Nature Garden could provide a quieter space for reflection, incorporating selected quotations that highlight Darwin’s scientific curiosity and sense of wonder. The inscriptions could emphasise observation, beauty and discovery. Such as:

“Beauty’s fine forms attract our wondering eyes, / And soft alarms the pausing heart surprise,”

“Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind.”

Together these ideas could create a distinctive identity through celebrating a continuing Derby story: from Darwin’s riverside orchard to contemporary nature connectedness research, Derby has been exploring humanity’s place in nature for more than two centuries.

Funded projects, be they nature-based or otherwise, are typically asked to demonstrate impact. Whether funded by government, trusts, health partners or environmental organisations, there is an understandable desire to know: does this work?

The usual response is for each project to commission or develop its own evaluation. While well intentioned, this can result in lots of small studies, lots of different measures, lots of reports, but little collective learning.

Our latest paper in the journal Ambio, explores a different approach: a tool that facilitates evaluation while pooling evidence across projects. Rather than treating each project as a separate piece of evidence, the tool enables different organisations to collect the same core data and combine results across many initiatives. The findings suggest this approach can provide insights that individual projects simply cannot generate on their own.

At its heart, the idea is simple. Projects use common surveys before and after participation. Project managers also provide some basic information about the activities they’re offering. The survey data then feeds into a dashboard that gives individual projects useful feedback while also contributing anonymous data to a larger evidence base – as illustrated below.

This has clear benefits for projects. Many organisations do not have access to research expertise, large evaluation budgets or analytical support. A shared tool removes some of that burden. Instead of creating surveys and analysing results from scratch, projects can focus on delivery while still gathering meaningful evidence.

The real value, however, comes when data are pooled across projects.

The proof-of-concept study in the Ambio paper combined data from eight different nature-based projects. Individually, most projects would not have had enough participants to explore broader questions about what works best. Together, they created a dataset capable of identifying patterns across the sector.

The first finding was encouraging. Across projects, participants reported increased nature connectedness after taking part. This is important because nature connectedness is increasingly recognised as a key outcome, linked to both wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviour.

More interestingly, the pooled data allowed exploration of project characteristics associated with larger improvements. One pattern stood out. Projects explicitly using the Pathways to Nature Connectedness framework appeared to achieve greater increases in nature connectedness than projects that did not use the pathways. Together, eight projects revealed a pattern that none could have detected alone.

That’s good news, but it’s proof of concept, so the finding should be treated carefully. The sample was relatively small, with only eight projects involved, and the study was not designed to establish cause and effect. We cannot conclude that using the pathways caused the higher outcomes. Other factors may have been involved, such as organisational experience, enthusiasm or the use of structured frameworks more generally.

However, that is precisely the strength of this approach. The purpose of a shared evaluation system is not necessarily to provide definitive answers. Instead, it helps identify promising patterns that deserve further attention. It acts as an intelligence system for the sector, highlighting where more focused investment, research or programme development might be worthwhile. Without pooling data, this signal around the pathways would probably have remained invisible.

There is an important point here for funders and policymakers. Too often, evaluation requirements unintentionally fragment evidence. Every grant programme requests something slightly different. Every project develops its own framework. Every report sits in a separate folder. As a result, considerable effort is invested in evaluation, but relatively little cumulative knowledge is generated.

A shared monitoring system offers a different model. Rather than funding dozens of isolated evaluations, investment can support a common measurement framework and data infrastructure. Individual projects still receive the evidence they need for reporting and learning, but the wider sector also gains a growing dataset capable of identifying trends, benchmarking performance and informing strategic decisions.

The approach is not limited to nature connectedness. It could be applied to wellbeing, loneliness, physical activity, environmental education, citizen science or other shared outcomes. Any area with multiple projects pursuing common goals could benefit from combining data rather than dividing it.

For project leaders, the message is straightforward: good evaluation does not always have to mean doing everything yourself.

For funders and policymakers, the challenge is perhaps greater. If we want stronger evidence, we should think beyond evaluating individual projects and start building systems that enable collective learning. The future may lie not in funding more bespoke evaluations, but in creating shared evidence systems that allow projects to learn from one another.

Lengieza, M.L., Richardson, E. & Richardson, M. Amplifying social benefits from multiple nature-based initiatives by crowdsourcing nature connectedness and wellbeing data: A proof of concept. Ambio (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02472-1