Finding Nature

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

Forty years ago today I started working, 11th August 1986. I didn’t enjoy school, so left at the first opportunity aged 16, off down the dual carriageway on my speed restricted 50cc Suzuki. I was an apprentice at Rolls-Royce, learning the basics, from filing metal and turning, to grinding and electrical installations. To the exacting standards expected of those building jet engines.

The first task was to make a ‘box with hinged lid’ from tin plate. Four days of cutting, folding and soldering. The box was finished on Friday 15^th August and still works perfectly. It is still one of my most satisfying outputs.

‘Box with hinged lid’ – 1986 and 2026

Then came technical drawing, fitting and a tin plate funnel, also still in use. Then wiring, circuit boards and ring mains. For the milling instructor, talking was not allowed. He roved the rows of machines with his micrometre, silently assessing your work. If the measurements were a tenth of a millimetre out a week’s work would be flung into the bin. It’s one way to set high standards.

The first anniversary in 1987 was spent wiring toroids, I’d been placed onto the ‘instrumentation’ pathway, no more metal work, just electrical work, wires, cables, circuit boards and out onto site, in the test beds with the jet engines, checking gauges and meters.

The workplace was divided into works and staff (each with their own toilets!), I was on a works route. Overall, I was realising that I wasn’t heading in the right direction for me, although I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. It felt like there was little room for creativity, other than my ever more elaborate logbook illustrations, see below. So, I left in 1989, a month or so before the 3-year apprenticeship was complete.

Memory Failure

It’d be 7 more years, including 3 years at University, until I found a workplace where I fitted, and where managers recognised potential, and encouraged me to do a PhD. That’s not a criticism of the system at Rolls-Royce, after all a football manager can’t be expected to identify a good cricketer. I’d started on the wrong path, and I had to spot that myself.

While some may recognise difference, or not fitting in, others, if they have the right perspective, may spot aptitude. Careers are rarely planned, they are often about moments of opportunity, doors that open, but that may not lead to a favourable destination. I’ve given up jobs I wasn’t enjoying twice, in order to try and open doors elsewhere.

Back to the tin box, such manual skills are wonderful to have and develop. They still felt of their time in 1986, rather than a craft to marvel over on TV, but computers were appearing in the workplace, although it’d be 1996 until I had one on my desk.

When new technology arrives it creates opportunities for creative thinking. In 1999 a few of us repurposed a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation into a web server to host online course materials for students, for all modules by 2000. This was soon followed by discussion forums and the first online degrees, undergraduate psychology in 2005 and my Masters in Ergonomics with a ‘virtual workplace’ soon after. This was acknowledged by the professional body as having “transformed student learning in the discipline across the UK and internationally” – confirming that the point wasn’t the technology itself, but the improvements it could bring.

In the early years, some wanted to shut down this rogue use of technology, but by 2011 it was seen as distinctive and standard setting. It was celebrated, replicated and claimed. People with ideas can be seen as mavericks, even problems when they act on those ideas, but they can be establishing a prototype that more formal systems can adopt.

Fast forward 25 years, the online degrees have been highly successful, and AI is presenting similar opportunities for innovation and transformation. Once again, existing systems are challenged and there can be a similar desire, by some, to hold things back. As with the Internet, it’s clear this new technology is here to stay. Those that adopt it well early can still be front runners decades later.

Back in the late 1990s, I also did online research, developing some of the first online psychology experiments, and using AI to facilitate research has been my focus over the past 18 months or so. Rather than asking AI to do the thinking for me, I’ve used it as a research assistant, programmer and data analyst.

One project explored how our relationship with nature has changed over the past two centuries, analysing millions of words from digitised books to reveal long-term cultural trends and the social factors linked to them. An idea quickly became reality, whereas previously it would have remained in my mind. Another involved building an agent-based computer model that simulated the lives of thousands of virtual people, families and communities to explore how nature connection is passed between generations and influenced by changes in society, cities and culture – more on that here.

Agent Based Model: From idea to reality

What’s exciting is that the agent-based model was something I’d wanted to build for over a decade. I could imagine it, how people, places, culture and nature might interact over time, but turning that idea into working software always felt beyond the programming skills I had available. AI changed that. It helped me translate concepts into code, test ideas rapidly and create a simple model that behaved as intended. That was followed by a second, far more sophisticated model that incorporated regional differences, cultural trends and future scenarios.

Overall, working with AI on and off for eight months from February 2025, I produced four research papers published between August 2025 and March 2026. The latest project has returned to the cultural-trends project, this time using the rapidly evolving AI tools to automate it. I enter the factors I’m interested in, and it does the rest, gathering the data, running the analyses, validating the findings, and drafting the results section. A project that took me several days in 2025 now takes a few minutes of my time.

In the same way that the internet allowed me to move teaching online 25 years ago, AI has allowed me to turn ideas into reality. Enabling me to explore approaches that would previously have remained as sketches in a notebook.

How many people have ideas, talents or ways of thinking that never quite fit the systems around them? Looking back, the most important moments in my career were not promotions or job titles, but the moments when someone recognised potential, or when a new tool opened a door that had previously been closed. Perhaps the challenge with AI is the same as it was with education, apprenticeships and the internet: will it help us spot and develop different kinds of talent, or simply become another way of selecting people who best fit the existing system?

For me, that is where the real opportunity lies. Not in replacing expertise, judgement or creativity, but in amplifying them. The most powerful use of AI is perhaps not getting answers, but helping people build things they could previously only imagine. AI is a power tool, just like those that enabled me to shape metal in 1986. The craft still matters, the judgement still matters, the ideas still matter, but the right tool expands what is possible. Forty years after making that tin box, I find the same satisfaction in building something useful from raw materials. The materials are no longer sheets of metal, but data, code and ideas.

May 2026 marks a small but meaningful milestone for my findingnature.org.uk blog: 12 years online and reaching 500,000 views. What began as a space to explore ideas and share research around nature connectedness has grown into a global resource, with over 279,000 visitors, 215 posts, and a wealth of shared research, practices, and reflections. To receive the latest blogs into your inbox you can subscribe.

A Journey Through the Years

The first blog post 22 May 2014 looked at two research papers, Kamitsis & Francis (2013) on how spirituality mediates the relationship between engagement with nature and psychological wellbeing. And a study on meaning in life, nature connectedness and well-being by Howell, Passmore & Buro (2013).

The blog has evolved steadily since then, with interest building year by year, peaking in 2022 when a retweet by Greta Thunberg led to the busiest day and month in the site’s history. That single most popular day was 11 August 2022. When Twitter became X a main source of referrals (7752) faded (to 617 in all of 2025) and views have levelled out around 60,000 to 70,000 per year from around 40,000 unique visitors.

Views and Visitors Since 2014

What People Read Most

The most visited pages reflect a strong appetite for both theory, policy and practical guidance on nature connection, with the top post being the launch of our first policy briefing in 2020. The biodiversity stripes in 2022 were also popular thanks to Greta. So the widely used research into the pathways from 2017 only make it to 3^rd. Next up, is the practical guidance and the launch of the Nature Connection Handbook in 2022. The top 5 is completed by another research paper, this time signalling the start of my shift to looking at nature connectedness as a societal issue, as much as an individual trait.

• A New Relationship with Nature: what it means and what we can do – 23,911 views
• Biodiversity Stripes – A journey from grey to green – 21,122 views
• Beyond Knowing Nature – 5 Pathways to Nature Connection – 16,728 views
• The Nature Connection Handbook – 11,648 views
• Applying the Pathways to Nature Connectedness at societal scale – 10,698 views

A Resource Hub for Practice

Downloads from the resources section have been a major part of the blog’s impact. The Nature Connection Handbook alone has been downloaded 100,000 times, with other guides, postcards, and handbooks reaching tens of thousands more. This suggests the work is not just being read, but actively used in organisations, communities, and education.

A Global Reach

While the UK leads with over 266,000 views, the blog has found an international audience with views from 218 nations. There have been over 100 views from 93 nations.

It’s encouraging to see ideas about nature connection travelling so widely.

How People Find the Blog

Search engines, overwhelmingly Google, account for the largest share of traffic (139,800 views), but social platforms have played a key role, noting that LinkedIn took over as the leading referrer since 2023:

• X (Twitter) – 34,659
• LinkedIn – 16,987
• Facebook – 10,426

Academic and institutional links (e.g. journals, and research platforms) also feature strongly, reflecting the blog’s connection to research and practice.

When People Visit

Thursdays are the most popular day (17% of views), with 2pm the busiest hour. It seems many readers are engaging during the working day—perhaps reflecting the blog’s use in professional and academic contexts.

Looking Ahead

Half a million views is a moment to pause and reflect—but also to look forward. Blogs on my research papers published in 2026 have received a couple of thousand views so far, but the 2017 pathways blog is still in the top 5. The practical guidance remains popular with the various handbooks and guidance reaching another 14000 or so downloads this year. The mix of research and application is still key. Thank you to everyone who has read, shared, downloaded, and applied these ideas over the past 12 years. The journey continues.