Finding Nature

If we want to repair our relationship with nature, we first need to understand the system that has been steadily eroding it – my latest research paper.

Responses to declining nature connection often centre on individuals or on providing more green space. But these approaches can overlook the deep cultural, historical, and regional forces that shape our relationship with nature. Without a system‑level view, policies risk being piecemeal, short‑lived or ineffective. To understand why nature connectedness has been slipping, we need a wider perspective, from individual moments of noticing nature, out to regional histories of urbanisation, and further still to national cultural shifts driven by science and industry.

My latest research paper, (a first Richardson & Richardson with my son who’s completing a Masters in Data Science), goes into the engine room of that system, showing how cultural change, local environmental conditions, and psychological processes interact to power (or stall) our relationship with nature. This is the first model to link cultural change, regional environments and psychological pathways into a single system capable of explaining two centuries of decline and today’s regional differences.

Built from real-world data and research evidence the model simulates individuals and families over two centuries in eight cities and counties. It shows how national trends and local environments interact to shape nature connectedness, placing everyday behaviour and attention to nature within the wider system policymakers seek to influence.

It’s the most complex work I’ve attempted and the culmination of a year using new approaches such as machine learning and agent-based modelling to study long-term trends and global differences in recent papers in Earth, Ambio, Sustainability Science and Biological Conservation. As such, the paper also offers a theoretical synthesis of the emerging macro-nature connectedness field, shifting the agenda from individuals and green space to strategic interventions that address the forces driving long-term disconnection and the realities of local places. Put simply, nature connection isn’t viewed as an individual trait, but a system shaped over centuries—this latest research starts to reveal how.

What is the Nature Connection Engine?

This study introduces a hybrid agent‑based model – conceptualised here as a Nature Connection Engine – that unifies macro‑level cultural dynamics, regional socio‑environmental context, intergenerational mechanisms, attention to nature and behavioural feedbacks within a single systems framework.

The conceptual framework of the model

So, putting it a little more simply, the model includes three key drivers of nature connection:

(1) macro‑level cultural context over time – outer oval

(2) contemporary regional environmental conditions – middle oval

(3) psychosocial processes, including attention and intergenerational transmission – inner oval

Even more simply, it’s a computer simulation of people and places over time.

Using UK cities and counties for training and testing, there were three research questions:

1. How well does the agent-based model reproduce current regional nature connection while reflecting historical national trends in the human-nature relationship?
2. How do macro-level and regional-level factors influence regional differences in the human-nature relationship?
3. Can the model be used to generate future human-nature relationship trends for scenario exploration?

Bringing the Idea to Life

 The Nature Connection Engine runs as a yearly simulation from 1800 to 2020, modelling how people, families and places evolve together over time. Each year, the model updates five core processes: how towns grow, how nature changes, how individuals age and form families, how their connection to nature shifts, and how this connection is passed to the next generation.

An individual’s nature connectedness changes through a balance of influences: the nature around them, their attention to it, and wider cultural and regional pressures. These interacting forces allow realistic long‑term trends to emerge from small, everyday experiences.

The model was trained on four contrasting regions—Northumberland, Dorset, Birmingham and Leicester—and then tested on four others, including Liverpool and North Yorkshire, to check how well it generalises to regions it had never seen, giving confidence that its insights hold beyond the calibration areas. The model was also stress‑tested using sensitivity analyses. Much more sits behind the model, but this is the basic engine that reveals how two centuries of human–nature relationships can explain contemporary regional differences.

What can the model do?

Built from real‑world data, the model reliably mirrors both the long‑term national decline in nature connectedness and today’s regional variation, recreating two centuries of decline and reproducing contemporary differences across places. It not only fits the past, it fits the present and can help diagnoses the forces behind the trends over decades and differences we see today.

The model shows that regional conditions explain around two‑thirds of variation, with macro‑cultural trends (science, economy, secularisation) shaping the overall national trajectory. Urban areas are influenced more strongly by local socio‑environmental factors, while rural regions are more exposed to long‑term cultural pressures.

The Nature Connection Engine can also test interventions before they’re implemented, helping reveal why the same policy succeeds in one place but falters in another. The model found that children’s programmes raise nature connectedness across all regions and are the single most effective intervention, while neighbourhood greening strengthens the effect but rarely reverses decline on its own. However, combined action—children’s programmes plus nature‑based neighbourhoods—creates the conditions for sustained recovery, especially in urban settings where lower baseline connectedness allows for larger long‑term gains.

The model can be run into the future, and these scenarios show that under current trends, nature connectedness continues to fall, particularly in rural areas – something to think about. Encouragingly, model runs extended to 2100 show the potential for self‑sustaining improvement once supportive conditions are in place.

What next?

The model is complex, but reality is far more complicated and there can be further work to improve it, to make, for example, simulated Leicester more like real Leicester. So, I’m now seeking funding to:

• Incorporate more real urban and greenspace data to simulate neighbourhood‑level inequalities and opportunities.
• Extend the model with new mechanisms linking attention, experience, behaviour and feedback loops.
• Calibrate the future scenarios using results from the many individual projects running across the UK.
• Co‑design the outputs of the new version of the model to ensure relevance, usability and policy alignment.

The Vision

Policymakers lack tools that can reveal why interventions succeed in some places but not others, how cultural or economic trends influence outcomes, or how combinations of programmes could generate long‑term, self‑sustaining improvements in connectedness, wellbeing and pro‑nature behaviours.

The strength and stability of the initial model provide the foundations for a new policy tool— a Nature Connection Engine — a practical diagnostic and scenario‑testing approach that helps policymakers explore what works, where, why, and for whom. Under this view, nature connection becomes an engine for nature recovery and wider social benefits, rather than a narrowly individual or access‑based issue.

Such a model would provide a decision‑support dashboard that allows practitioners to test “what‑if” scenarios – e.g. rather than one successful community garden in Derby, what if there were 25? Together with the children’s programme that worked really well in Bradford? This will directly support urban planning, nature recovery, public health, wellbeing strategies and children’s nature engagement programmes.

That future is possible with a little more work, for now, the model shows how today’s regional differences emerged and why similar environments can lead to different levels of nature connectedness: individual relationships with nature are shaped by the interplay of culture, place and family. A key finding is that rural regions—despite greater access to nature—are vulnerable to long‑term cultural forces driving disconnection. The work also highlights that improving access to green space, while valuable, is a relatively shallow leverage point unless paired with interventions that shape attention and early‑life experience. In short, meaningful recovery requires changing not just the environments people live in, but the psychological and cultural conditions that sustain connection across generations.

Richardson, M., & Richardson, L. A. (2026). Reframing human–nature connectedness: A multi-scale agent-based model across time and region. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 120, 129399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2026.129399

Over the past year I’ve been focussing on the bigger picture of nature connection, what factors explain differences between nations and over 200 years? I looked at long-term trends in a paper in Earth last summer, then differences between nations in Ambio in November, followed by trends again earlier this week in Sustainability Science. The fourth paper in that series (just one more to come!) has just been published in Biological Conservation.

Although there’s global recognition that solving environmental crises requires a new relationship and reconnection with nature there are differences in that relationship across nations and cultures. This paper takes a very broad approach using the largest regional grouping, the Global North and Global South which form two economic worlds. Aside from economic differences, there are also differences between the worldviews of the Global North and Global South which may well contribute to differing human–nature relationships. Therefore, in this paper we are interested in two key research questions:

• Does nature connectedness differ between Global North and Global South?
• If so, what factors might explain those differences?

Clearly, this grouping hides great differences between and within nations, yet the North–South grouping provides a useful way to investigate macro dynamics. It captures historically rooted economic and cultural contrasts that shape human–nature relationships at scale. Understanding similarity and differences on such a scale is important when considering global policy.

Using data from over 60 countries we looked at how a range of objective socio-economic (e.g. urbanisation, biodiversity, economy, income and technology) and subjective cultural indicators (e.g. values related to technology, science versus faith and spirituality) explain any differences in nature connection between the Global North and South.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, on average, nature connectedness was higher in nations of the Global South relative to the Global North. Given the grouping is based upon economic development, this fits with the proposal that the dualistic outlook of the North and how the perceived right of exploitation of natural resources for economic progress strengthened a sense of separation between humans and nature.

However, there was no difference in nature connectedness when controlling for economic differences. It was the indicators of subjective values that explained more variance in nature connectedness than the economic indicators, pointing to the key role of worldviews and values in shaping group-level nature connectedness. Together, the objective indicators explained 39.0% of the variance in nature connectedness between the north and south. Whereas the subjective indicators explained 53.2% of the variance.

It is also noteworthy that, when controlling for the North–South difference, several objective indicators were surprisingly non-significant despite appearing as significant indicators in previous research. For example, as a block, economic development factors, which have been identified as a negative predictor of country-level nature connectedness in several studies, were not a significant predictor after accounting for the North–South dichotomy. The fact that such a simple categorical dichotomy based largely on economic development managed to outperform a collection of continuous measures of the very same suggests that economic factors may not fully explain the underlying differences that contribute to the nature-connectedness disparity.

Similarly, biodiversity, which has likewise been identified as a significant predictor of country-level nature connectedness, was a non-significant predictor of nature connectedness when we controlled for the North-South dichotomy. Again, this suggests that some other factor (e.g., cultural differences, in this case) may explain differences in the human–nature relationship between North–South. One important consideration is that for many Indigenous cultures, connection to nature is not primarily through biodiversity or individual species, but through a deep relational bond with land itself. This differs markedly from Western perspectives, which often frame land in terms of ownership or resource value.

So what does explain the North–South dichotomy?

Although the North–South dichotomy is largely based on economic development, this study suggests there’s a need to consider other dimensions on which the regions differ. Spirituality showed a significant positive relationship with relationship to nature connectedness. Attitudes towards science and faith also played a role. Specifically, a stronger belief that society is too dependent on science over faith was associated with higher nature connectedness. In the Global North, people are more open to depending on science over faith. In contrast, the openness to dependence on faith over science in the Global South is, instead, accompanied by a stronger relationship with nature.

Natural Disasters

It’s interesting to note that vulnerability to natural disasters had a significant, negative impact on nature connectedness, yet both are significantly lower in the Global North—whereas in the Global South, the human–nature relationship is stronger, despite increased exposure to events such as flooding, storms, drought and earthquakes. This inconsistency may, in fact, highlight the strength of worldviews, values and spirituality compared with environmental factors. That is, while this negative correlation implies that one would expect nature connectedness to be lower in the Global South (where natural disasters are more common), nature connectedness is, indeed, higher in the south. Considering that no other environmental variables predicted nature connectedness, the most plausible explanation is that cultural supports, such as relational and spiritual interpretations of nature, buffer against the negative effects of environmental harm.

The reason for the inconsistency notwithstanding, it is still worth recognizing the negative relationship between natural disasters and nature connectedness. With such events likely to increase with climate change—including in the North where the cultural supports are not as present—the negative relationship between exposure to natural disasters and nature connectedness could undermine efforts to renew the relationship with nature.

Conclusions

This research set out to explore how global differences in nature connectedness can inform a closer relationship with nature. The findings reveal a significant disparity in nature connectedness between the economically defined regions of the Global North and South, with the former generally exhibiting lower levels of connection. By exploring the global differences in nature connectedness, the results suggest that nature connectedness is not primarily a product of economic or environmental conditions, but is deeply embedded in cultural, spiritual, and value-driven contexts.

They point to the need for a multifaceted approach to reimagining human–nature relationships, one that addresses the adverse effects of disasters, draws on cultural and spiritual strengths, and better connects science and faith to foster a sustainable, interconnected worldview.

Richardson, M., Rocha, N. M. F. D., & Lengieza, M. L. (2026). How can global differences in nature connection inform new relationships with nature? Biological Conservation, 316, 111768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2026.111768

Earth image By Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds)Robert Simmon (enhancements: ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation)Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean GroupAdditional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights). – https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=57723, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=306260

Understanding how our relationship with nature has changed over time helps identify the forces that have shaped the long‑term decline, and where recovery might come from. Using nature‑related word use in books as a proxy for the human–nature relationship over the past two centuries, my latest research paper, published in Sustainability Science, explores that long-term decline using a simple machine learning approach.

This new study explores whether wider socio‑economic and cultural factors, represented through their own word‑use trends, can predict the long‑term changes in the human–nature relationship. In short: can non‑nature words explain the fall in nature words?

Tracing the human–nature relationship through language

The human–nature relationship proxy comes from the frequency of use of 28 experiential nature words such as river, blossom, mosses and meadow. The set spans sensory modalities (e.g., bark, stream), experiential places (e.g. mountain, meadow, coast), living elements (e.g. birds) and archetypal aspects (e.g. river). The words evoke lived and sensory experiences in nature and tap into deep symbolic or cultural meanings of the type related to closer relationships with nature.

These words reflect what people noticed, valued, and wrote about. And when their use is plotted over time, a clear decline of around 60% is revealed. Particularly from 1850, a time when industrialisation and urbanisation grew rapidly.

The new model pairs this nature‑word trend with seven macro‑factors, each represented by their own cluster of words:

• Natural disasters
• Science and technology
• Religiosity
• Industrialisation
• Humanism
• Urbanisation
• Economic development

These wider clusters capture structural and cultural shifts known to influence people’s relationship with nature.

Word use trends since 1800

Testing whether macro‑factors predict nature‑related word use

So through varying the weight attached to each macro-factor trend, can the seven trends shown in the chart above be combined to form the nature words trend?

The study tested over 48 million combinations of factor weights using a machine learning approach before refining the best solution using an approach called gradient descent. The resulting model fits the observed HNR trend closely, see chart below, explaining around 98.6% of the variance. Trends in non‑nature words can explain the fall in nature words!

Nature word trend versus trend constructed from non-nature words

Looking at the weights attached to the non-nature words that are needed to explain the use of nature words, three points stand out:

1. Urbanisation and economic development are the dominant influences.

This aligns with the shift to urban living and increased consumerism.

2. Industrialisation mattered earlier but less so now.

Its influence peaked in the early 20th century, reflecting its key role in the initial decline.

3. Humanism shows a steady and growing influence.

Although assigned a lower weight, its consistent rise, particularly since 1990, suggests an increasing cultural focus on human‑centred values, potentially at the expense of meaning derived from the wider natural world.

Science, natural disasters and religiosity show comparatively modest contributions in the model, despite large changes in their own trajectories.

Overall, the weightings align well with historical intuition: large‑scale structural shifts, especially urbanisation and the economy, map closely onto the long-term decline in the cultural presence of nature.

Looking forward: on‑trend futures and possible recovery

The model’s fit over time allowed two simple scenarios to 2050 to be tested.

On‑trend scenario showed that if current patterns continue, the recent uptick in nature‑word use is unlikely to continue. Increasing urbanisation and continued rise in human‑centred values may push the HNR downwards again.

The recovery scenario suggested that if urbanisation is softened through approaches such as biophilic city design, and if humanistic values broaden towards an “all beings” viewpoint, as seen in the rights of nature and One Health movements, the model suggests a recovery to levels last seen around the mid‑20th century.

Where is the human-nature relationship heading?

These are not forecasts, but illustrations of how socio‑cultural shifts could influence the future HNR.

Three independent approaches, one pattern

This work now sits alongside earlier approaches:

• the agent‑based model simulating the decline in HNR from 1800 to 2020, and
• the raw nature‑word trend itself.

All three show a remarkably similar pattern: a strong decline beginning around 1850, a long trough, and a modest recent rise. Convergence across methods increases confidence in the underlying trend.

Conclusions

The results show that the frequency of use of non‑nature words can indeed explain nature‑related word use. Language about industry, cities, economics and human‑centred values explains the long‑term weakening of the human–nature relationship. Of these, urbanisation and economic development have the strongest influence. The findings reinforce the importance of structural and cultural drivers, not just individual behaviour, in shaping connection with nature. They also highlight pathways for recovery: greener urban living, and worldviews that place humans within, rather than apart from, the wider community of life.

Richardson, M. (2026). The human–nature relationship across two centuries: Macro factor insights from a machine learning model. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-026-01807-x

Discussions of nature connection often begin with access: how much green space people have, how close they live to it, and whether they are urban or rural. Drawing on People and Nature Survey (PANS) data across England, this blog takes an informal look at how nature connection varies across cities, towns and counties. The patterns that emerge challenge simple urban–rural explanations and point instead to deeper social, cultural, and regional influences.

Nature Connection Across England (darker is more connected). Created with flourish.studio

The relationship between noticing and nature connection

The data looks at how strongly people feel part of nature and how often they notice and engage with everyday nature. The correlation between the two was weaker than might be expected, just 0.17 between nature connection and noticing across the local authorities with over 300 survey responses. While individual‑level studies show that actively noticing nature is an important pathway to stronger nature connection, the relatively weak correlation between noticing and nature connection at the local‑authority level suggests that place‑based differences reflect broader cultural, social, and historical factors, not just how often nature is noticed. We’ll return to that later.

Nature connection rankings

First-up, the sample sizes for each place could lead to around 8% error, so ranking differences in connection less than 5 need to be treated cautiously. Even allowing for this uncertainty, Liverpool and Leicester are likely below City of London and Tower Hamlets. And Cornwall is probably the most connected county surveyed.

City Living

At first glance, the City of London’s score looks anomalous, it has a low level of green space per person. It’s an unusual area though with around 9000 residents who are likely to be high earners and have second homes outside London. They’re nature identities likely formed elsewhere, so nature connection levels are less likely to be an effect of the urban environment itself. So, the City’s high score should not be read as evidence that dense commercial urban form promotes nature connection, but rather as an illustration that strong nature connection can persist even in highly urbanised contexts under certain social and experiential conditions

Tower Hamlets neighbours the City of London. It too has a low level of green space per person, but a lot more people at high density. So, there may be more green spaces than that suggests. It is threaded by canals, docks, and river-edges and more biodiverse green roofs than any other London borough!

Tower Hamlets is a “Tree City of the World” and promotes urban greening, estate-level and community-led planting. I’ve read that it has communities with strong traditions of allotment growing and outdoor social life. Nature could well be more embedded in living rather than framed as “recreation” or “escape”.

We know nature connection varies from nation to nation and Tower Hamlets has the largest Bangladeshi-born population in England and Wales. Perhaps, that community brings culturally embedded ways of relating to nature with them.

The interaction between cultural scripts of nature, migration history, urban form, and everyday practice will be complex. In some places (Tower Hamlets, Bradford, parts of Stockport), these align to support nature connection; in others (e.g. Leicester), they do not. Lived nature connection depends on whether the local environment affords expression of those practices. People may value nature highly but have fewer opportunities to enact that value daily. They may experience nature as distant, managed, or regulated.

Rural and Urban differences

The mean difference between urban and rural areas of 6.8% is far lower than the variation across cities (36%) or counties (20%), so the rural/urban divide is too simplistic. Especially as some city areas score so highly. Although urbanisation is a strong factor in nature connection across several studies it shows that there are other important regional factors.

High nature connection is not simply the outcome of noticing more nature in everyday life; it reflects deeper meanings, identities, and practices that are perhaps weakly tied to perceptual attention. There was a period where nature connectedness was often framed through mindfulness, but this data, plus the more structural research last year helps show how individual connection is context‑dependent, historically produced and socially transmitted within and across generations. This helps explain why dense, highly managed urban areas can score as highly as rural counties.

Which brings us to Buckinghamshire which provides a useful counter‑example to simple access‑based explanations of nature connection. Despite extensive countryside and relatively high affluence, average nature connection scores are low. This may reflect the county’s role as a commuter belt, where daily routines leave little space for everyday engagement with nature, and where landscapes are often experienced as destinations rather than lived environments. In this context, nature is nearby but not necessarily meaningful, reinforcing the idea that sustained nature connection depends less on proximity and more on how nature is woven into everyday life and identity.

Noticing Nature

For noticing nature, once again, the mean difference between urban and rural at 2.9% is far lower than the variation across cities (31%) or counties (29%). Given the weak relationship between noticing and connection at the place level there are other important factors that explain the differences. Places differ not just in how often people notice nature, but in whether those moments stick.

Noticing nature is a psychological mechanism that can be influenced by interventions to increase nature connection, but sustained nature connection depends on deeper structures. The persistence of nature connection at the level of places reflects deeper cultural and structural conditions, a pattern that mirrors my recent agent‑based modelling work on the emergence and decay of nature connection over time.

Cultural, social, and historical factors

Nature connectedness research has had a rapid growth over the last decade. As a field, it is maturing. The more reductionist, individual‑level focus was, and still is, necessary to establish a robust evidence base. My own more recent work has moved from viewing nature connectedness as an individual trait towards understanding it as an embedded phenomenon, explored through agent‑based modelling. In many ways, this marks a return to my ergonomics and human factors roots.

Those roots have always been present. One example is the reimagined ergonomics onion developed in 2017.

A nature connectedness informed, embedded model of ergonomics. Notes: Richardson et al., (2017); Adapted from Grey, Norris and Wilson (1987); Wilson and Corlett (2005).

Ergonomics, at its core, is concerned with the relationship between people and their environment, traditionally placing the person at the centre of the ‘onion’. The concentric rings represent interacting factors across solid boundaries, with the outside world treated as something external that we encounter. The adaptation above attempts to capture embeddedness by softening these boundaries and a larger shaded human form which reflects that experiences are not mediated across layers but are shared across factors.

From a nature connection perspective, the person does not reside at the centre. Instead, the self and the external natural world are integrated. The things we do, and the wider environment in which we do them, are part of our being. Being is not separate from the world; it is constituted through interaction with it.

Yet to understand nature connection, science often seeks to control and isolate factors, effectively reducing the number of layers in the onion. This is a necessary approach for understanding individual mechanisms, but it inevitably places complex realities to the side.

My recent research therefore focuses on simulating individuals and their dispositions within families, cultures, and environments shaped by urbanisation, education, and economic priorities. As with the regional patterns discussed above, nature connectedness becomes something that is experienced individually but shaped, scaffolded, and constrained culturally.

There is cultural inheritance, where some cultures transmit more holistic ontologies, moral standing for non‑humans, and seasonal, land‑based narratives, raising the population mean of nature connection.

There is everyday practice, where nature is part of food, work, worship, or daily movement rather than a recreational “escape”. In these contexts, nature connection becomes habitual rather than episodic.

There is environmental affordance, where those cultural scripts only persist if people can enact them and nature remains encounterable rather than abstract. Constraints such as urban design can suppress culturally inherited nature connection. Lower scores therefore do not imply weaker values, but weaker opportunities for expression.

The challenge now is to model these interactions and examine the levels of nature connection that emerge, and to test whether such simulations can reproduce the differences observed between local authorities. That is a study I hope to see published in the spring.

Conclusions

The data shows that nature connection doesn’t simply scale with rurality or green space. Instead, they point towards a more relational model where culture, stewardship, life history, and everyday engagement shape how people experience their place in nature, even in the most urban parts of England. Urban nature connection is compositional, not just spatial. Higher levels reflect who lives there and how they can relate to nature as afforded by what surrounds them. Culture sets the potential; place determines whether it can be realised. Understanding and modelling that interaction may be essential if we are to move beyond simple access‑based solutions and support enduring relationships between people and nature.

Nature Connections 2026 will take place on 16^th July in Derby, bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in nature connection to share and discuss the latest research, ideas, and applications. To keep costs down we’ve returned to a single day. You can submit an abstract or book your place.

Over a decade on from the first Nature Connections, the event has grown into something special, and for 2026 we look forward to welcoming you to a new venue, next (i’m promised) to a kingfisher highway, but still in the city and within easy reach of the railway station.

As ever, the day is made by those that attend and we invite submissions for ten-minute talks or poster presentations.  Submissions should outline a study, project or practice that focuses on nature connection – people’s sense of relationship with the more-than-human world. We welcome submissions from any sector, including academics, creatives, practitioners, and other professionals.

Deadline: 5^th March 2026

Hope to see you in July!