Finding Nature

The latest Living Planet Report paints a stark picture of our planet’s health, revealing that wildlife populations have plummeted by 73% since 1970. This alarming statistic is now visually represented by two darker grey stripes added to the biodiversity stripes, a tool designed to raise awareness and engagement about biodiversity loss. While climate change often dominates headlines, the decline in biodiversity is equally critical, underscoring a failing relationship between humans and nature. This blog delves into the complexities of biodiversity data, the significance of the Living Planet Index, and the urgent need to address both climate change and biodiversity loss to ensure a stable future for generations to come.

The biodiversity stripes have been used widely, from a football kit to adoption by the global Nature Positive campaign that put nature and the stripes at the heart of the world’s biggest environmental conventions, including COP27, COP28, and COP15. This biodiversity stripes themed campaign won the Best Environmental Cause Campaign at the Purpose Awards in June 2023. Such exposure should now be easier with the new stripes released as Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, thereby allowing others to share and adapt the stripes, with appropriate credit and sharing.

Biodiversity data is massively difficult and complex, and the Living Planet Index is just one approach that focusses on wildlife populations. The global data includes over 30,000 populations of over 5000 species and tells us that the population of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles has seen an average drop of 73% globally since 1970.

The biodiversity stripes though are an awareness and engagement tool to highlight the issue. Climate change has been found to get up to eight times more coverage than biodiversity loss. Yet only by addressing both the warming climate and loss of wildlife do we stand a chance of passing on a stable planet for future generations. This imbalance is odd as many of us claim to love nature and wildlife. And while we may talk about the weather, few of us love the climate. The decline of nature provides a sure sign that our relationship with nature is failing.

It is biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, that supports life. It is fundamental in providing the air we breathe and food we eat. Humans evolved within a vibrant, biodiverse, natural world. It is inherently good and vital for our wellbeing. Yet through a disconnected relationship dominated by use and control of nature we have done great damage to the natural world. A spiralling breakdown as when biodiversity decreases so does our relationship with nature. A failing relationship that the UN recognise as the root cause of the environmental crises.

In addition to the global stripes, there are stripes for several continental areas, such as Latin America, a region where the creative use of the stripes is illustrated with the toucan, showing the 95% decline in Latin American wildlife populations since 1970.

And Africa with 76% decline.

The larger the decline, the darker the grey, so you may wonder why the Europe and Central Asia stripes below are comparatively green? The living planet index starts at 1970 and the decline calculated from a standard maximum level of ‘1’. Therefore, any loss of wildlife before 1970 doesn’t feature, every region starts as a vibrant green, even though some have less nature to lose.

The biomass of wild mammals has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. Tens of thousands of years ago several million humans hundreds of mammals were wiped out in a megafauna extinction. Then, the Industrial Revolution centred in Europe saw the industrial exploitation of nature, together with changing agriculture, this saw the UK becoming one of most nature depleted countries on the planet.

Biomass of mammals

So, to illustrate, using another biodiversity index, the NBI, the mean level of biodiversity across the European nations of UK, Poland, France, Germany and Spain is 0.39, compared to mean in selected Latin American nations of Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela of 0.80. Latin America is around twice as biodiverse as Europe, yet has the greyest stripes based on the decline since 1970. Whereas Europe and Central Asia has stayed relatively green. The pair of stripes below provide a rough visualisation of this. The biodiversity stripes represent decline, rather than levels.

There is an urgent need to protect and restore what remains. But, like climate change, biodiversity loss is a symptom of a failing relationship between people and the rest of nature. Addressing biodiversity loss requires more than just conservation efforts; it demands a fundamental shift in our relationship with nature. ‘Nature connectedness’ captures this relationship and research shows it can be targeted to inspire pro-environmental behaviours and enhance human well-being.  The biodiversity stripes serve as a powerful reminder of the urgent need to protect and restore our planet’s wildlife. By fostering a deeper connection with the natural world, we can. As we confront the intertwined crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, we must strive to rebuild our bond with nature, ensuring a vibrant and biodiverse world where both people and nature thrive.

Find out more about the human relationship with the rest of nature and how to improve it take a look at Reconnection: Fixing our broken relationship with nature and The Blackbird’s Song & Other Wonders of Nature.

Walking through the entrance of an ancient hill fort recently returned my thoughts to time. Nature connection is often seen as about being ‘in the moment’. Reviews conclude mindfulness is the essential step to connection. Time and reflecting on the past or future isn’t a common theme, which is odd as reflection can explain nature connection better than mindful attention. This is a topic I explore in my next book, The Blackbird’s Song, a month-by-month guide to connecting with nature, which is published 24th October.

Bury Ditches Hill Fort

The hill fort dates from 500BC, I expect some of their descendants still live locally. An unbroken thread of life, from parent to child across over a hundred generations. The same thread runs through the local wildlife, but across many more generations, with far more failures as populations dwindled. This means that over recent centuries, many of our forebears have not been good ancestors for nature. Intentionally and unwittingly reducing and polluting habitats. The need for a new relationship with the rest of nature is now readily apparent.

That new relationship is a major challenge, the options need to extend beyond noticing nature in the moment. This ‘nature connection space’ is something I explore in The Blackbird’s Song using the diagram below. The mayfly represents the fleetingness of the present and mindful attention which can be the foundation for a deeper state of reflection and wisdom as represented by an owl. Reflecting on our connection with nature can involve thinking about the future, inspiring new ideas and understanding the importance of being a good ancestor. This represented by the beaver now being successfully reintroduced to the UK. Equally reflection can take us back into the past, our thoughts exploring the environment like the wolf that used to roam the UK.

The Nature Connection Space

Looking back and a sentimental desire for a former time is called nostalgia, which can be mocked somewhat in modern society. Yet, nostalgia is an emotion found across cultures that makes life more meaningful and provides a bridge between the past and present. Like nature connection, nostalgia is a positive emotion and helps us feel part of something beyond the here and now.

Looking further back in time to our ancestors brings continuity, connects us with place and shapes our personal identity. That link to the past can be used to encourage us to look forward and think about becoming good ancestors ourselves, by restoring the natural world and our relationship with it.

On the theme of time, unlike the distant past, our days are driven by ‘mechanical time’. This detaches us from natural rhythms and changes how we value time and how it flows between past, present and future. Time in nature feels longer and the clocks and schedules of urban living put us under pressure. This matters, as the perceived availability of time affects our behaviours.

Reconnecting with nature requires us to embrace a relational view that includes past, present, and future. By reflecting on our ancestral ties and the natural rhythms that once guided their lives, we can foster a deeper, more meaningful connection with the natural world. This journey inspires us to become better stewards of the natural world, ensuring that we leave a positive legacy for future generations.

This reflection on nature connection and time is a small part of The Blackbird’s Song. Month by month, the book explains the benefits nature can bring and suggests how to bring nature into everyday living in tangible and practical ways, creating a closer relationship with the natural world.

Last year we published a paper comparing the human nature relationship to inter-personal relationships, put simply love between people, or love for nature. Love is a profound human experience, it influences relationships, motivates behaviour and the love of nature is among the most frequently felt types of love. Our experience of love is shaped by both biological and cultural factors, rooted in fundamental neurobiological mechanisms of attachment.

Sometimes, people refer to the UK as a nation of nature lovers, although it’s not. A nation of pet lovers maybe? Love doesn’t have to be between people, but are these types of love different neurologically? Is a love of nature the same as love of a child?

To explore this, a recent research paper examines brain areas involved in love for six different objects: romantic partners, one’s own children, friends, strangers (varieties of interpersonal love), nonhuman pets (interspecies love), and nature (non-social love). The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity while inducing feelings of love through short stories.

The stories about love for nature depicted beautiful natural surroundings, immersing the subject in nature, for example: You are in the archipelago at the seaside. The blue waves ripple over the coastal stones, a crooked pine rises next to you, and there are white fluffy clouds here and there in the sky. You love nature.

Researchers systematically evaluated the differences between categories of love, using contrasts of the six types of love with each other in a pairwise manner. These contrasts highlighted clear differences between close interpersonal relationships, particularly romantic and parental love, and love towards nature.

Romantic and parental love activated social cognition, long-term personal memories and self-processing activations significantly more than love for nature. Those associated with sensory perception, were absent for interpersonal love.

Love for nature activated some brain regions more strongly than love for humans or pets, such as sensory integration, emotional memories, emotion related behaviours, modulation of visceral reactions, temporal memory, imagery, viewing of landscapes autonomic nervous system regulation and joy! While, as one might expect, self-processing activations were missing.

The activation of sensory, emotional and meaningful memories have parallels with the pathways to nature connectedness. Which also include beauty, of landscapes, for example and compassion – which returns us to care and behaviours driven by love. It is fair to talk of nature connection as a relationship.

So, while love for nature and interpersonal love share some neural mechanisms, they also involve distinct brain regions. That said, human and nature love both produced significant activation in the region associated with neurobiological frameworks of human affiliation. This commonality together with the differences, suggest a ‘fuzzy continuum’ where love between people is the original ‘prototype’ case, and compassionate love for categories, such as pets and nature love resemble the prototypes in varying degrees dependent on biological, cultural, and subjective psychological factors.

Of course there’s another prototype, the brain architecture of human love can also be seen as emerging from and building on fundamental biological attachment systems shared with other mammals, showing our innate connection with the rest of the natural world.

Pärttyli Rinne, Juha M Lahnakoski, Heini Saarimäki, Mikke Tavast, Mikko Sams, Linda Henriksson, Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 34, Issue 8, August 2024, bhae331, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae331

Rinne, P., Tavast, M., Glerean, E., & Sams, M. (2023). Body maps of loves. Philosophical Psychology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2252464

Previous research into the wellbeing benefits of nature has primarily focused on restoration – essentially a dose of nature will do you good when you’re fatigued. This is great, but nature is much more than a pill to pop, there are much deeper connections and a story to tell how nature keeps us well, rather than restores us. Restoration-based accounts do not explain all the well-being benefits derived from nature.

The role of nature in the regulation of emotions has been overlooked despite evidence that people seek out nature to manage their moods.  My previous work between 2016 and 2019 on nature and emotion regulation first considered how a model of affect regulation, the three circle model of emotion, provides a framework to explain the mental well-being benefits of nature, illustrated below. This was followed by a study that showed that emotional regulation was involved in the relationship between nature connectedness and wellbeing, showing that people who are less connected with nature experience greater difficulty in emotion regulation. The final paper summarised this work and showed how nature helps manage our emotions for wellbeing.

In the last nine months three more papers on nature, connectedness and emotional regulation have been published. The first considers nature contact for emotion regulation and explored the roles of nature connectedness and engagement with nature’s beauty in urban young adults. It found that nature connectedness mediated the link between nature contact and emotional regulation. Further, engagement with natural beauty moderated the link between nature contact and emotional regulation.

The second paper looked at the role of emotion regulation in the links between nature contact, emotional ill-being and well-being. Again, effective emotion regulation was involved in the relationship between nature contact and better wellbeing, but for some wellbeing outcomes time in nature provided diminishing returns. This paper didn’t consider nature connectedness, but the third did.

The final paper was a review of the role of nature in emotion regulation. Their review of 27 studies found that nature exposure has a positive impact on emotion regulation in general and on specific emotion regulation strategies, such as enhancing the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies  such as mindfulness and decreasing rumination and worry. The benefits of nature connectedness were mediated by emotion regulation processes. This is illustrated in the diagram above.

It’s increasingly clear that the benefits of nature contact and connection can be explained by changes in emotion regulation. As such, frameworks explaining how nature benefits wellbeing need to be updated to include emotion regulation in addition to restoration. Nature helps manage our moods and keep us well.

Richardson, M., McEwan, K., Maratos, F., & Sheffield, D. (2016). Joy and calm: How an evolutionary functional model of affect regulation informs positive emotions in nature. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2, 308-320.

Richardson, M., & McEwan, K. (2018). 30 days wild and the relationships between engagement with nature’s beauty, nature connectedness and well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1500.

Richardson, M. (2019). Beyond restoration: considering emotion regulation in natural well-being. Ecopsychology, 11(2), 123-129.

Gu, X., Zheng, H., & Tse, C. S. (2023). Contact with nature for emotion regulation: the roles of nature connectedness and beauty engagement in urban young adults. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 21377.

Vitale, V., & Bonaiuto, M. (2024). The role of nature in emotion regulation processes: An evidence-based rapid review. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102325.

Bratman, G. N., Mehta, A., Olvera-Alvarez, H., Spink, K. M., Levy, C., White, M. P., … & Gross, J. J. (2024). Associations of nature contact with emotional ill-being and well-being: the role of emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 1-20.

A guest blog by Dr Fiona Holland, from the School of Psychology at the University of Derby

Nurturing a connection with nature has long-term benefits for children. This blog explains how research in this area has led to the creation of a new resource for parents, carers and those working with young children – the Connecting Families With Nature Handbook.

We can all probably identify particular moments in nature where we’ve felt a sense of connection – we might stop and observe a spider web in the dew, smell a flower, listen to a bird, or perhaps enjoy a well-earned view from the top of a hill. For those with children, a highlight of parenthood can be times when we see our loved ones enjoying times outside, immersed in nature whether they are gleefully enjoying rolling down a grassy bank, amazed at the sight of a harvest moon, or fascinated by a bug on a leaf.

The benefits of spending time in and being connected to nature for children are well established and nature-based interventions have been shown to enhance the mental health and wellbeing in children. However, it is not simply spending time outside that leads to these improvements, it the relationship with nature that has been found to be an essential ingredient.

Pathways to nature connectedness

The pathways to nature connectedness, developed at the University of Derby, show that there are five ways that people of all ages connect to nature: through Contact (such as listening to birdsong), Meaning (seeing nature as a way to represent an idea, for example the first flowers heralding spring), Emotion (expressing feeling about nature via talking or writing about it), Beauty (appreciating an amazing view, using art to capture this) and Compassion (such as being concerned for animals and plants).

The pandemic highlighted disparities across the country, as families from lower socioeconomic levels had more limited access to outside play and nature and spent less time outdoors (Natural England, 2021). The UK government sought to fund opportunities for young people from these areas once lockdowns were lifted. I, alongside my colleague, Dr Caroline Harvey, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University, evaluated one project, Generation Green. This was a large, multi-partner intervention and included organisations such as the Outward Bound Trust, the YHA England & Wales, Scouts, Girlguiding, Field Studies Council and the ten English National Parks.

Back to baseline

Findings from the evaluation were positive, with participants (aged 11-16) showing increases in nature connectedness and confidence in making new friends. However, follow-up measures indicated that once the young people return to school and daily life, their nature connectedness returned to baseline levels again a few months later. For changes to be sustained over time, more time with and in nature is needed. Resources are clearly needed to support the maintenance of these benefits over time and mapping these across the pathways to nature connectedness will help maximise any benefits.

As a result we have teamed up with Developmental Psychologist Dr Chris Barnes to create the Connecting Families with Nature Handbook, a user-friendly activity pack that is easy for parents, teachers, nursery, pre-school and family hub staff to ‘grab and go’.

The activities in the initial handbook focus on children aged from 0-7, and more activities will be added to suit a range of ages as the resource is developed further. Derby City Council has funded the initial Activity Handbook and, alongside things to do for families with young pre-school and school-aged children, it also includes some nature-based activities for 0-2 year-olds, an age-group often overlooked. The pack is freely available, and is easy to use with minimal resources needed. You can access it via this link:

Connecting Families With Nature Handbook

We are looking forward to evaluating the handbook with families in Derby later this year, and to sharing the resource at the Nature Connections Conference in Derby in June. This two day conference is hosted by the University of Derby. Fiona and Caroline are presenting a keynote talk, as are several other colleagues from the Nature Connectedness Research Group

Top tips for connecting with nature with children

1. Make sure your child is dressed for the weather, and bring along drinks and snacks if needed. Engaging with nature positively is less likely to happen if they are too cold, hot, or hangry!
2. Slow down – try to allow children to engage in an unhurried way; they can spend time playing with sticks, mud and leaves, and adults can benefit from the opportunity to be present too
3. Try to avoid the temptation to go on your phone while a child is engaging with nature – this disconnects you from the experience, and also offers a contrasting model for the child. Phones can be used to take photos of a particularly interesting plant or animal, or to identify something, but scrolling is not advised
4. When trying an activity from the resource pack, think of ways you can personalise it even further for the child/ children – e.g. if you are doing a nature treasure hunt, what could you add in that you know will delight them on their search?
5. Taking children out with a friend, sibling or play group can enhance the fun for some, and we encourage parentso try to foster a spirit of collaboration rather than competition so the children help each other to make art, or find natural objects, rather than racing or competing against each other.

Find out more about nature connectedness research at the University of Derby.