By Dr Caitlin Hinson, Senior Natural Capital Specialist at Natural England
Until now, evidence for the complex links between nature and health and wellbeing has cut across sectors and research disciplines. There is a lot of useful evidence out there, but the range has made it difficult to draw together and use to inform decision making.
This was very much the experience of Natural England, a traditionally ecologically focused organisation with a growing remit around how people and wider nature relate to each other. To begin to unpick this relationship and bring the evidence together in one place, Natural England has just completed the most comprehensive review to date. The review focuses on how natural environments in the UK context relate to human health and wellbeing, in both positive and negative ways.
Bringing the evidence together
With such a large body of evidence to work through, we made use of systematic search methods, commonly used in both the health and environment research sectors. We identified over 2,000 reviews that report evidence on how a specific exposures to nature, such as water-based recreation, pollen, gardening, climate and air pollution, related to specific health and wellbeing outcomes, such as mental health, respiratory outcomes and obesity.
After sorting through all the reviews, we identified the most recent and comprehensive research on each combination of nature exposure and health outcome. A total of 104 reviews were included in the final report, which provides a summarising overview, as well as a breakdown of evidence for individual links between nature exposures and health outcomes.
The ways that people and natural environment interact
We sorted the evidence into four main categories of nature exposure—the ways that people and the natural environment interact:
- General nature exposures is about being close to nature, rather than deliberate interaction with it. How close parks, fields or green spaces are to where people live and work is a common way of looking at nature exposure in research. This category also includes other more passive exposures, such as people’s exposure to extreme weather events, pollen or wildlife.
- Active Engagement with nature is all about the deliberate activities that people do outside, such as varied types of outdoor recreation, like gardening or outdoor exercise. Active engagements include organised or spontaneous activities, as well as nature therapy.
- Exposure to contaminated nature captures people’s contact with pollutants while spending time outdoors. These may be in water, air or on the land.
- Exposure to nature improvement considers how improvements to our natural environments, such as nature recovery work, air or water quality mitigation or nature-based volunteering, can impact on their health and wellbeing.
How does nature exposure relate to our health and wellbeing?
The report summarises the strength of evidence for a range of areas, from active travel to green social prescribing. To provide a flavour of some of these insights:
- Exposure to green spaces is good for our health, showing links with better psychological wellbeing, increased physical activity and markers of health linked to this. Accessible green space in more built-up areas in particular will be important for protecting health and wellbeing.
- Exposure to nature improves the activity levels of children and young people.
- For other age groups, good evidence exists on how active and deliberate nature activities, such as gardening and exercise outdoors, benefit mental health and wellbeing.
- Evidence to connect positive health outcomes with water-based environments, often called blue space, is growing.
- Contamination, pollution and toxins are negatively impacting our health and wellbeing. Pathogens in water are causing illnesses for bathers, and air pollution from transport and industry is having significant negative impacts on respiratory and cardiovascular health.
- However, it is positive to see that improvements in air quality were found to correspond with improvements in quality and length of life.
The ‘take home’?
Although some areas are well-evidenced, this review highlighted gaps in understanding that we need answers to across both the environment and health sectors. We need clearer evidence of ‘what works’ for health and wellbeing, in terms of nature-based activities beyond gardening and physical activity. We need to get to grips with the risk climate change and other drivers of change poses to the health and wellbeing of people in the UK, and ways to mitigate these risks. We also need evidence that improving the condition of the environment through nature recovery can benefit people as well as nature.
There is huge potential to take action that benefits both our health and wellbeing, and our natural environment. Natural England will continue to build cross-sector partnerships for nature’s recovery to achieve our vision of thriving nature for people and planet.