‘What psychological endeavour is greater than a habitable planet?’

There is global recognition that the relationship between humans and the rest of nature is failing. This fracture is the root cause of our warming climate and the shocking loss of biodiversity. Psychology should be playing a central role in this human-caused crisis, especially as the United Nations recognises the climate emergency as the greatest global challenge of our time, indeed, in the COP15 agreement, a nature connection target was included.

Sadly, people in the UK have one of the lowest levels of nature connection in Europe. We enjoy art and poetry that considersnature, we cherish naturalists and enjoy nature documentaries, and millions of us are members of nature conservation organisations, yet the reality is that we are not a nation of nature lovers. Within a failing global relationship with nature, people in the UK are more distant than most. No surprise, as the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries on the planet.  

The psychological construct of 'Nature connectedness' examines the relationship between humans and nature. For the last 10 years my research and practice has focused on this and on the decline of biodiversity. My work highlights the role psychologists can play in global issues of huge importance and there is an indication of change.

Connection to nature

Since definitions and scales were developed at the turn of the century, use of the term 'nature connectedness' has grown rapidly, mostly in the last ten years. When I founded the Nature Connectedness Research Group in 2013, 77 research papers used the term; by 2022 that 77 had grown to 1410.

As recently as a few decades ago, psychology could be described as mute on the environmental crisis, even normalising damaging behaviours and lifestyles (Kidner, 1994). Things have improved, with, for example, the emergence of conservation psychology (Saunders, 2003), which calls for psychologists to apply their expertise to nature conservation issues. Environmental psychology includes issues at the heart of a sustainable future, and it is now seen as a core area of our discipline.

So how exactly do we fix our broken relationship with nature? When I set-up the Nature Connectedness Research Group ten years ago at the University of Derby, it seemed intuitive to me that the human relationship with nature mattered and was at the heart of environmental crisis. I founded it to 'understand people's connection to the natural environment and design and evaluate interventions to improve connectedness, bringing about the associated benefits in well-being and conservation behaviour'.

The design of interventions and focus on solutions, together with increased recognition of the human-nature relationship being a root cause of the environmental crises, has had widespread impact. The group has produced dozens of research papers, applied the results widely and been recognised for its work, winning two Green Gown Research with Impact awards in 2021 and being named by Universities UK as one of the UK's 100 best breakthroughs. Our work aims to lead efforts to create a new relationship with nature, through research and developing interventions and sharing guidance.

Clearly, a research group starts with research and that includes what's done on a shoestring budget as well as two large scale £1+ million consortium programmes: Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (2016 to 2019) and Connected Treescapes (2021 to present). Human wellbeing is a core topic of psychology, and our research has explored the links between nature connectedness and various aspects of mental well-being. Demonstrating the potential that nature connection approaches can offer our well-being has led to 'nature prescriptions' being adopted in NHS pilots and has also helped to inform Mental Health Awareness Week in 2021.

Ultimately, human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the natural world, so understanding how to effectively connect people with nature has been a core focus of the group's research. The simplest interventions to improve nature connectedness focus on bringing people to nature. However, to fix a broken relationship, larger scale approaches are needed.

Our pathways to nature connectedness design framework provides five broad activity types to foster: around Senses, Emotion, Compassion, Meaning, and Beauty. This framework has been widely adopted around the world to help connect people with nature, including the Government's Green Influencers scheme and the Green Recovery Challenge Fund, who help initiatives such as 'Generation Green', where organisations including the YHA, Scouts and National Parks connect young people with nature.

In 2015, The Wildlife Trusts used the pathways to inform the design of their innovative 30 Days Wild national programme, with over one million people taking part in the first five years. In 2018, the National Trust adopted the pathways as a framework for their design of visitor experience activities and programmes. One part of this work was a re-fresh of the national campaign: 50 things to do before you're 11¾ , launched nationally in 2019. The pathways have also informed physical spaces, for example, the Butterfly House at Durrell Zoo and Silence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The transformational change required for a sustainable future has led to a systems perspective to consider how the pathways can be applied at societal scale. The utility of the pathways framework for application across contexts has seen its inclusion in policy briefings and evidence reviews including Stockholm+50; a UN science evidence review. In total, 23 of our research papers have been cited 77 times in 49 reports from 29 policy bodies in 12 countries, including: the IPCC, WHO, EU, OECD, IPBES, IUCN, and Governments of New Zealand, Finland and the UK.

Communicating the loss of biodiversity

The key aspect for a sustainable future is, of course, awareness. People cannot push for a solution to a problem they do not know exists. Climate change has been found to get up to eight times more coverage than biodiversity loss. An amazingly simple yet effective way of communicating global warming is the use of Climate Warming Stripes, created by Professor Ed Hawkins in 2018; a simple series of vertical-coloured bars, showing the heating of the planet over 200 years.

Effective communication of complex geoscience issues presents an enormous challenge and Hawkins' stripes have had a hugeimpact. In the launch week alone, over a million people downloaded the graphics and they have been shared widely: doing a great job increasing climate change awareness. It therefore seemed a simple idea to create biodiversity stripes as a communication and engagement tool. In the summer of 2022, that's what I did (see main image, above).

The Living Planet Index provided the data I needed. It includes over 20,000 populations of over 4000 species and tells us that the population of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles has seen an average drop of 69 per cent globally since 1970. It's worth pausing to reflect on that. Over two-thirds of the animal population has been wiped away in less than a single human lifetime. A catastrophic collapse of the wildlife that makes the earth, and our brief existence on it, so wonderful, so colourful, and so alive. Human actions, our use and control of natural resources, are causing a mass extinction. Yet walk through a city and you will see no memorials to that destruction.

To create the stripes, conditional formatting of the LPI data allows each data point to be assigned a colour. Colours are important variables in perception, impacting cognition, emotions and meaning. The choice of colours is critical to ensure that the graphic is as intuitive as possible just as the cooler blues and warmer reds were in Hawkins' stripes. Since biodiversity and nature is commonly depicted by the colour green, the 1970 maximum LPI was represented by a vibrant green. Since the decline of wildlife can be seen as a loss of colour, the lowest LPI figure was represented by grey; a colour also associated with the growing urbanisation linked to biodiversity loss. However, the stripes needed to engage people, so the mid-point value in the data was represented by yellow, which research suggests is the most eye-catching colour. Yellow is also harmonious with green, and a combination preferred by users. The declining trend in the LPI was therefore captured by a transition from green to yellow and then from yellow to grey.

I'm pleased to say that the design worked! Within a few weeks the biodiversity stripes were available on a variety of Greenpeace tops and soon adopted by the global Nature Positive campaign: a coalition of 32 leading non-governmental organisations who used the stripes to decorate the Nature Zone at COP15. The Nature Positive campaign offered a vision of optimism, by saying we can reverse the decline in biodiversity. It uses simple but effective messaging by inverting the stripes, so, rather than representing decline they provide a vision that the diverse and sometimes fragmented nature community could collaborate around.

The biodiversity stripes campaign won the Best Environmental Cause Campaign at the Purpose Awards in June 2023. Supported by industry-leading brands such as PRWeek, the awards recognise campaigns that use creative ideas successfully to further positive causes. Multiple media coverage followed from Channel 4 News, The Financial Times, the national French TV weather forecast as well as mentions at the French National Assembly and ClimateNow Conference.

Most recently, a new set of biodiversity stripes decorated the Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum in London in June. The new stripes provided the theme for the Natural History Museum's Annual Trustees' Dinner, attended by 300 guests: from Government ministers to comics that care about our natural world. Using the Museum's 2000 to 2050 Biodiversity Intactness Index the new stripes show how nature in the UK can recover from previous damage given time, space, and effort. The stripes were featured on screens around the hall as well as on menus, invites, trays and the cocktail and dessert bars. Once again, the message was clear; we can, and must, fix our broken relationship with nature.

What else can we psychologists do?

Although there's been a distinct rise in nature connectedness research, it still represents a tiny fraction of psychological endeavour. After all, what psychological endeavour is greater than a habitable planet? As a human induced issue, psychology can and should be at the forefront of creating a new relationship between people and the rest of nature, at scale. However, to fully realise this, psychologists need to embrace application of research and recognise the need to unite both human and nature's wellbeing.