Happiness is greater in natural environments

Abstract

Links between wellbeing and environmental factors are of growing interest in psychology, health, conservation, economics, and more widely. There is limited evidence that green or natural environments are positive for physical and mental health and wellbeing. We present a new and unique primary research study exploring the relationship between momentary subjective wellbeing (SWB) and individuals' immediate environment within the UK. We developed and applied an innovative data collection tool: a smartphone app that signals participants at random moments, presenting a brief questionnaire while using satellite positioning (GPS) to determine geographical coordinates. We used this to collect over one million responses from more than 20,000 participants. Associating GPS response locations with objective spatial data, we estimate a model relating land cover to SWB using only the within-individual variation, while controlling for weather, daylight, activity, companionship, location type, time, day, and any response trend. On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments. These findings are robust to a number of alternative models and model specifications. This study provides a new line of evidence on links between nature and wellbeing, strengthening existing evidence of a positive relationship between SWB and exposure to green or natural environments in daily life. Our results have informed the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), and the novel geo-located experience sampling methodology we describe has great potential to provide new insights in a range of areas of interest to policymakers.

Flourishing in nature: A review of the benefits of connecting with nature and its application as a wellbeing intervention

“…Similar findings are reported in other systematic reviews on the health benefits of nature (Bowler et al, 2010) and the effect of "green exercise" on mental wellbeing (Thompson-Coon et al, 2011). Additional support comes from an experience sampling study of 20,000 residents of the United Kingdom (MacKerron & Mourato, 2013). Even after controlling for a variety of confounding variables (e.g., weather, social company, type of activity, day of the week), people were happier when in natural environments than when in urban ones.…”

“…Given the positive hedonic outcomes, one may question why people are not spending time in nature (Evans & McCoy, 1998;MacKerron & Mourato, 2013;Matz et al, 2014). One explanation for this disconnect is that nature's effects on wellbeing are underappreciated.…”

“…The shift to urban living is expected to continue and become even more pronounced as the twenty-first century progresses. In financially wealthy, industrialized nations, less than 10% of each day, on average, is spent outdoors (Evans & McCoy, 1998;MacKerron & Mourato, 2013;Matz et al, 2014) and per capita participation in nature-based recreation is declining (Pergams & Zaradic, 2008). Children are spending less time outdoors (Louv, 2005), opting for large amounts of screen time instead (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010).…”

Green space: A natural high

“…In Japan, for example, people who spent time participating in Shinrin-yoku -sitting or walking in a forest -had lower cortisol concentrations, pulse rates and blood pressure than when they visited the city 4 . And it's not just parks and forests; blue spaces such as the sea, canals and lakes may give an even bigger boost to people's mood 5 .…”

Is the Netherlands sustainable as a global-scale inner-city? Intenscoping spatial sustainability

“…At the end of the paper we briefly describe and discuss some critiques of the Ecological Footprint; the nature of the notions of urban and rural; the strategic role of integrating preferences and settlement attributions into the analysis and the political dimensions of assuming voluntary or involuntary positions with resource use. It is important 5 to note that related economic-monetary (Latouche, 2010, Willemen, 2010, Duro and Teixidó-Figueras, 2013 and hedonic (Kerekes, 2011, Kopmann and Rehdanz, 2013, MacKerron and Mourato, 2013 considerations are omitted from this approach. Their involvement is important for further analysis and for obtaining a more comprehensive answer to the research question at hand (Kocsis, 2012), but their omission here is necessary for reasons of clarity and because of the frequent unavailability of comprehensive and reliable estimates.…”