Imperial College London and the University of Kent researchers published a framework capturing the connections between mental health and conservation.

Led by Dr Thomas Pienkowski from the Centre for Environmental Policy, the team created a framework for policymakers, which includes the diverse direct and indirect relationships between mental health and nature loss.

The links between mental well-being and nature have been researched in the past, suggesting that exposure to green spaces can lead to improvements in mood.

The team’s paper, published in journal One Earth on 19 July, goes one step further and also considers how nature can affect other social determinants of mental health. This includes access to resources and income, as well as nature’s role in personal and communal identity. 

We spoke to Dr Pienkowski and co-authors Dr Emma Lawrance, Climate Cares Centre Lead and Mental Health Lead for Imperial’s Institute for Global Health Innovation, and Dr Jessica Fisher, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent.

Q: What motivated your team to research the impact of nature on people’s mental health?

Dr Thomas Pienkowski: We don’t know much about how the global nature crisis will affect mental health. Most research in this area has overlooked how nature supports the socioeconomic fabric of people’s lives that underpin their mental health.

In this paper, we wanted to show how nature’s material contributions, like wild-harvested foods, products, and building materials, affect the ‘social determinants’ of mental health. Building on this, we look at how losing these contributions, like when fisheries collapse, can worsen stressors like poverty, which in turn could harm mental health.

We also discuss how conserving biodiversity might impact mental health by changing how nature’s benefits are distributed and accessed or creating direct effects through conservation projects. 

This paper brought together two well-established bodies of evidence from conservation and mental health sciences that hadn’t ever been bridged before. We have a particular focus on the Global South, where many people rely on natural resources to meet their basic needs.

Dr Emma Lawrance: I was really pleased to meet Tom and Jess and come into this work because I see the enormous value in forging connections between disciplines, connections between sectors, and making it clear to people how interdependent global health is with the climate and biodiversity.

Over the last year, I also worked on this project called Connecting Climate Minds, where we spoke to nearly 1000 people from different research backgrounds, different disciplines, different sectors, and different lived experiences, from 90 countries.

It was very clear how important the environment is to so many communities and the mental anguish that comes with being disconnected from their lands and from their cultures, or having their lands and livelihoods affected by the climate and ecological crises.

Many cultures around the world, including many Indigenous cultures, don’t put artificial barriers between human health and wellbeing and the health of the lands they practice their stewardship over.

This should be considered in how conservation policies are implemented, which may even displace these communities from their lands.

Q: What are a few of the broad sweeping ways nature can impact mental wellbeing?

Dr Jessica Fisher: It’s now an accepted truth across members of the public, policy and practice that people get health and wellbeing benefits from biodiversity – everything from physical benefits, like better cardiovascular health, to psychological benefits, like improvements to mood and lower fatigue.

There’s also social health, our relationships to others, like when we use green spaces for social events. Then there’s the concept of spiritual health, which is about our relationship with ‘something greater’. 

With all these different pathways, we get a holistic view of how nature benefits our mental wellbeing. 

Q: What are you hoping the framework will achieve in short-term and long-term policy?

Dr Thomas Pienkowski: There are two levels. By demonstrating these links, we want public health professionals to join calls to protect biodiversity as a public health measure.

On the other level, we want to encourage conservationists to really think through the mental health implications of the different strategies that they take.

For example, governments around the world have committed to expanding area-based conservation to 30% of the world’s surface by 2030, which will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

That expansion could take the form of relatively strict protected areas that exclude people. Our framework suggests that such an approach might undermine progress towards global mental health goals.

Alternatively, other approaches could support local communities and Indigenous groups in managing landscapes in ways that benefit nature while also supporting local livelihoods and cultures.

These approaches may help support residents’ mental health by recognising their rights to natural resources, land, culture, and self-determined governance systems.

Dr Emma Lawrance: We’re trying to form the connection between these ideas and show people that these kind of causes and consequences are very interlinked. You can’t make policy decisions in silos – if you care about health, you need to care about the climate and environment.

So, when we talk about carbon emissions, we should also talk about how many lives could be lost or saved. Similar narratives involving human health and well-being could also be powerful for global conservation efforts.

Q: This seems like a tricky balancing act. Is it feasible to avoid forms of conservation that have severe mental health harms during such a critical time period?

Dr Emma Lawrance: I agree that there are sometimes these trade-offs, but more often, there are win-win scenarios or co-beneficial scenarios.

Research suggests that changes that create a healthier environment can also create fundamentally healthier and happier people. Sometimes there will be trade-offs to consider and we’ll run into hard and vital questions about what would constitute a Just Transition as the Perspective importantly highlights.

But a lot of the time when you are considerate about the interconnections, there are clear paths for conservation and human well-being to be fundamentally aligned.

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'Nature’s contributions to social determinants of mental health and the role of conservation' by Thomas Pienkowski et al. is published in One Earth