Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing
By M. White, Ian Alcock, J. Grellier, Ben Wheeler, T. Hartig, S. Warber, A. Bone, M. Depledge, L. Fleming. Scientific Reports, 2019
910 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Spending time in natural environments can benefit health and well-being, but exposure-response relationships are under-researched. We examined associations between recreational nature contact in the last seven days and self-reported health and well-being. Participants (n = 19,806) were drawn from the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment Survey (2014/15–2015/16); weighted to be nationally representative. Weekly contact was categorised using 60 min blocks. Analyses controlled for residential greenspace and other neighbourhood and individual factors. Compared to no nature contact last week, the likelihood of reporting good health or high well-being became significantly greater with contact ≥120 mins (e.g. 120–179 mins: ORs [95%CIs]: Health = 1.59 [1.31–1.92]; Well-being = 1.23 [1.08–1.40]). Positive associations peaked between 200–300 mins per week with no further gain. The pattern was consistent across key groups including older adults and those with long-term health issues. It did not matter how 120 mins of contact a week was achieved (e.g. one long vs. several shorter visits/week). Prospective longitudinal and intervention studies are a critical next step in developing possible weekly nature exposure guidelines comparable to those for physical activity.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc8321693838253805077ba326a52da6de1e8b22
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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Citations in the corpus
- Nature contact, nature connectedness and associations with health, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviours (2020, background): “Indeed, previous analysis of a different set of MENE data observed that people in England living in the least green areas spend significantly more time in nature than those living in greener areas, contrary to common assumptions about greener areas facilitating more time in nature (White et al., 201”
- Moments, not minutes: The nature-wellbeing relationship (2021, background): “They noted that previous research evidencing the importance of time in nature have not also considered individual factors such as levels of nature connectedness (e.g., Meredith et al., 2020; White et al., 2019).”