Comment Humans have long benefited from nature’s offerings. But beyond being a key source of food, water and raw materials, the natural world can contribute to people’s overall well-being through a range of intangible impacts—and, new research suggests, there are much more critical relationships between human and of the nature of one might think. After reviewing hundreds of scientific papers on “cultural ecosystem services,” or the intangible benefits of nature, researchers identified 227 unique pathways through which people’s interaction with nature can positively or negatively affect well-being, according to a paper published on Friday in peer. -reviewed journal Science Advances. The paper is believed to be the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and quantifying the complex ways in which humans and nature are connected. And its findings could have important real-world implications, said Lam Thi Mai Huynh, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the University of Tokyo. “For the modernized world, people tend to disconnect from nature,” he said. “For ecosystem management, the best solution, the most sustainable solution, is to connect people back to nature and let local people be the ones to help maintain and manage ecosystem services.” Humanity’s greatest ally against climate change is the Earth itself For Huynh, the ambitious research – an undertaking that even her supervising academic initially thought was impossible – stemmed from a desire to improve understanding of the complex underlying processes behind how nature’s intangible outcomes – such as opportunities for recreation and recreation or spiritual fulfillment—have an impact on well-being. A major challenge, however, is that much of the existing scientific literature on cultural ecosystem services is “highly fragmented”, the review notes. “You have different people looking [the intangible benefits of nature] through a different lens,” said Alexandros Gasparatos, associate professor at the Institute for Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo, who co-authored the paper. While having diverse research is critical, he said, “it becomes a little difficult to bring everything together.” But the new study, a systematic review of about 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, creates “an excellent knowledge base,” Gasparatos said. “The whole point of this exercise is to understand the connection,” he added. “We give names to phenomena.” The review analyzes the hundreds of potential links between individual aspects of human well-being (mental and physical health, connectedness and belonging, and spirituality, among others) and cultural ecosystems, such as recreation and tourism, aesthetic value, and social relations. The researchers then went a step further and identified more than a dozen distinct underlying mechanisms through which people’s interactions with nature can affect their well-being. The researchers found that the highest positive contributions were seen in mental and physical health. Recreation, tourism and aesthetic value appeared to have the greatest impact on human health through the “regenerative” mechanism, or experiencing restorative effects from nature, such as stress relief, according to the paper. Meanwhile, the highest negative impacts are linked to mental health through the “catastrophic” mechanism, or direct damages associated with the degradation or loss of cultural ecosystem services, the researchers wrote. “In reality, you don’t have just one path,” and the results aren’t always positive, Gasparatos said. “It’s not like if I go into the woods, I get one thing.” A well-designed park, for example, can be a place for recreation and leisure as well as for connecting with other people. You may also find yourself appreciating the sight of towering trees and lush green scenery or birds and other wildlife. On the other hand, a poorly maintained natural space could result in an ugly or visually threatening landscape that can make you feel uncomfortable or afraid to be there. Here’s what you can do to deal with your anxiety about climate change The paper can provide a road map, Huynh said, to help people, especially decision makers, understand that there are not only various intangible benefits of interactions with nature, but also how to try to achieve them. “If we understand the underlying process, we can help design better interventions to manage the ecosystem,” he said. “We can help improve nature’s contribution to human well-being,” in addition to potentially improving sustainable management practices and eliminating some of the negative impacts on well-being. The research was widely applauded by several outside experts who were not involved in the work. “It’s long overdue to have a study like this that makes some of these connections a little clearer,” said Keith Tidball, an environmental anthropologist at Cornell University. “These things have been scattered all over the place for a long, long time, and this paper takes a huge step forward in clearing up what was previously quite confusing.” Anne Guerry, chief strategist and chief scientist at the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, agreed. “They’ve done a really good job of bringing together extremely diverse literature,” he said. It was a challenge, he noted, among researchers to be able to present the science in a way that revealed where and how nature provides the greatest benefits to humans, which could in turn help “inform and motivate conservation and restoration investments that lead to better outcomes for both people and nature.” For example, research could have an impact on the role that nature can play in human health. “What it’s going to be seriously helpful for is being able to continue to work to make the case that doctors and clinicians can actually prescribe outdoor time, outdoor recreation, even outdoor space because of these pathways that they’ve identified in this document,” Tidball said. In one scenario, elements of this work could eventually be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, said Elizabeth Haase, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health. “That makes us able to say that when we facilitate this kind of interaction with nature, you see these kinds of benefits, and then you prescribe these kinds of natural experiences, or we have policies that say you’re actually depriving someone of their mental health if you destroy these natural landscapes,” he said. Doctors in Canada can now prescribe national park cards to patients However, the review has limitations, prompting some experts to caution against overinterpreting or overemphasizing its results. One potential issue is that the existing research included in the review disproportionately focuses on individuals rather than groups. “There are a lot of times where something might be really good for one person, but overall for the community, it might not be good at all,” said Kevin Summers, senior research ecologist in the Office of Research and Development at Environmental Protection. Agency. “In many cases, there can be unintended consequences for what seem like very simple, straightforward decisions,” Summers added. Other research gaps should also be considered, Gehry said. While the review suggests that some connections between some characteristics of human well-being and cultural ecosystem services appear stronger than others, it does not mean that those other relationships may not be important, he said. “We have to be careful about oversimplifying the results and thinking that the lack of a documented relationship in this paper means something isn’t important,” he said. Instead, it might mean that “it hasn’t been studied and we haven’t found ways to quantify it and bring it into the scientific literature and out of our kind of tacit understanding.” The researchers addressed the limitations of their work, noting in the paper that future research “should explore in depth how these pathways and mechanisms manifest in less-studied ecosystems and understand their nuanced effects on various stakeholders.” In the meantime, however, the findings serve as an important reminder of the necessity of nature. “It can justify, very well, a mindset like, ‘Let’s invest in nature because it has all these benefits,’” Gasparatos said. With such strong positive benefits related to creativity, belonging, regeneration and more, “it’s easy from this document to feel that your constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness requires a country to preserve natural spaces,” he added. Haase. At a time when many people are becoming disconnected and further removed from our “ecological selves,” efforts to connect humans and nature are not only interesting from a scientific, philosophical or ethical point of view, Tidball said, but “there are also implications for human safety where they matter.” And, he said, if steps are not taken to reconnect people with nature, the consequences could be dire. “If we continue down a path as a species in a state of ecological amnesia,” he said, “we will find ourselves out of habitat and out of time and therefore out of luck.”
