Understanding Connections between Nature's Contributions to People and Life Satisfaction

Abstract

The Millennium Ecosystem assessment in 2005 established that through ecosystem services, healthy environments lead to a healthy society overall, including individual wellbeing. Since the initial publication, ecosystem services have been reframed as nature’s contributions to people (NCP), in an attempt to better represent the multiple types of relationships human communities hold with nature. Specifically, the NCP framework provides three categories of value people hold with nature: intrinsic, instrumental, and relational. We tested the relationships between indicators from each category to individual life satisfaction (a measure of subjective wellbeing) in the Puget Sound of Washington State. Intrinsic contributions were measured through bird diversity, proportion of natural area, and habitat diversity near one’s home. Instrumental contributions were measured as air pollution, proximity to quantity of agricultural lands, and proximity to quantity of forest lands. Relational contributions were measured as perceived psychological restoration from natural environments and participation in outdoor recreational activities. The relationships between these indicators and life satisfaction were tested with regression analyses using spatially-explicit life satisfaction data from a random sample of 1823 survey respondents. Psychological restoration (relational), outdoor activity (relational), and recent change in forest (instrumental) significantly associated with life satisfaction. Additionally, two of the intrinsic variables (bird diversity and habitat diversity) were significantly associated with both relational variables (psychological restoration and outdoor activity). Race was the most significant predictor of both psychological restoration and outdoor recreation. These findings empirically show direct benefits to subjective wellbeing from nature’s contributions to people, as well as complex relationships between relational, instrumental and intrinsic values of nature.

Keywords: ecosystem services, outdoor recreation, psychological restoration, environmental health