A recently published paper speaks directly to something this podcast has been circling for a while – the relationship between access to nature, the health of people, and the future of conservation lands.
Transcript
My podcast on the 25 May this year addressed the New Zealand government’s Conservation Amendment Bill. This is arguably the most significant reform of conservation legislation in New Zealand since the Conservation Act 1987 came into effect four decades ago. I have been critical of the Bill particularly as it relates to dismantling longstanding safeguards for nature and protected lands. This includes the risk of sale of significant parts of the conservation estate. We need to protect public conservation lands which belong to all New Zealanders and are enjoyed by New Zealanders and international visitors alike.
A major justification for the bill is that the government wants the Department of Conservation to meet the costs of managing and maintaining the conservation estate. This is despite the fact that much of the work of the Department of Conservation is actually in the public good such as protecting our most critically endangered native bird species.
So I was interested to see a paper that was published four days ago in Communications Health. The title of the paper is Public Nature-Based Mental Healthcare. The lead author is Prof. Ralf Buckley from Griffith University with co-researchers from India, China, Malaysia, Japan, Chile, and Australia.
I want to discuss this paper because it raises points that are not well recognised. It makes an argument of relevance to sustainable tourism that I think is important. That point is that being in nature is good for mental health. We know that being active in nature is good for physical health. But green and blue spaces are also an important part of people’s mental health.
This idea is not new. In fact now well established in the scientific literature. But beyond that immediate point, the paper asks who has access to nature? And who is responsible for ensuring that access exists now, and continues to exist in the future?
The paper argues that the current answer to both questions is inadequate — and that we need a fundamentally different approach. One that treats nature-based mental healthcare not as a lifestyle choice for those with time and money, but as a genuine public health priority.
The timing of this message is important. Mental health challenges are increasing globally. Anxiety and depression statistics have been increasing especially for young people. Demand for conventional medical mental health treatments for these conditions, including antidepressants and psychological counselling, greatly outstrips supply in New Zealand and Australia, where many people in need simply can not access the mental healthcare they need in a timely manner.
The paper proposes that nature-based mental healthcare, delivered through a public health framework, could be a significant and cost-effective part of the response to mental wellbeing. The implications for how we think about national parks, conservation policy, green spaces urban planning are very significant.
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In addressing this point it is worth being clear about what nature-based mental healthcare actually means. The paper uses the term nature-based mental healthcare to describe regular exposure to nature, typically several hours per week, either alone, with others, or in guided settings. The evidence for its effectiveness is well established across neuroscience, epidemiology, and psychology. The authors are not making a new claim about nature’s benefits. They are making a new claim about how those benefits should be delivered.
At the moment, nature-based mental healthcare is largely available in the form of what the paper calls lifestyle medicine. This means it is discretionary. You choose to go to a local park, engage in nature-based tourism activities or join a walking group. Some will seek out a forest therapist. All of these possibilities depend on having time, money, transport, physical confidence, and cultural familiarity with outdoor spaces. Those who already have all of these things benefit. Those who do not – and the paper is clear that this is a substantial portion of the population – largely or entirely miss out.
There is also a clinical model of nature-based mental healthcare, where a healthcare professional, such as a link worker for social prescribing or occupational therapist, incorporates nature into a treatment programme for a person with anxiety or depression. This is valuable, but it is still limited to those who actively seek clinical care. Research shows that in Australia, for example, around half of those assessed as being in poor mental health do not seek any medical treatment at all.
Wellbeing and mental health challenges encompass a wide range of experiences from tempory distress to severe and persistent mental illness. Some people experiencing mental health challenges do not require a clinical response. Maintaining good mental health often depends on a combination of clinical and non-clinical support. Current mental health systems are largely designed around responding to acute illness.
The paper’s central argument is that a third model is needed – specifically a public health model. This involves investing in nature-based mental healthcare in much the same way that governments invest in road safety, clean water, or anti-smoking campaigns. Not by waiting for individuals to seek treatment, but by creating the conditions under which good mental health becomes more accessible to everyone.
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The point that I find most relevant for a sustainable tourism podcast audience is that investing in nature-based mental healthcare is also a case for investing in nature conservation.
The authors note that national parks already contribute more than $US 5 trillion per year to the global economy through improvements in visitor mental health alone. That is five hundred times the total global budget for protected area management. Indeed in 2024 research from the University of Adelaide reported that in Australia every visit to a national park saves the national health budget almost $100 (O’Connor et al., 2024).
The mental health benefits of protected natural areas already generate economic returns that dwarf the cost of maintaining those areas. But those returns are currently unrecognised in almost all conservation finance and policy discussions, including the Conservation Amendment Act.
This matters enormously for how we argue for conservation. For decades, the case for protecting natural areas has rested primarily on biodiversity and ecosystem services, international tourism and physical health outcomes. More recently carbon storage has become a point of justification. All of these arguments remain valid and important.
But the mental health argument adds something qualitatively different. It connects the existence of wild and biodiverse landscapes as well as green and blue spaces in urban areas and directly to the psychological wellbeing of urban populations – populations that are growing, that are increasingly nature-deprived, and that are placing mounting pressure on already-strained public health systems.
The paper is also clear that the quality of nature matters, not just its presence. The mental health benefits of nature exposure improve with the pristineness and biodiversity of the environment. A manicured urban park provides some benefit. A biodiverse forest provides significantly more. This is a direct argument for maintaining ecological quality, not just spatial coverage. Degraded nature is less effective nature – for wildlife, for ecosystems, and for human mental health.
For those of us who think about regenerative tourism and Indigenous models of human-nature relationships, there is something deeply resonant here. These models understand ecological health and human wellbeing as inseparable. The science reviewed in this paper is reaching the same conclusion and, in doing so, is producing hard economic evidence for the protection of conservation lands in doing so.
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One of the most important contributions of this paper is its attention to access. Specifically, it addresses the question who currently cannot access nature and why? This is not simply a matter of proximity. The barriers are multiple, interconnected, and often invisible in mainstream conservation and public health policy.
The paper identifies material barriers first. If you do not have a car in New Zealand, Australia or Chile, many national parks are effectively inaccessible. Public transport reaches very few parks in those countries. Japan, China, and India do somewhat better, with more parks accessible by train or bus. This is a point that has been recognised by researchers in Norway as important in terms of the accessibility of national parks to urban populations. But even where transport exists, other barriers and constraints arise.
There are also social and psychological barriers. Many people, particularly those who did not visit parks as children, lack the familiarity and confidence to spend time in natural settings independently. This is not a consequence of laziness or indifference. People whose parents took them to parks continue visiting them as adults. Those whose early experience excluded them from nature are far less likely to seek it out later in life, regardless of its proximity or their mental health needs.
Cultural barriers are equally significant. In some societies, social, religious, or cultural norms limit women’s or other groups’ participation in outdoor activities. Any effective public health model for nature-based mental healthcare must acknowledge and respond to these differences, rather than assuming a universal model of nature engagement.
The equity implication is important. A system in which nature-based mental healthcare is only available to those with money, transport, confidence, and cultural familiarity reproduces and deepens existing health inequalities. The people most likely to experience poor mental health (such as those in poverty, those in overcrowded urban environments, and those facing social exclusion) are also the people least likely to benefit from a lifestyle-medicine model of nature-based mental healthcare. A public health approach is important because those who most need access to nature are currently the most likely to be excluded.
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The paper proposes that delivering nature-based mental healthcare at national scale requires investment across four interconnected portfolios. None of them sits within the health system alone. This is part of what makes the model both genuinely novel and politically challenging.
The first and largest portfolio is public parks and greenspace. This means expanding – not reducing – the protected area estate, upgrading visitor infrastructure in existing parks, and ensuring that urban greenspace exists in lower-income suburbs as well as wealthy ones. The authors note that some countries have already committed to expanding protected areas under the Convention on Biological Diversity, but both coverage and funding continue to fall well behind targets. Nature-based mental healthcare, the paper suggests, could provide new political momentum for those commitments because the argument is now not only about biodiversity, but about the mental health of urban populations.
The second suggested portfolio is guiding and access facilitation. People unfamiliar with access to natural environments need support. This means investing in guided walks, ranger-led programmes, and subsidised access to qualified nature guides. Not for commercial tourism, but for public health purposes. China’s national health strategy already includes nature-therapy infrastructure in 1,200 forest reserves, providing a billion person-hours of guided nature exposure per year. This is the kind of systematic investment the paper is advocating.
The third portfolio is public education. Children who experience nature through school programmes are more likely to seek it as adults. Continued investment in outdoor programmes for schools, and in subsidising participation in community outdoor organisations, builds the cultural familiarity and confidence that makes nature-based mental healthcare accessible over the long term. Adult health campaigns – similar to those that have successfully shifted public attitudes toward smoking and physical exercise – can also play a role, though these need to be sensitive to cultural context and cannot simply be transplanted from one country or from the dominant cultural context to another.
The fourth portfolio is public transport. Parks and natural areas that cannot be reached without a car are effectively private goods, regardless of their formal public ownership. Governments that are serious about nature-based mental healthcare as a public health intervention need to ensure that natural areas in urban and suburban areas, and areas that are distant from urban centres, are accessible by public transport. This is an investment in social equity as much as in health, and its returns, in reduced healthcare costs and improved workforce productivity, are significant.
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The economic argument made in this paper is important for conservation advocacy. The claim that national parks generate more than $US 5 trillion annually through visitor mental health is based on peer-reviewed published research. The methodology involves large-scale survey data on visitor wellbeing, validated psychological scales, and economic modelling of healthcare cost savings and productivity gains.
What this research tells us is that the public return on investment in protected areas, when mental health benefits are included, is much larger than the cost of maintaining those protected areas. The current global budget for protected area management is approximately $US 10 billion per year. The mental health return alone is five hundred times that figure.
The paper also makes a point about the direction of causality that is important for policy. Nature conservation generates mental health benefits. But the argument runs in the other direction too: if we fail to conserve high-quality, biodiverse natural environments – as proposed in the current Conservation Amendment Act in New Zealand – we lose the mental health benefits they provide. Degraded ecosystems mean degraded health outcomes. Every hectare of biodiverse habitat lost, every urban forest cleared for development, every wetland drained — these are not only ecological losses. They are reductions in the mental health infrastructure of the communities that live nearby.
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For most of the history of conservation, the arguments for protecting natural areas have been made on behalf of nature itself — its intrinsic value, biodiversity, and ecological functions, and its role in sustaining life on earth. Those arguments are more important now than ever before.
This paper advances a different kind of conversation. It argues that nature conservation is a form of direct investment in the mental health of the world’s growing, increasingly urbanised, and increasingly nature-deprived human populations.
For those who have been making the case for regenerative tourism – tourism that restores ecological and social health rather than simply extracting value from it – this paper provides strong supporting evidence. The wellbeing of people and the health of ecosystems are not separate goals. They are the same goal, approached from different directions. The sooner our policy frameworks reflect that, the better – for people and for nature conservation.
Reference
Buckley, R. C., Singh, R., Zhang, Z. J., Liddon, M., Zhong, L., Underdahl, S., Cooper, M.-A., Westaway, D., Chauvenet, A. L. M., & Brough, P. (2026). Public nature-based mental healthcare. Communications Health, 1, 6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44528-026-00012-7
Buckley, R. C., & Chauvenet, A. L. (2022). Economic value of nature via healthcare savings and productivity increases. Biological Conservation, 272, 109665.
O’Connor, P., James Loch, A. & Maclean, J (2024). ‘A dose of nature’: Every time you visit a national park, you save the health budget almost $100. The Conversation 27 November 2024. https://theconversation.com/a-dose-of-nature-each-time-you-visit-a-national-park-you-save-the-health-budget-almost-100-243916
