Nature connectedness: the missing metric for public green spaces

Ask a public garden how it is doing and you will usually get a number: visitors last year, footfall this month, perhaps a satisfaction score. These are useful numbers. They are also, in an important sense, the wrong ones — or at least, they miss the one that matters most. None of them tells you whether anyone left feeling any closer to the natural world. There is a metric for that, and most green spaces are not measuring it.

A relationship you can measure

The thing those numbers miss has a name: nature connectedness — a person's subjective sense of their relationship with the rest of the natural world. It is not a mood or a marketing phrase. It is a psychological construct with validated instruments behind it. The most widely used, the Connectedness to Nature Scale developed by Mayer and Frantz in 2004, asks people to rate statements about whether they feel a sense of kinship with the natural world and think of themselves as belonging to a community that includes it.¹ The result is a score — something you can record, compare and track over time, exactly as you would visitor numbers.

This is the first reason connectedness deserves to be called a metric rather than a sentiment: it can be counted. The relationship a visitor has with nature is not visible at the turnstile, but it is not unmeasurable. It simply requires a different instrument.

Why it is the metric that matters

A green space could measure many things. Connectedness earns priority because it predicts the two outcomes such a place most exists to produce: human wellbeing and care for nature.

On wellbeing, a meta-analysis by Pritchard and colleagues found that nature connectedness is positively associated with eudaimonic well-being — the deeper sense of living a meaningful, worthwhile life, as distinct from momentary pleasure.² This is not the fleeting lift of a nice afternoon; it is the kind of wellbeing tied to a life that feels worth living.

On nature itself, a meta-analysis by Mackay and Schmitt pooled seventy-five datasets and found a strong and robust association between how connected people feel to nature and how much they actually do to protect it.³ People who feel more connected to nature tend to behave more sustainably toward it. Connectedness, in other words, is a leading indicator of both human and planetary benefit — a great deal more than footfall can claim.

Footfall tells you how many people came. Connectedness tells you whether the visit did any of them any good.

Not the same as time spent

The natural objection is that connectedness must simply be a proxy for time in nature — measure the footfall and you have, indirectly, measured the feeling. The evidence says otherwise. Drawing on a large population survey, Martin and colleagues found that nature contact and nature connectedness were each associated with better health, greater wellbeing and more pro-environmental behaviour — and that the two were distinct, with connectedness adding something beyond how much contact a person had.⁴

You can visit often and feel little; you can visit rarely and feel deeply. A turnstile counts the visits. Only a connectedness measure captures whether they amounted to a relationship. This is precisely why it is the missing metric: a green space optimised for visitor numbers alone can be crowded and still leave no one any closer to nature.

How connectedness is built — and what doesn't build it

If a green space decides connectedness is worth pursuing, the research is unusually specific about how — and about one popular approach that does not work.

In a study by Lumber, Richardson and Sheffield, the routes that actually predicted a stronger connection to nature were sensory contact, emotion, meaning, compassion for other living things, and the experience of natural beauty.⁵ Knowledge-based activities — naming, identifying, fact-learning — did not predict connection at all.⁵ In a follow-up, a guided walk built around the effective pathways raised people's connectedness more than the same walk taken without them.⁵

For anyone who has tried to deepen visitors' bond with nature by giving them more information, this is a sobering result. Knowing a plant's Latin name and feeling connected to it are different achievements, and the first does not reliably produce the second. Designing for connectedness means designing for noticing, feeling and meaning — for the moment a visitor is moved by something — not for recall.

Measuring it in practice

Adding the metric is not a research project. Alongside the longer Connectedness to Nature Scale,¹ brief validated instruments exist — the six-item Nature Relatedness scale among them⁶ — short enough to sit at the end of an exit survey. A handful of questions, asked of a sample of visitors a few times a year, yields a number you can watch move as you change what the space offers. There is also a national-scale precedent: the Nature Connection Index, used in population surveys, shows that connectedness can be tracked at the level of a whole country, let alone a single garden.

The aim is not to replace footfall but to complement it. Footfall tells you the space is being used; a connectedness measure tells you whether the use is doing what you hoped — and, repeated over time, whether a change you made helped.

The metric worth managing

We manage what we measure. A green space that counts only how many people pass through will, quietly, optimise for passing through. One that also measures how connected its visitors feel can optimise for the thing the evidence ties to wellbeing and to the protection of nature itself.² ³

Nature connectedness is the missing metric: measurable with tools that already exist, meaningful in a way footfall can never be, and — most importantly — something a green space can deliberately build. Count the visitors, by all means. But if you want to know whether your green space is working, measure the relationship it leaves behind.