Abstract
Global conservation is increasingly reliant on young people forming meaningful connections with urban nature. However, interactions with nearby nature do not inspire all children and adolescents living in cities to act pro-environmentally. Our survey of over 1,000 school students from Sydney, Australia, revealed that 28% of respondents maintained strong nature connections. Younger students (aged 8–11) were more strongly connected with nature than their older peers (aged 12–14), and environmental behaviors were negatively associated with increasing age. Differences between boys and girls were less consistent, resulting in part from differential functioning of questionnaire items. Regardless, girls were more willing than boys to volunteer for conservation. Our findings suggest that policies designed to strengthen urban children’s nature connections will be most effective if they explicitly address the “adolescent dip” and other emerging demographic patterns, thereby ensuring all young people reap the health, wellbeing, and conservation benefits of connecting with nature.
Highlights
Humanity currently faces an unprecedented existential threat in the form of interconnected global crises: declining biodiversity and accelerating climate change [1]
Consistent with our hypothesis that nature connection would decline with age, we found a consistent pattern across the childhood and adolescent years: 8- to 11-year-olds were more closely connected with nature than 12- to 14-year-olds
Considering the difference we identified was between students who were separated by 1 year in age, we suggest that another type of cohort effect—one reflecting the stage of schooling—interacts with a true longitudinal effect to distinguish between the nature connections and pro-environmental behaviors of the two age groups within our study population
Summary
Humanity currently faces an unprecedented existential threat in the form of interconnected global crises: declining biodiversity and accelerating climate change [1]. These phenomena are caused by directly destructive human activities [2] and arise as a result of our consumptive, reproductive, and democratic choices [3]. We connect with nature through sensory contact, emotion, beauty, meaning, and compassion [7], and the strength of an individual’s nature connection is a better predictor of environmental behavior than is their environmental knowledge [8] This may be because behavioral commitment to conserving nature arises from affective and experiential nature connections in addition to cognitive ones [9].
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