The health benefits gained from adults in the UK spending more time in nature during the first year of lockdown was equivalent to £356 an adult, new figures show.
However, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found the amount of time Britons visited or spent time in nature fell dramatically last year compared with 2020, with 15% fewer visits recorded in 2022 compared with 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The ONS has calculated the associated health benefits in terms of “the number of years of life lived in perfect health”: a combined 22,000 years across the population.
The monetary value of the associated benefit was estimated to be £356 for every person aged 16 and over in terms of how much it would cost the NHS to provide the equivalent health benefits.
But while Britons spent less time in nature than they did in 2018 and 2019, overall the population is spending more time outdoors than they did a decade ago.
The number of visits to nature peaked that year during widespread working from home, home schooling and furlough.
“There are health and wellbeing benefits to spending time in nature,” Dom Higgins, of the Wildlife Trusts said, with one suggesting that people who spend an average of two hours or more a week in nature over the course of a year were more likely to report being in good, or very good, health.
There are various explanations as to why Britons opt out of time in nature. Bad or poor weather was the most cited reason across the 12 months to March 2022, with being busy at work or at home – with 2020 being the year of the first two lockdowns – and poor physical health also listed.
The figures also reveal that the average daily time in minutes spent on walking or running has fallen dramatically: in March 2021, the average daily time people spent walking for exercise was 19 minutes; in the equivalent month in 2023 that figure stood at 7.6 minutes, but rose to 9 minutes in September this year.
A separate but related release also published by the ONS on Monday, Natural Capital Accounts, estimates the value of the plants, rivers, peatland and other natural resources.
The data, modelled on similar concepts to the national accounts used to produce statistics such as GDP, puts the total value of the UK’s nature stock at £1.5tn as of 2021, – broadly equivalent to the value of all the houses in the UK.