Engagement with nature has been shown to have a range of health and wellbeing benefits. However, evidence from Natural England’s Monitor of Engagement with Natural Environment Survey (MENE) – and its successor the People and Nature Survey (PaNS) – shows that nature spaces in rural and urban environments are not accessed equally by everyone and that factors including age, ethnicity and socio-economic status seem to play a role.
There is a range of evidence, ranging from academic research to first-hand experience, that provide insight into the barriers and enablers to accessing and engaging with nature spaces and the outdoors for specific groups. This publication series was commissioned by Natural England to bring together this evidence in one place in a way that allows practitioners to consider the needs of different groups that are often under-represented, and to build on previous experiences of how these needs have been tackled. However, this series also highlights the importance of ‘intersectionality’: the ways in which social identities and related inequalities– for example, race, class and age – overlap and intersect.
The series includes five publications:
• four evidence briefings, each of which focuses on a particular social group that is under-represented in accessing nature spaces (older people, people living in low income areas, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, and people living with disabilities);
• a summary report, which focuses particularly on intersectionality and also provides an overview of the methodology adopted for the literature review; this includes a separate annex which provides a table of evidence sources.
These publications can be found in the ‘Related Access to Evidence records’ section of this page.