Disparities in barriers to nature's contributions to people and repercussions on quality of life

While nature contributes to multiple dimensions of human quality of life, access to nature and its benefits is unequally distributed. We surveyed residents of a French metropolitan area to address three research gaps: (i) what are the most common barriers to accessing various Natures Contributions to People (NCP)? (ii) how these barriers vary across socio-demographic groups? (iii) how do they relate to nature connectedness and impact quality of life? Most frequent barriers, i.e., lack of time, crowding, and low availability or quality of green spaces, differed across NCP categories. Individuals with lower income, limited physical mobility, living in urban areas, and women reported more barriers. More numerous barriers reduced NCP satisfaction, indirectly diminishing quality of life, while nature connectedness independently increased it. Our finding that barriers accumulate for disadvantaged groups, reinforcing social inequities, calls for policies addressing multiple dimensions of access to promote equitable relationships with nature. Graphical AbstractRural residence, gender, income and physical mobility impact the number and types of barriers encountered to access and benefit from Natures contributions to people (NCP), and thus satisfaction with the NCP they can benefit from. These factors also impact nature connectedness. Both pathways result in higher reported quality of life for rural residents, men, people with high physical mobility and income. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=96 SRC="FIGDIR/small/699912v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (33K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@ddd95corg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e958b3org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1be5249org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c71fc_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG