Understanding how nature reshapes human sense of time to foster well-being and sustainable futures

Time is a central dimension of the human experience; our perception of time influences how we feel and act upon the world. A growing number of people living in fast-paced urban environments report feelings of time scarcity, which have been associated with risky behaviours and poor well-being. Yet, mounting evidence suggests that nature experiences can regulate how urban dwellers perceive time, positively impact their well-being, and promote more sustainable behaviours. This raises the thought-provoking possibility that human and environmental well-being are influenced by a feedback loop driven by the interaction between nature and human sense of time. NATURETIME will test the connected hypotheses that natural environments positively influence human time perception and that such changes in time perception can enhance pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. The project will adopt an ecosystem services framework and a multidimensional characterisation of time, including dimensions of perceived temporal duration and perspective, to explore nature’s contributions to human sense of time. It will use virtual-reality experiments to understand how specific landscape features and nature experiences influence human time perception, and validate experimental results using real-world data obtained with citizen science. The project will also model the effects of nature on time perception at the landscape scale under different scenarios. Finally, the project will employ behavioural experiments and Big Data analytics to understand how changes in time perception influence pro-environmental and sustainable behaviours. NATURETIME launches a new research area on time perception ecology and will generate actionable knowledge that can inform the design of cities and other living environments in a manner that improves human time regulation, boosts well-being, and stimulates the positive and sustainable behaviours needed to address ongoing environmental challenges.