People may feel grateful to nature for its provisions, as both anecdotal accounts and emerging research evidence suggest. The present study further explores this experience—referred to as gratitude to nature—by examining its relationships with other nature-related constructs, environmental stewardship, psychological well-being, and physical health across 10 countries from both the Global North and Global South. We assessed the Gratitude to Nature Scale’s measurement invariance and construct validity across these diverse social contexts and observed consistently positive associations between gratitude to nature and experience with nature, nature connectedness, and anthropomorphism of nature.
Our findings also reveal that individuals who possessed stronger gratitude to nature were more likely to engage in various forms of pro-environmental behaviors and that stronger gratitude was significantly linked to both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, and to self-reported physical health to a lesser degree. Overall, these results encourage future research to investigate the potential of interventions based on gratitude to nature for fostering ecological stewardship and promoting well-being. This research contributes to the emerging relational discourse on human-nature relationships by emphasizing the affective connection between people and the natural world.
It also echoes recent calls for cross-cultural studies in the study of human–environment relationships. This research is partially funded by the RGC Early Career Scheme from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 25607322) and a Departmental Research Fund (P0046089) by the Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, conferred to H.-W. Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China The authors declare no competing interests.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Tam, KP., Chan, HW. & Chen, G.
Gratitude to nature, environmental stewardship, and well-being in 10 countries. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-73988-5 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-73988-5
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