The role of nature and environment in behavioural medicine

The Society of Behavioural Medicine (www.sbm.org) defines behavioural medicine as an “interdisciplinary field concerned with the development and integration of behavioural, psychosocial, and biomedical science knowledge and techniques relevant to the understanding of health and illness, and the application of this knowledge and these techniques to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation”. From the perspective of behavioural medicine, many health problems depend on undesirable behaviour and thus better health may be achieved by changing behaviour. Until now, behavioural medicine has mainly focused on behaviours with a direct impact on human health and well-being. However, more recently, environmentally-related behaviour, especially pro-environmental behaviour, has achieved attention as an indirect pathway to better health. Pro-environmental behaviour can be defined as the propensity to take actions and decisions with an ecologically sustainable impact and is commonly understood as a consequence of concerns regarding ecosystem destruction, climate change, and other harmful impacts of anthropogenic actions (Stern 2000). Proenvironmental behaviour is related to decisions such as active transport (e.g. biking) instead of passive (e.g. car driving), recycling, or reduced red meat consumption. Several pathways are suggested for explaining a relation between proenvironmental behaviour and health. In the following, a few of these pathways are outlined. In addition, various potential mechanisms for inducing or changing environmentally-related behaviours are discussed.