Language Reveals Global Links Between Nature Attitudes and Sustainable Development

Disentangling the cultural drivers of ecological degradation and recovery remains a central challenge for a regenerative future. Here, we use language to develop the first systematic record of global variation in nature attitudes and explore the implications for global environmental health. Using natural language processing (multilingual and contextualized word embeddings) we identify nature representations in 120 languages spoken across 189 countries. Starting with English we find moderate associations of nature with importance, although this trend has increased over the last 200 years. Despite being the international standard language of environmental policy discussions, English expresses weaker nature-importance associations than 70% of other languages. In contrast, Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken in Global South nations, tend to express the strongest nature-importance associations. Critically, even after controlling for economic, linguistic, and attitudinal factors, the global variation of nature-importance associations in language robustly correlates with national-level environmental health, especially protection of water and land biodiversity areas.