We all need natural environments to feel and be healthy. We need green and blue environments to enable the well-being of our minds and to enable active movement, as well as to maintain the diversity of our body’s health-promoting microbiome. 

Increasing time spent in nature offers ways to promote well-being and health both at the individual level, regionally and nationally. In the 3-30-300 Nature Recommendation, we raise natural environments and time spent in nature as one of the pillars of good health, alongside the more traditional healthy diet, sufficient exercise and adequate sleep. Actually, we go even further, because nature’s biodiversity enables all human well-being; it improves the quality of sleep, inspires us to move more, provides healthy environments that increase well-being and enables the basic conditions of our lives, such as access to oxygen, food and drinking water.

The nature recommendation is inspired by the 3–30–300 model, which has been widely used in urban planning in recent years. As a nature recommendation, the 3-30-300 model offers an easy-to-remember recipe for moving and spending time in nature:

• Visit nature at least 3 times a week.
• Spend at least 30 minutes at a time in nature.
• Aim at spending a total of 300 minutes in nature every week.

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Every moment spent in natural environments offers us various well-being and health benefits. The aim of the 3–30–300 Nature Recommendation is to inspire us to spend time and move in natural environments as often as possible, but at least three times a week. This enables the well-being benefits we get from natural environments, which are based on frequent and regular contact with nature (Tyrväinen, 2023). 

Going out to nature several times a week also enables new positive habits to form and become part of everyday life, as well as enables the accumulation of the amount of active movement recommended in the Physical activity guidelines.

Why do we need a Nature Recommendation?

We Finns are known as a ‘people of nature’. However, our relationship with nature is very dispersed and different, for example, depending on where we live and age group. About four percent of us don’t go out in nature at all, and 700,000 Finns go outside less often than once a week (LVVI3). At the European level, things are even worse in terms of physical activity. Almost half of Europeans do not do any kind of exercise (Special Eurobarometer 525).

Due to urbanization, the use of cars and our changed lifestyles, our contact with diverse nature has decreased significantly. We suffer from Nature-deficit disorder, the effects of which can be seen, for example, in the prevalence of lifestyle diseases, such as heart and circulatory system diseases, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. Increasing the amount of time spent in nature has an ever-increasing importance not only in terms of public health, but also in terms of the national economy. (Tyrväinen et al., 2024)

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