Language Reveals Global Links Between Nature Attitudes and Sustainable Development (WP-25-30)
Tessa Charlesworth, Leland Werden, Johan van den Hoogen, Madalina Vlasceanu, Thomas Lauber, and Thomas Crowther
When people talk and write about nature, they provide a window into how their culture represents the natural world, whether they see it as important, worthy of concern and protection. Such collective beliefs may be a key driver of global environmental health or degradation, yet no study to date has been equipped to map cultural representations of nature at scale. This research aims to quantify global variation in linguistic representations of nature and explore implications for sustainable development indicators. The authors use Natural Language Processing (multilingual word embeddings) built from Wikipedia text for 120 languages spoken in 189 countries, and from European parliamentary speeches for 28 languages in 27 countries. In English, the concept of Nature is moderately but robustly associated with Importance (alongside other dimensions, e.g., Concern, Protection), and such associations increased over 200 years. Yet, examining other languages revealed that Niger-Congo and Austronesian languages (mostly spoken in Global South nations) express the strongest Nature-Importance associations whereas English and Indo-European languages (generally spoken in the Global North) express the weakest. Robustness tests within 27 European countries reinforced that such country-level variation of Nature representations are consistent across text sources, time (2015-2022), and speaker demographics. Most critical, the robust global variation is significantly correlated with Sustainable Development Goals, including protection of water and land biodiversity areas, even explaining variance over economic covariates. In addition to introducing new methods and empirical records for mapping nature representations worldwide, the results underscore the importance of non-English perspectives in guiding policy and research on environmental protection.