"Figure 15: During 2017, 2500 million visits were taken in nature in the urban environment ","" "Number of visits to urban green space and hours spent according to Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment survey (MENE), UK, 2009 to 2017","" "","" "Notes","1. For the years 2016 and 2017, due to the frequency of one of the MENE questions changing to a quarterly question, we switch from using monthly to quarterly weight which might explain some of the changes in the numbers. 2. For example, welfare values can be derived from the Outdoor Recreation Valuation Tool (ORVal) developed by the University of Exeter with support from Defra, which is based on an econometric model of recreational demand using MENE visitor data, and covers publicly accessible sites across England and Wales. Although urban centres cannot be selected in ORVal, it is possible to filter sites by land covers associated with urban areas (managed grassland, sports pitches and so on) to give an approximate value per urban site visit. To illustrate for England, the average value per visit of such sites is £3.12 in 2017 values. Applying this to the numbers of visits in the physical account would give a welfare value of £3.12 x 2525 million visits = £7.9 billion per annum. Some of this value is likely to be attributable to non-natural features within recreational sites such as playgrounds. " "Unit","Millions" "","" " ","Time Spent at Habitat (hours)","Total visits" "2009","1680.82","1670.89" "2010","1293.55","1447.58" "2011","1545.03","1682.26" "2012","1963.13","1822.35" "2013","1992.35","1885.91" "2014","1985.73","1954.63" "2015","1960.18","1980.83" "2016","2551.66","2097.18" "2017","2680.29","2524.77"