Natural burials, sometimes called green burials, involve returning human remains to the earth in biodegradable containers, without embalming fluids, concrete vaults or permanent grave markers. The authors, Edward Shih-Tse Wang of National Chung Hsing University and Hung-Chou Lin and Mei-Yin Wang of National Taiwan Normal University, frame the practice not merely as an alternative disposal method but as a full-fledged nature-based solution. Where traditional cemeteries impose what planners call land locking, permanently removing hectares of prime urban space from ecological or public use, and columbarium towers simply shift land consumption from horizontal plots to vertical concrete, natural burial grounds can be designed as renewable landscapes. Because biodegradable containers decompose within roughly one to three years, plots can be rested, recultivated and reused on rotating schedules, while the sites themselves double as carbon sinks, stormwater basins, microclimate regulators and biodiversity corridors.

Taiwan’s policy environment already supports this vision. The Funeral Management Regulations of 2002 established a legal framework encouraging natural burials, and municipalities such as Taipei and New Taipei City offer free or subsidized green burial services, with tree burial sites, plant storage options and sea burial available across the island. Yet adoption among seniors remains modest, which is precisely the puzzle the research set out to solve. The team surveyed Taiwanese adults aged 55 and above, the cohort that Ministry of the Interior data show most frequently takes responsibility for funeral arrangements, to identify the psychological, marketing and relational factors that shape their willingness to choose eco-burials.

The study’s theoretical engine is Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, a widely validated model in which behavioral intention is driven by three constructs: attitude, the individual’s favorable or unfavorable evaluation of the behavior; subjective norm, the perceived social pressure from significant others; and perceived behavioral control, one’s sense of being able to carry the behavior out. To this framework the researchers added social marketing’s classic 4Ps, product, price, place and promotion, the idea being that voluntary behavior change for social good can be promoted much like a commercial offering. Two further variables completed the model: environmental awareness, reflecting knowledge of and concern for ecological issues, and perceived security of attachment to adult children, an emotionally loaded construct capturing how much aging parents trust and feel supported by their grown offspring when contemplating end-of-life choices.

Data collection took place in March 2023 through convenience sampling at senior centers in four districts of Taipei City. Of 330 questionnaires distributed, all returned, 304 proved valid, yielding a 92.12 percent effective response rate. The sample skewed female, at 78.6 percent, a pattern the authors attribute to the well-documented feminization of aging rather than sampling error. The largest age group was 65 to 69 years old, the most common religion was Buddhism, most respondents had two adult children, and 62.5 percent held university degrees. All questionnaire dimensions showed strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values above 0.7, and most above 0.9.

The statistical results were emphatic on one point: personal attitude is the single most powerful driver of seniors’ natural burial intentions. In simple regression, attitude alone explained 58.9 percent of the variance in intention, with a standardized coefficient of 0.77. Subjective norm followed closely, explaining 53.5 percent of variance with a coefficient of 0.73, confirming that family support and social expectations weigh heavily in East Asian funeral decisions. Perceived behavioral control explained 37.9 percent. Within the marketing mix, perceived product demand, meaning seniors’ recognition of the ecological value and social benefits of natural burial, explained 46.5 percent, while combined channel accessibility and promotional information explained 25.6 percent. Environmental awareness accounted for 23.4 percent. Only two variables showed statistically significant but practically trivial effects: price and cost, with a small negative coefficient of minus 0.13, and attachment security to adult children, with a coefficient of just 0.12.

Hierarchical regression sharpened the picture further. The three Theory of Planned Behavior variables together explained 63.7 percent of the variance in intention, with attitude remaining dominant in the multivariate model. Adding the marketing variables, then environmental awareness, each contributed roughly two additional percentage points of explanatory power, and in the final model environmental awareness, attitude, subjective norm, and channel and promotion all retained significant direct effects. Strikingly, price sensitivity and attachment security lost statistical significance entirely once the psychological and ecological variables were accounted for. The practical implication is provocative: financial incentives and administrative streamlining, the tools most governments reach for first, are secondary facilitators at best. If core cultural attitudes and family norms remain unfavorable, subsidies alone will not unlock the land-sparing transition that dense cities need.

The authors draw direct connections between these micro-level intentions and macro-level spatial governance. Voluntary psychological acceptance, they argue, is the indispensable human mechanism behind any municipal effort to convert static, stigmatized deathscapes into dynamic green infrastructure. Top-down zoning and master plans cannot succeed through regulatory decree; unless older citizens come to see natural burial as a dignified and honorable end-of-life choice, efforts to recycle cemetery land will stall in public inertia. Conversely, when families mutually validate green burial options, they dismantle long-standing taboos around unmarked, non-permanent resting places, giving governments the social license to replace columbarium construction with cyclical, land-recycling burial parks. Seniors’ ecological consciousness, meanwhile, means that public communications linking mortality choices to parkland expansion and carbon reduction can resonate deeply with this demographic.

From the findings, the researchers outline a practical playbook for policymakers and funeral service providers. Municipal funeral offices should establish standardized multi-year plot rotation schedules within natural burial parks, achieving perpetual land recycling on a fixed footprint and eliminating the need for continual land acquisition. Urban planners should reconceive burial grounds as multifunctional green infrastructure woven into city-wide greenbelt networks, serving simultaneously as carbon sinks, stormwater filtration basins and biodiversity corridors. Cross-departmental task forces uniting funeral management, urban planning and environmental protection agencies should streamline pre-registration through both physical and digital channels, embedding natural burial options in community healthcare facilities and civic portals. Most importantly, promotional messaging should be family-centered, highlighting environmental stewardship while engaging the adult children who are, in practice, the primary discussion partners for aging parents contemplating their final arrangements.

The study is not without limitations, which the authors acknowledge candidly. The cross-sectional design captures intentions at a single moment, and intentions may shift as health status or family circumstances change; longitudinal research tracking whether pre-need intentions translate into actual burials would strengthen the evidence base. The sample was also drawn from a highly urbanized setting, and comparative work across metropolitan and rural regions could reveal how local land availability alters the relative weight of psychological versus economic predictors. Still, by extending the boundaries of sustainable consumer behavior research from everyday choices like recycling to mortality-related decisions, the study makes a bold claim: that the path to greener, less land-hungry cities may run through one of humanity’s most intimate and taboo-laden decisions, and that winning over seniors requires appealing to their values, their families and their sense of dignity rather than their wallets.

Subject of Research: Psychological and social marketing determinants of older adults' intentions to choose natural burials as a nature-based solution for sustainable urban land management in Taiwan

Article Title: Drivers of seniors’ natural burial intentions for sustainable urban land management

Article References: Wang, E. S.-T., Lin, H.-C., & Wang, M.-Y. (2026). Drivers of seniors’ natural burial intentions for sustainable urban land management. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1858074. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1858074

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1858074

Keywords: natural burial, green burial, nature-based solutions, urban land management, Theory of Planned Behavior, social marketing, environmental awareness, Taiwan, aging society, sustainable cities, end-of-life planning, columbarium capacity