Nature exposure can significantly enhance individuals' pro-environmental behaviors, and vast research has suggested that this could go through nature connectedness (Martin et al., 2020), as the more individuals are exposed to nature, the more they feel connected to it and more willing to act for it. However, recent research has also suggested that individuals' ability to imagine a positive future is a fundamental lever for behavioural change (Bosone et al., 2025). Given that contact with nature has been demonstrated to influence creativity and imagination (Guegan et al., 2017), it is plausible to suppose that nature exposure could also affect pro-environmental intentions through creative imagination of positive futures. Nature connectedness and positive future prospection could thus be two crucial factors in this process, respectively representing affective and cognitive pathways. This research adopted a mixed-method, cross-cultural design and included participants from France (N= 215) and China (N=244), who completed a questionnaire including a creativity task requiring them to imagine a more sustainable society in 2050. The results revealed cross-cultural differences: Chinese participants reported significantly higher levels of collective pro-environmental behavior, whereas French participants scored higher in individual pro-environmental behavior and in creativity (fluency dimension). Regression analyses further demonstrated that nature connectedness and future prospection (assessed with the Environmental Cognitive Alternatives, ECA, scale) sequentially mediated the association between nature exposure and both individual and collective pro-environmental behaviors. Moreover, creativity exerted culturally specific effects: it moderated the relationship between nature connectedness and ECA only within the Chinese sample. This finding suggests that individuals with high creativity may rely less on emotional connectedness to nature and more on cognitive pathways to construct vivid future prospections, which subsequently foster sustainable behaviors. These results offer insights for developing strategies to promote pro-environmental behaviors by designing interventions that align with affective versus cognitive thinking styles and creativity orientations.