CHANGES IN OUTDOOR ACTIVITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISK PERCEPTION DURING COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has led to legislative “Safer-At-Home” or “Shelter-In-Place” orders in the United States requiring residents to refrain from gathering in public spaces. Those orders have resulted in the closure of many businesses considered “non-essential,” and changes in the way many others continue to do business, such as allowing employees to work from home. The guiding framework for this research draws upon existing theories about how people connect with nature and the environment, as well as how they perceive environmental risk. Its goals are to determine whether an unexpected increase in time led to an increase in outdoor activity and if that change created a connectedness to nature and the environment, leading U.S. residents to think more carefully about environmental and climate issues and the associated risks. We will present initial data (N~1250) collected from a developed and validated survey of the general public using Amazon’s Mechanical TURK service. The survey collects information about respondents’ environmental risk perceptions, awareness, and knowledge, as well as demographic information such as age, race, gender, education, and employment sector, among others. The survey also examines self-reported information about the type and duration of outdoor activities each respondent participated in before and during the COVID-19 crisis. It is hypothesized that time spent outdoors increased as a result of COVID-19 restrictions and that this change is a predictor of environmental risk perception among some demographic groups of the sampled population.