Connection to nature of university students in the environmental field — An empirical study in 41 countries

Abstract

People's personal relationships with nature are seen as essential factors influencing environmental behavior. Although human-nature relationships have been a recurring research topic in a wide range of disciplines, there has been a lack of comparative international studies. A particularly important group in this context are students in the field of environment and sustainability, as they are likely to become future decision-makers in society. Therefore, this study takes an international approach across 41 countries to examine the personal human-nature relationship, the connection to nature, of students in the field of environment and sustainability. For the survey, an online questionnaire was used, which was distributed by e-mail to different universities in each country. The connection to nature scores of each country were correlated with country-specific wealth indicators to determine how wealth and connection to nature are related. The results show that the connection to nature of the surveyed students in the different countries is in a medium to high range. It was found that in wealthier countries the connection to nature is weaker than in less wealthy countries.