Natural multi-hazard risk perception and educational insights among Geography and Tourism students and graduates amid the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Multi-hazard risk perception is an emerging research topic that has been gaining more and more interest since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the unprecedented interactions between the management practices of the pandemic and of other co-occurring natural hazards, and to the compounded impact of these multi-hazards. This paper aims to investigate the specialization and study level-dependent differences concerning multi-hazard risk perception and hazard-related education insights of future potential specialists in natural hazard-induced risk management and tourism reconstruction. These differences were explored by applying a multi-layer questionnaire on 547 Geography and Tourism students and graduates from two universities in Iași City (Romania) and Novi Sad (Serbia), and performing descriptive and differential statistical analyses. The statistically significant differences that emerged refer to estimations of the impact level of the Covid-19 pandemic and of other natural hazards at different spatial scales and on different socio-economic activities, on the training/career of the respondents, and to the hazard-related education improvements. Up to date, none of the papers in the existing literature integrate both the Covid-19 pandemic and the co-occurrent natural hazards as objects of students’ perception, which makes the present study a starting point for such research endeavours.