The city of Innsbruck embedded in the mountain nature of the Alps (©Tabea Bork-Hüffer).

By Tabea Bork-Hüffer, Leonie Wächter, and Russell Hitchings.

Read the full paper here.

Research and policy during the Covid-19 pandemic often focused on nearby urban nature spaces and how they promote health and wellbeing. This article tells the story of connections to nature spaces that were valued precisely because they were not nearby. Nearby spaces in cities such as urban parks were often associated with the virus and a dense population that spreads it. This article is based on a study with young adults in Innsbruck, Austria, which is located in the Alps. With a team of researchers and university students, we accompanied 98 participants from March until November 2020. Methods were applied in a way that allowed participants to raise topics they found important. Among these were their strong connections to the mountain nature. During a regional quarantine implemented from March to April 2020 they were no longer allowed to go there and suffered much from these lost opportunities. With the relaxation of quarantine measures they celebrated the recovery of mountain spaces. But soon they did not talk much about nature anymore. This shows how nature is taken for granted when young people can use it on their own terms.

Our results prompt the question, whether people in other places had similarly strong connections to nature in the pandemic. More research is needed that analyses specific nature spaces and the role they play for people in specific contexts. This might require methods that accompany people over longer times. It is also of benefit if open questions are asked that allow participants to tell us what is important to them and how that changes during difficult times. Ideally future policies and communications take note of people’s specific nature relations and local contexts. In our study, we think a better policy to respond to shocks as the pandemic might have been to encourage people to enjoy the mountains, either practically while respecting social distancing provisions or imaginatively by reminding them that the mountains will always be waiting. This could have been more effective than telling them to go to nearby urban parks within community borders for short periods and make the most of that.