Vavuris et al. / Springer / August 2023
This chapter explores undergraduates’ perceptions of environmental and community health in the context of COVID-19 based on a 2022 campus-wide survey at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). The authors explore: (1) how UCSC students experience environmental health threats in their home communities; (2) whether disparities in environmental health exposures exist among UCSC students based on race/ethnicity and first-generation status; and (3) whether students make connections between environmental health threat exposures and the impacts of COVID-19, and, if so, how that shapes students’ perceptions of sustainability. The authors found that over half of UCSC undergraduate respondents were impacted by environmental health threats, and that a majority of students believe that these environmental health threats exacerbated their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby perceiving environmental sustainability to be more important as a result. This research points to a need to better understand student experiences of the pandemic more integratedly and comprehensively, integrating educational, economic, environmental concerns with epidemiological ones.
