Environmental and Regulatory Concerns During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results from the Pandemic Food and Stigma Survey
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Environmental and Regulatory Concerns During the COVID‑19 Pandemic: Results from the Pandemic Food and Stigma Survey Maik Kecinski1 · Kent D. Messer1 · Brandon R. McFadden1 · Trey Malone2 Accepted: 27 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this article, we present data from the monthly Pandemic Food and Stigma Survey (PFSS), a nationwide representative sample of adults in the United States designed to identify how the pandemic is affecting concerns about food and the environment. Two surveys were conducted in May and June 2020. Our analysis suggests that the public’s concern about contracting COVID-19 has been high; however, infection with COVID-19 was not the only concern. A majority of respondents remained strongly concerned about environmental issues, such as climate change, while responses to sudden relaxations of environmental and food safety policies varied. We analyze the PFSS data to identify factors associated with concerns about pandemic and environmental regulatory changes. In general, we find that people whose food security has been threatened by COVID-19 remain concerned about relaxation of environmental regulations, and those most inclined to take steps to reduce spread of the virus, such as wearing masks and social distancing, are more concerned about relaxed regulations than those less willing to take mitigating actions. Keywords COVID-19 · Environmental attitudes · Environmental regulations · Food safety regulations JEL Classification C83 · I12 · I18 · Q58
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1064 0-020-00438-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Kent D. Messer [email protected] 1
Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware, 531 S. College Ave, Newark, DE 19716, USA
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Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, 446 W Circle Dr, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
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1 Introduction The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, led to drastic government, business, and individual actions that exposed many human behaviors previously cloaked by “normalcy.” Though the news media has been saturated with popular press reports and anecdotal accounts of responses to the pandemic, little (if any) data, to date, has been collected that sheds light on how the pandemic is shaping our perceptions and behaviors. While a substantial amount of new regulations was passed to address the pandemic, many environmental policies and regulations have been relaxed or suspended since COVID-19 began to spread in the United States. On March 26, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an order called COVID-19 Implications for EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Program that was effective retroactively to March 13 (EPA 2020) that stated: EPA does not expect to seek penalties for violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, s
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