Mediating Role of Environmental Awareness for the Nexus between Perceived Risks of COVID-19 Pandemic and Use of Sustainable Transportation: Evidence from Urban Passengers in Ethiopia, 2022

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global pandemic and a threat to humankind. In addition to many cases of illness and millions of deaths, the economy and social interactions have suffered. It remarkably declined overall transportation and mobility in most countries. However, given that there is a gap between environmental sustainability awareness and what is practiced by transport users, the goal of this study was to empirically assess the mediating role of environmental awareness in the casual links between perceived risks of the COVID-19 pandemic and ecologically sustainable transportation use. The study identified relevant theories, conceptual frameworks, and variables. Mixed research and surveys were carried out on the public and private transport service users in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Comparative analysis, structural equation modeling, and structural causal model framework were applied to estimate casual relationships among variables and test the hypotheses. Despite the rising of human-caused climate change denial beliefs, findings revealed that a large part of the causes of the COVID-19 pandemic are climate change, biodiversity misuse, and wildlife degradation, all of which are environmental in nature and anthropogenic. People perceived the COVID-19 pandemic as more of a risk to others than to themselves, and climate change or global warming has become a danger to humanity, mainly during the pandemic. Accordingly, the pandemic risks increased people's mainly passengers' awareness of the environment, and this caused them to give greater consideration to the environmentally attractiveness of the transport they use. This, in turn, encouraged people to take personal climate-friendly measures and pro-environmental behavior, mainly greater willingness to use public transportation than private transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic than before. Thus, the total effect of the COVID-19 pandemic anxiety on the use of public transportation is completely mediated by enhanced environmental awareness. These are evidence that COVID-19 has strengthened environmental awareness and promoted sustainable action in the context of the transportation industry of developing countries. The study informs that urban planning and policy need to consider pandemic-sensitive and innovative public health and transport systems, integrated public health education, one health approach, and smart city. It suggests that maintaining the environmental awareness of societies and encouraging them to mitigate climate change through urgent climate actions and modal shifts to the use of sustainable urban transport such as public transportation.