For many people who have experienced lockdowns and restrictions on indoor activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, outdoor recreation has provided one of the few opportunities to get out of the house, exercise and relax. On May 27th 2020, the European Commission announced its long-term recovery strategy (NextGenerationEU), which will guide and support EU member states as they recover from the impacts of the pandemic. The fundamental policy framework for the recovery is a combination of the EU Green Deal, a strengthening of the EU Single Market and adaptation to the digital age, and an inclusive recovery. One of the objectives of the programme NextGenerationEU is: “Working with nature to protect our planet and health”. It is therefore important to understand how people think about and connect with natural environments in order to further increase the impact of this policy. While many studies have documented the changes in outdoor activities that have taken place during this pandemic, few have examined people’s perceptions of the associated risks. It is now widely recognised that risk perception has a major influence on an individual’s behaviour when exposed to a hazard, whatever its nature (financial, professional, natural, etc.), and that this perception is dependent on multiple parameters (Sjöberg 1999). The context in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a breeding ground for diverse representations and beliefs regarding the risk of infection when outdoors. The scientific knowledge base was still under construction during this period, the permitted activities (walking, relaxing, running) were generally not considered ‘risky’ (unlike other sports such as climbing or shooting), and the potential for infection by such viruses had, from a European perspective at least, only previously been associated with travel to ‘exotic’ destinations and certainly not with the familiar places frequented during lockdowns. In addition, there has been an assumption that people have considered outdoor environments taken as a whole (Landry et al. 2021) to be less dangerous than enclosed environments taken as a whole (Kim and Kang 2021). However, we believe this assumption to be too generalised as some previous works have shown that many people do not seem to perceive naturals environments in the same way (Nutsford et al. 2006). In this presentation, we propose to examine this question by analysing recreational users’ perceptions of the risk of COVID-19 infection in several natural environments in France.