essay on need for public awareness about environment

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2 Public Awareness for Environmental Management- Need, Scope and Importance

Hardeep Kaur and Sunil Mittal

1.  Introduction

3. Need of Public awareness

3.1. Population explosion

3.2.Poverty

3.3.Agricultural growth

3.4. Ground water

3.5. Deforestation

3.6. Land degradation

3.7. Technological advancement

3.8. Genetic diversity

3.9. Urbanization

3.10. Air and Water pollution

4.  Importance of Public awareness

4.1. Environment education goals

4.2. Objectives of Environment education

4.3.Guiding principles of Environment education

5. Indian Government initiatives towards public awareness

1.   Introduction

Environment literally means surroundings and is derived from French word ‘environ’. Environment constitutes all the abiotic and biotic components. Every organism is dependent on its environment for food, shelter and living. There is continuous exchange of matter and energy in the environment which is necessary for making it hospitable for various organisms. Survivability of the organism is dependent on steady supply and removal of waste from environment. Environment provides conditions for existence and development of living organisms. Rapid urbanization, increase in population and industrialization are the serious problems which have disturbed the balance of the nature. It has led to depletion of natural resources with pollution of soil, air and water. Evolving concepts of development and modernization have drastically put pressure on the ecosystems and deteriorated healthy atmosphere. Modern day human are so busy to achieve their goals that they are least bothered about what is happening in the surrounding and its impact on environment. All these factors makes it essential to spread awareness among the public.

2.   Scope of public awareness

Quality and integrity of environment can be preserved by public awareness. Dwindling environment is the biggest threat to the existence of human beings. Loss of valuable natural resources and pollution lead to harmful effects as well as abiotic stress on flora and fauna. Public awareness is one of the basic principles in environment management. It involves:

• Developing sensitivity and awareness towards environmental issues.
• Inculcating and imbibing the stringent need for conservation of natural resources and surrounding environment.
• Encouraging active participation of the people in environmental protection and development.
• Developing expertise for the active identification and finding remedy to environmental problems.
• Assessment of socio-economic, ecological and aesthetic aspects and impacts of various environmental programmes initiated to improve environmental health.

3.   Need of public awareness in Environment management

It is very important to make public aware about the deadly consequences of the environmental degradation as it would lead to massive extinction of life if left unattended and reformative measures are not undertaken. We are facing various environmental challenges that need to be tackled stringently for sustainable growth and development. Eco-friendly approach needs to be followed in every nation to acquaint for the threats posed in the name of industrialization and development. Natural resources are limited in the world. We are dependent on natural ecosystems for the products obtained from forests, grasslands, oceans and from agriculture and livestock as well as water, air, soil, minerals, oil etc. which are indispensable part of our life support systems. Life would be impossible without these all substances. Increase in population put pressure on these limited natural resources. The earth cannot sustain the ever growing demand for resources. Moreover misuse of resources is the other contributing factor to environmental deterioration. Wastage and pollution of water resources, generation of non-biodegradable materials like plastic, non-recyclable electronic waste, nuclear waste are the other serious threats. Manufacturing processes generate solid waste, chemicals and gases that pollute the environment. Alarming increase in waste generation cannot be managed by natural processes as most of the synthetic waste is non-biodegradable. These keep on accumulating in our environment leading to a variety of diseases and other adverse environmental effects that seriously affects our lives. Air pollution leads to chronic respiratory diseases, water pollution to gastro-intestinal diseases, and many toxic pollutants are known to cause cancer. This alarming situation can only be dealt by initiatives taken by each one of the individuals daily towards preserving environmental resources. Neither government alone can manage and safeguard the environment, nor bunch of environmentalists can prevent environmental degradation. Sensitization can only be done to create self-responsibility. Therefore, efforts at individual level can lead to sustainable development.

Various environmental challenges are as below:

Current population in India has reached nearly 1.34 billion with population growth rate of 1.2%. Some of the reasons for rapidly growing population are illiteracy, poverty, high fertility rate, reduced mortality rates and infiltration from neighboring countries. It puts extensive pressure on natural resources to meet growing demands. Hence, population growth is the biggest challenge. Women literacy and awareness are some of the measures that need to rigorously practice to circumvent this challenge.

3.2. Poverty

Environment –poverty nexus dates back from ages. Poverty was one of the main agenda for the achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) framed by United Nations and its eradication from the world is the first goal for year 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. Although number of poor as well as the proportion of poor below the poverty line (according to the Tendulkar poverty line) have been declining over two decades as per government reports, but about 270 million are still below the poverty line. Initiatives like MGNREGA have been taken to improve the poverty presiding in India. Majority of poor people are directly dependent on the natural resources for their basic needs like food, fodder fuel and shelter. Environment degradation has adversely affected the status of poor who depend upon natural resources for their immediate needs. Thus, the challenge of poverty and the challenge of environment degradation are two sides of the same coin. The population growth and poverty are interlinked as every child is the bread winner for the family.

3.3. Agricultural Growth

The main aim of green revolution was making nation food sufficient but the strategies adopted in achieving this aim lead to harmful effects directly on the rural and indirectly on the urban communities. Introduction of high yielding varieties, indiscriminate use of fertilizers, insecticides have led to development of resistant varieties of flora and fauna, decreased soil fertility, disturbance of the natural ecosystems etc. Lack of appropriate knowledge to use insecticides and fertilizers, awareness for the banned chemicals and  ignorance of the potential ill effects has led to surfacing of serious diseases like cancer along with harmful effects and disruption of agricultural ecosystems. The people must therefore, be acquainted with the eco-friendly methods to sustain and increase agricultural growth without damaging the environment.

Rational use of groundwater is necessary as aquifers are limited, confined and ground water level is declining day by day. Leaching chemical fertilizers and pesticides, industrial effluents have polluted surface water and affected the quality of the groundwater. It is essential to maintain the water quality of rivers and other water bodies. Strategies for provision of safe drinking water and keeping water bodies clean are the key challenges. Initiatives under Corporate social responsibility (CSR) by the industries for effluent treatment can be helpful. Mandatory and stringent law for tackling industries not abiding the rules for waste disposal and awareness among public to act as whistleblower can help to open new paths for providing fresh and pure drinking water to the nation.

Massive deforestation is the result of industrialization. Submerging of forests due to building of dams for hydroelectric power plants has led to displacement of local people, and damage to flora and fauna. Dams on river Narmada, Bhagirathi etc. have become hot topics for debate in political and scientific spheres. Forests cover in India has been decreasing from last few decades owing to pressures of development. Vast areas have turned into wastelands. These areas can be rejuvenated by increasing vegetative cover. The tribal communities respect flora and fauna to sustain their lives. Local people should be integrated with knowledge and skills of the forest department for restoring and conserving forests. Well planned strategies by joint management of forests should be evolved. We must recognize the power of awareness and integrity of the public towards environment issues from past. ‘Narmada bachaoandolan’ is one such acclaimed protest for preserving environmental integrity by the local people. The demonstrations, hunger strikes, protests, rallies and written representations have made an impact on the direction of the movement to stop the building of  large and small dams along the Narmada. Media attention of these events has taken the issues from a local level to a more national scale. These protests have forced the World Bank to withdraw its loan from the projects.

Land is a limited resource. With the increase in human population and economic development, demand for land is increasing. Total land area of India is 329 million hectares out of which only 266 million hectares have potential productivity. 143 million hectares of land is under cultivation and remaining land area (85 million hectares) has suffered from soil degradation. Nearly 30% of the land in India is degraded. From 123 million hectares, 40 million hectare land is completely unproductive. Overgrazing, water and soil erosion leads to further land degradation. This degradation can be avoided by reforestation and local public efforts to restore land usage.

3.7. Technological Advancement

Present day people are more concerned about using latest technologies without knowing potential ill effects of the gadgets and electronic devices. Although these have become indispensable part of living in present time but overuse and unnecessary ignorance about potential ill effects need to be tackled. Development has to go hand in hand with vigilance, sensitivity and security toward management of natural resources. This change can be brought in education, administrative procedures, outlook and institutions.

3.8. Genetic Diversity

Genetic diversity need to be conserved by taking proper measures. Interbreeding of the wild populations has greatly reduced with urbanization and deforestation leading to alarming disappearance wild genetic stocks/extinction. Lack of genetic diversity in tigers has been stated as the cause for their extinction. Habitat loss and fragmentation has led to confined breeding. The protected areas like sanctuaries, national parks, biosphere reserves are isolates populations thereby decreasing interbreeding efficiency. Steps need to be taken for preserving genetic biodiversity as every creature is important to maintain balance in nature.

Urbanization and industrialization has led to various environmental problems like solid waste disposal, development of slums and sewerage disposal. Clean towns and cities are therefore major challenge which can be accomplished only by the cumulative effort of government and people.

3.10. Air and water Pollution

Most of the industrial setups do not comply with the environmental standards setup for waste disposal and treatment. Stringent implementation of the environmental policies is necessary to prevent environmental deterioration. Their implementation needs resources, technical expertise, political and social obligation. Awareness to environmental policies is mandatory for achieving public support for their implementation.

4.  Importance of Public awareness in Environmental management

Depletion of the natural resources and environmental degradation necessitates the need for action plan for environment protection. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, ozone layer depletion, and illegal trade of endangered species, habitat destruction, land degradation, ground water depletion, invasive species, environmental pollution, solid waste and sewage disposal pose serious threat to forest, marine, freshwater and other land ecosystems. Ignorance and lack of concern for the environmental issues pose hurdles in environment management. Government alone cannot manage the entire issues single handedly without public support. Every individual should be the integral part of campaign for the prevention of environment degradation as we are the only ones to reap the benefits of clean environment. Prevention is always better than cure. Reducing wastage of natural resources and remaining alert about the sources that lead to pollution and degradation of our environment will enable us to prompt government action for environmental protection. This is possible only through massive public awareness. Newspapers, radio and television strongly influence public opinion. Press and media add on to the public efforts and enforce politicians to respond positively to a strong public movement. NGOs and small help groups are continuously  working towards sensitizing people towards environment. Various green policies formed by the government are the fruits of public efforts. Sensitization of the society about environmental issues and challenges initiate skill and expertise development in the individuals leading to appropriate solutions to the environmental issues. Idea of ‘DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT’ can be accomplished by public awareness only. Public can play important role in law making and their enforcement.

4.1    Environmental Education Goals:

The objective of environmental education is that the public should become conscious, attain knowledge, change outlooks, and realize capabilities to combat real-life environmental problems. For this, the general public should be acquainted with integrated inter-disciplinary and holistic education. This is only possible with a new approach to education itself—which should be provided in schools and universities.

The goals of environmental education as pointed out by the UNESCO is to create environmental awareness in the world population—an awareness about the whole environment and problems associated with it and generate commitment in people to work individually and in union towards solving existing problems and preventing new ones from emerging.

4.2. The objectives of environmental education formulated at the UNESCO’s Tbilisi Conference (1977) were as follows:

i) Awareness: To make people sensitive towards environment and associated problems that arises due to its misuse.

ii)   Knowledge:  To  help  people  gain  experiences  and          basic  understanding  of  the environment and related problems.

iii)    Skills: People must gain skills for recognizing and resolving environmental problems.

iv)    Attitude: Help people acquire values and feelings of concern for the environment and encourage their participation in keeping our environment clean and safe.

v)      Participation: Provide an opportunity to get involved at all levels in the task of resolving environmental problems.

4.3.   Guiding Principles laid down by the UNESCO ICEE at Tbilisi in 1977 were as  follows:

The need is to consider the environment as a whole, that is, the natural, technological, social, economic, political, cultural, moral, historical and aesthetic environment.

• The need is to have a continuous life process of environmental education—from pre-school level to formal and non-formal education levels.
• An interdisciplinary approach to spread awareness of environmental problems and knowledge about environment is necessary.
• Major environmental issues are to be ‘examined from local, national, regional and international perspectives.
• The complex nature of environmental problems is to be recognized, critical thinking and problem-solving skills need to be developed in people.
• The value of local, national and international cooperation in addressing environmental problems is to be highlighted.
• The need is to use available knowledge about the environment and the various available approaches to teaching and learning.
• Learners must be acquainted with the real causes of environmental problems and the way these get expressed and must be encouraged to participate in prevention and resolving environmental problems.
• School-level education needs to link up aspects of sensitivity to environment, knowledge of environment and problem-solving.
• The need is to stress on current as well as potential environmental situations.
• All plans for social, economic and other kinds of growth and development must pay attention to environmental aspects.

In our country, various government and non-government organizations are involved in environment protection and conservation. Some of the well-known organizations include government organizations such as the Ministry of environment, forest and climate change, Botanical Survey of India (BSI) and Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Salim Ali Center for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) and NGOs such as Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-I),  Uttarkhand Seva Nidhi (UKSN) etc. Various environmental activists have played important roles in protection and conservation of environment and lead to massive revolutionary movements for conservation of nature. Some of the renowned people are M S Swaminathan, Medha Patekar, Sunderlal bahuguna, R.K Pachauri etc.

5.    Indian Government initiatives towards public awareness and environmental education

The Government of India with Ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MOEFCC) has focused on environmental education and is undertaking programmes that involve public contribution to keep our environment safe. Few mentionable schemes are as follows:

I.  The ‘Environmental Education, Awareness and Training (EEAT) ’ is a scheme of

the Ministry for improving the understanding of people at all levels about the relationship between human beings and the environment and to develop capabilities/skills to improve and protect the environment. This scheme was launched in 1983-84 with the basic objective to promote environmental awareness among all sections of the society and to mobilize people’s participation for preservation and conservation of environment. EEAT Scheme has the following objectives:

• To promote environmental awareness among all sections of the society;
• To spread environment education, especially in the non-formal system among different sections of the society;
• To facilitate development of education/training materials and aids in the formal education sector;
• To promote environment education through existing educational/scientific/research institutions;
• To ensure training and manpower development for environment education, awareness and training;
• To encourage non-governmental organizations, mass media and other concerned organizations for promoting awareness about environmental issues among the people at all levels;
• To use different media including films, audio, visual and print,, theatre, drama, advertisements, hoardings, posters, seminars, workshops, competitions, meetings etc. for spreading messages concerning environment and awareness.
• To mobilize people’s participation for preservation and conservation of environment. The objectives of this scheme are being realized through implementation of the following programmes launched over the years:

II.  National Environment Awareness Campaign (NEAC)

The NEAC was launched in 1986 with the objective to create environmental awareness at the national level. In this campaign, nominal financial assistance is provided to schools, universities, research institutes, colleges, women and youth organisations, NGOs, army units, government departments etc. from all over the country for conducting awareness raising and action oriented activities. NEAC activities have been supervised and monitored by thirty four Regional Resource Agencies (RRAs) . 11754 organisations participated from across the country during NEAC 2013- 2014.

III.   National Green Cops (NGC)

NGC is a major initiative of MOEFCC for creating environmental awareness among young children. This scheme has indicated the importance of grass root level in enhancing the environment awareness at mass. Launched in 2001-02 the scheme aims at sensitising the young minds towards environmental conservation and sustainable development. The scheme has come up with a network of more than 1, 00,000 Eco clubs across the country in 14 years, making it one of the largest conservation networks. This programme provides in-depth field experiences to school children and offers opportunities to convert their ideas into creative action.

IV.    Swach Bharat Abhiyan

A major initiative by the present government towards a clean and safe environment is the Swach Bharat Abhiyan. The objectives of Swachh Bharat include eliminating open defecation through the construction of household-owned and community-owned toilets and beginning a responsible mechanism of monitoring toilet use. Run by the Government of India, the mission aims to achieve an Open-Defecation Free (ODF) India by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, by constructing 12 million toilets in  rural India at a projected cost of ₹1.96 lakh crore (US$30 billion). The mission contains two sub-missions: Swach Bharat Abhiyan (“Gramin” or rural), which operates under the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation; and Swach Bharat Abhiyan (Urban), which operates under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The mission includes ambassadors and activities such as national real-time monitoring and updates from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are working towards its ideas of swach Bharat. Various public figures and Brand Ambassadors have been selected by the government to propagate the message. Due to the massive volunteer ship and government determination the overall national rural “household access to toilet” coverage has increased to 62.45 per cent and usage of 91.29 per cent in 2017.

Other awareness programmes

• Awareness cum action programs in and around the protected area, in wildlife corridors, biodiversity hotspots, rivers and wetlands
• Awareness programs which focus on communities that are critical to conservation of forests/wildlife/environment
• Quiz Programmes/Competitions etc.
• Yatras based on the environmental issues
• Organising appropriate awareness programmes on the occasion of mass congregations like industrial exhibitions, trade fairs, health melas, sport meets, conferences, training inter-school/college/university competitions etc.
• Any other programme/activity that promotes awareness about environment.
• (http://www.indiaonlinepages.com/ population / india-current-population.html)
• http://www.moef.nic.in/division/national-environmental-awareness-campaign-neac
• http://www.moef.nic.in/division/environmental-education-awareness-and-training-eeat
• http://www.moef.nic.in/division/national-green-corps-ngc

Essay on Environmental Awareness

Students are often asked to write an essay on Environmental Awareness in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Environmental Awareness

Understanding environmental awareness.

Environmental awareness means knowing about the natural world and how our actions affect it. It’s like being a good friend to the Earth. We learn what helps or hurts our planet, like recycling helps but pollution hurts.

Why It Matters

Caring for the environment is important because we all need clean air, water, and soil to live. If we don’t look after the Earth, our health and the health of animals and plants can suffer.

What We Can Do

Everyone can help the environment. Simple acts like turning off lights, saving water, and planting trees make a big difference. It starts with each of us doing our part.

250 Words Essay on Environmental Awareness

What is environmental awareness.

Environmental awareness is understanding the importance of looking after our planet. It means knowing how our actions can hurt or help the Earth. Just like we keep our homes clean, we need to keep our environment clean too.

How to Help

We can all do simple things to help. Turning off lights when we leave a room saves energy. Walking or biking instead of using a car reduces air pollution. Recycling things like paper, plastic, and glass means less trash in landfills. Planting trees helps because trees clean the air.

Learning and Sharing

Learning about the environment is fun. We can read books, watch documentaries, or go on nature walks. Sharing what we learn with friends and family can help them understand too. When more people know about the importance of the environment, they can start making changes as well.

Being aware of the environment is very important. It’s about knowing that every little thing we do can help or harm our planet. By making better choices every day, we can all help to keep our environment safe and healthy for ourselves and for the animals and plants that share our world.

500 Words Essay on Environmental Awareness

Environmental awareness is about understanding the world around us and knowing how our actions can affect it. It’s like being a good friend to the Earth. We learn how to take care of nature, the air, the water, and all the living things, including people, animals, and plants. By being aware, we make sure our planet stays healthy and beautiful for everyone.

Why is Environmental Awareness Important?

Our planet is the only home we have, and it gives us everything we need to live: food, water, and a place to stay. But sometimes, we use too much, waste things, or harm nature by accident. When we know about the environment, we can make better choices, like recycling or saving water. This helps our Earth last longer and keeps it a safe place for animals and plants, too.

How to Learn About the Environment

Simple ways to help the environment.

There are many easy things we can do to help. Turning off lights when we leave a room saves energy. Walking or biking instead of asking for a ride in a car can help keep the air clean. We can also plant trees and flowers to give homes to birds and insects. Using less plastic by carrying a reusable water bottle or bag helps keep our oceans and rivers clean.

Environmental Awareness at Home

At home, we can do a lot to be kind to the Earth. Saving water by taking shorter showers, recycling paper, cans, and bottles, and not wasting food are simple habits that make a big difference. We can also ask our families to buy things that are good for the environment, like products that can be used again or are made without hurting nature.

Environmental Awareness at School

Sharing what we know.

The more we talk about the environment, the more people will understand how important it is. We can share what we know with others by making posters, writing stories, or even putting on plays. When we all work together, we can make a big change for the better.

In conclusion, environmental awareness is about being a good friend to our planet. It means learning how the Earth works and how we can take care of it. By doing simple things at home and school, and sharing what we learn, we can help make sure the Earth stays a happy and healthy place for all living things.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Protect the environment, prevent pandemics, ‘nature is sending us a clear message’

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On this year’s World Environment Day , celebrated on June 5, the UN is drawing links between the health of the planet, and human health, and highlighting the importance of protecting biodiversity, the system that supports life.

“At least 70 per cent of emerging infectious diseases” such as COVID-19 , are crossing from the wild, to people, and “transformative actions are urgently required to protect environment and human rights”. This was the message from David Boyd, the independent UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, ahead of this year’s Day.

Mr. Boyd added that countries should take urgent action to protect the environment and stop climate disruption, biodiversity loss, toxic pollution and diseases that jump from animals to humans.

Get the message

UN chief António Guterres said in his message that “nature is sending us a clear message. We are harming the natural world, to our own detriment.”

He noted that habitat degradation and biodiversity loss were accelerating, “climate disruption is getting worse…To care for humanity, we must care for nature.”

Time for natureSince World Environment Day was launched in 1974, it has grown to become the UN’s biggest annual event, advocating for environmental action and raising worldwide awareness of the need to increase protection for the planet’s long-term survival.

The 2020 edition, which has the tagline “Time for Nature”, is being hosted by Colombia, which is organizing several events, streamed live, which can be accessed here, or on social media. The theme is biodiversity protection, at a time when one million animal and plant species are believed to be on the brink of extinction.

This year’s Day inevitably references the global COVID-19 health crisis, noting that, with the population doubling over the past 50 years, and the global economy growing fourfold over the same period, the delicate balance of nature has been disrupted, creating ideal conditions for pathogens, such as COVID-19, to spread.

As countries open up, and governments approve stimulus packages to support job creation, poverty reduction, development and economic growth, the UN Environment Programme ( UNEP ), is urging them to “build back better”.

This involves capturing opportunities for green investment — such as renewable energy, smart housing, green public procurement, and public transport — guided by the principles and standards of sustainable production and consumption. 

A failure to do so, warns UNEP, and an attempted return to business as usual, risks seeing inequalities rising even further, and a worsening of the degradation of the planet, at a time when one million animal and plant species are on the brink of extinction. 

• climate action
• UN International Days

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Public Awareness of Nature and the Environment During the COVID-19 Crisis

• Published: 12 July 2020
• Volume 76 , pages 1149–1159, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

• Sandra Rousseau   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8948-8644 1 &
• Nick Deschacht 2  

As our behavioral patterns change due to the COVID-19 crisis, our impact on nature and the environment changes too. Pollution levels are showing significant reductions. People are more aware of the importance of access to local green and blue spaces. By analyzing online search behavior in twenty European countries, we investigate how public awareness of nature and the environment has evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. We find that the crisis goes hand in hand with a positive shift in public awareness of nature-related topics, but that awareness of environmental topics remains unaffected. While the decreasing pollution levels and media attention may reduce the overall sense of urgency to tackle pollution problems, the increased experience with local natural resources may strengthen public support for a recovery program that puts the transition towards a more sustainable economic system centrally.

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1 Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis has a massive impact on the world and our behavior. International transport flows have plummeted but also within-country traffic flows have significantly reduced as we are all strongly encouraged, or even mandated, to stay and work at home. As our behavioral patterns change, our impact on nature and the environment changes as well. People are more and more aware of the importance of access to local green and blue spaces and personal experiences with the local natural environment are rapidly increasing during daily walks and runs. Gardens have become a highly appreciated asset. Urban nature plays a critical role in local resilience during this crisis by maintaining physical and mental well-being (Samuelsson et al. 2020 ). Urban nature can provide people with opportunities to escape household confinement and enjoy positive well-being effects (Bertram and Rehdanz 2015 ), maintain social contacts (Jennings and Bamkole 2019 ) and provide a sense of connection with the outside world (Whitburn et al. 2019 ). Familiarity and experience with nature can influence people’s valuation and appreciation of natural resources (LaRiviere et al. 2014 ). Even brief contact with the natural environment can boost feelings of connectedness with nature and mood (Nisbet et al. 2019 ). The frequency of visits is a strong predictor for a higher disposition to protect ecosystems and biodiversity (Tyrväinen and Väänänen 1998 ; Kwak et al. 2003 ; Lo and Jim 2010 ). Overall, when people feel connected with nature, they are more inclined to spend time in it (Lin et al. 2014 ) and protect it (Schultz 2002 ). Thus, we expect that public awareness of nature may be increasing during the COVID-19 crisis.

Besides the impact on nature experiences, the forced shift in behavioral patterns resulted in significant reductions in pollution levels (Helm 2020 ). Daily global CO 2 emissions fell by 17% by early April 2020 compared with the mean 2019 levels, mostly due to changes in surface transport (Le Guéré et al. 2020 ). In its Global Energy Review 2020, the International Energy Agency has predicted an 8% drop in global CO 2 emissions, to reach a decline of 30.6 Gt for 2020 compared to 2019 (IEA 2020 ). Such a reduction would be the largest ever, six times larger than the previous record reduction of .4 Gt in 2009 due to the financial crisis. Also, local air pollution levels are positively affected: nitrogen dioxide pollution over northern China, western Europe and the U.S. decreased by as much as 60 percent in early 2020 compared to the same period last year (Bauwens et al. 2020 ). Water quality is showing signs of improvement as well. A decrease in suspended particulate matter concentrations by 15.9% was found in Vembanad Lake, India, compared with the pre-lockdown period (Yunus et al. 2020 ). Still, the emission reductions in transportation and industry did not help to avoid severe air pollution in China (Wang et al. 2020 ). As COVID-19 has dominated the news and social media for the past months, communication about these and other pollution problems has substantially reduced. Yet, when pollution trends were reported in media and scientific reporting during the COVID-19 crisis, the message has been positively framed in general by pointing out (short-term) reductions in emissions. Thus, we expect that the public perception of the urgency of environmental problems may be decreasing and that the public awareness of environmental issues, in general, may be largely unaffected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Insights into public awareness levels, which we measure by online search behavior, are important inputs for the long-term recovery strategies after the COVID-19 crisis as public opinion—supportive or otherwise—is a key determinant of policy change in democratic countries (e.g., Burstein 2003 ; Dalton 2013 ; Millner and Ollivier 2016 ). For example, as public opinion shifts towards prioritizing the environment, there is a significant and positive effect on the rate of renewable energy policy outputs by governments in Europe (Anderson et al. 2017 ). As another example, Herrnstadt and Muehlegger ( 2014 ) show that the effects of abnormal weather extended beyond increased online search behavior for ‘climate change and ‘global warming’ to observable action on environmental issues measured by voting records of the US Congress. Public support is determined by perceptions, emotions, physical characteristics of the pollution, economic circumstances and geography, but also by the amount of media coverage (Drews and van den Bergh 2016 ). The impact of media coverage can have a positive, but also a negative, impact on public support for environmental policies depending on the content and framing of the message, the source of the information and individual characteristics (Bostrom et al. 2012 ).

We investigate how public awareness of nature and the environment, measured by online search behavior in twenty European countries, is affected by the COVID-19 crisis. The short-term improvements in several pollution indicators may reduce the sense of urgency to act now and the calls for system-wide fundamental actions may be—temporarily—less audible. Several experts and institutions are concerned about this effect. As Inger Andersen, the head of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), said “COVID-19 is not a silver lining for the climate” and “Visible, positive impacts are but temporary, because they come on the back of tragic economic slowdown and human distress” (UN 2020 ). Furthermore, many environmental experts, politicians and organizations see the recovery from COVID-19 as an opportunity and call for a sustainable, low-carbon recovery strategy of the economy and our society. The European Commission ( 2020 ), for example, stated: “Now is the time for our European Union to get back to its feet and move forward together to repair damage from the crisis and prepare a better future for the next generation”. A recent editorial in Nature ( 2020 ) mentions: “But as economies are revived, now is the right time to make up for past omissions—and rebuild them in a way that takes nature’s true value into account”. While the decreasing pollution levels may counteract the urgency and validity of these messages, the increased experience and appreciation for local natural resources may provide an opportunity as it may strengthen public support for a recovery program that sees the economy as being embedded in the natural environment.

2.1 Data Collection with Google Trends

In Europe, Google is the most used search engine online with a market share of more than 90% in the period from January 2019 till April 2020 (Statcounter 2020 ). Thus, we use online search behavior recorded on the Google Trends website (trends.google.com) to measure public awareness of nature and the environment. Google Trends has already been used for many purposes such as studying the occurrence of influenza-like diseases (Carneiro and Mylonakis 2009 ), interest in the environment and biodiversity (Mccallum and Bury 2013 ; Nghiem et al. 2016 ), or predicting tourism flows (Siliverstovs and Wochner 2018 ). Several studies have also used Google Trends to study communication strategies (Husnayain et al. 2020 ) and public awareness (Hu et al. 2020 ) during the COVID-19 crisis.

Google Trends can be searched based on ‘search terms’ or ‘topics’. Search terms can be anything and are user-defined, while topics are defined by Google and group all search terms related to this topic. Hence, topics are collections of search terms. Using topics rather than search terms to collect data has several advantages since the relevance of users’ searchers for the topic has been checked. Moreover, using a topic search also avoids the problem of incorrectly spelled and incomplete search terms as Google corrects for the most common mistakes. Also, topics are language-neutral, while search terms are not.

Google Trends (GT) measures search popularity in relative terms based on a randomly drawn sample of all search terms used in queries within the chosen period. Let I be the set of search terms (or topics) in which a researcher is interested (e.g. birds), t a time unit within the time horizon T (e.g. each week in 2020), z the chosen region (e.g. France) and c the chosen category (e.g. animals), then the search popularity indicator of search term i element of set I, is defined as (Siliverstovs and Wochner 2018 ; Genoe and Rousseau 2020 ):

Moreover, if the number of searches in the numerator of Eq. ( 2 ) is smaller than an (unspecified) threshold, it is set to zero. Google first calculates the relative search volume for each search term i of the set I, in each unit period during a predetermined time horizon T, for region z. This relative search volume is then rescaled for the maximum relative search volume for all search terms in the set I. This maximum is set equal to 100, and all other relative search volumes are expressed as a proportion of this maximum and thus range from 0 till 100.

To capture public awareness of nature and the environment, we selected twelve topics. Six topics are related to nature: forest, birds, nature, biodiversity, gardening and vegetable plot. Six other topics capture environmental issues: climate change, CO 2 -tax, air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution and circular economy. We observe weekly search behavior from January 1, 2019, till May 11, 2020 for the twenty largest European member states according to population size: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czech Republic, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland, and Croatia. The reference point of SPI = 100 was obtained in the week of 3 to 9 May, 2020 for the topic ‘birds’ in France. All other data points are rescaled accordingly.

As the timing of COVID-19 measures and policy actions differs between the different countries, we first investigate the trend in daily searches for the topic ‘coronavirus’ between January 1, 2020, and May 11, 2020 to determine the peak for the twenty European countries under investigation (see Fig.  1 ). While we observe the first peak around the time of the lockdown in Wuhan, China (January 23, 2020), the major peak occurs around March 14, 2020 when confinement measures were put in place in many European countries starting with Italy on March 9, 2020. The timing of this peak, around March 14, is the same when using SPI data based on the topic “corona” or the search term“corona or covid”.

Notes : Five-day moving average of the Google Trends indicator. Cross-country mean, weighted by population

GT search popularity indicator for daily searches of ‘coronavirus’.

2.2 Difference-in-Difference Approach

To identify the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on natural and environmental awareness, we compare the difference of the GT search popularity indicator (SPI) for the twelve selected topics before and after the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 with the difference of the indicator over the same period in the year 2019. This “difference-in-differences” approach (DiD) is well-established in the literature on impact evaluation and the estimation of treatment effects for its capacity to remove common sources of bias in standard approaches (Angrist and Pischke 2014 ; Gertler et al. 2016 ). The DiD approach provides an unbiased estimate of the treatment effect if the change of the outcome variable in the treated group would have been the same as the change in the control group in the absence of treatment (the parallel trends assumption). In the context of the present study, the identifying assumption is that, in the absence of a COVID-19 outbreak, the difference in SPI between the periods before and after March 14th, 2020 would have been the same as the difference between the same periods in 2019.

In the main analysis, the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on natural and environmental awareness is obtained by estimating the linear regression equation:

where \(\beta_{DiD}\) is the DiD estimate of the effect of interest, \(SPI_{ijt}\) is the GT search popularity indicator of topic \(i\) in country \(j\) in week \(t\) , \(T\) is a time dummy variable distinguishing the period after March 14th ( \(T = 1\) ) from the period before ( \(T = 0\) ), \(D\) is a dummy variable indicating the treatment year and distinguishing the year 2020 in which the COVID-19 crisis occurred ( \(D = 1\) ) from the year 2019 ( \(D = 0\) ), \(\alpha_{i}\) denote a set of controls for topic fixed effects and \(\gamma_{j}\) a set of controls for country fixed effects. The topic and country fixed effects are included in the model because the SPI level depends on the search topic and it varies across countries. In short, the effect of interest \(\beta_{DiD}\) captures the increase in the SPI after the COVID-19 crisis within (or “holding constant the average trend in”) specific topics and countries, and after netting out seasonality effects in the data.

The periods after and before March 14th used in the analysis are selected in the following way. Let \(w\) denote the number of the week within the calendar year so that \(w = 1\) for the first week of January, \(w = 2\) for the second week of January, etcetera. The first week after March 14th is then in week number \(w = 11\) . In our analyses, the period after March 14th is defined as the period of 5 weeks with numbers \(14 \le w \le 18\) . The period before March 14th is defined as the period of 5 weeks with numbers \(3 \le w \le 7\) . In other words, we use a bandwidth of 3 weeks before and after March 14th that is excluded from the analysis to compare periods that are sufficiently separated in time. Thus, our main regression analyses are based on 2400 observations—i.e. 10 weeks of data in 2020, the same weeks of data in the control year 2019 (so 20 weeks in total) for 20 countries and 6 topics related to both natural and environmental awareness. As a robustness check we also perform the analysis based on a bandwidth of 2 weeks, leading to 2880 observations (2 times 12 weeks for 20 countries and 6 topics).

While search behavior for several topics related to nature and environment fluctuates somewhat over time, there has been a clear and rapid increase in the search for nature-related topics during the COVID-19 crisis after March 14th, 2020 (Fig.  2 ). The average Search Popularity Index (SPI) for nature-related topics quickly increased by 6 points to almost 15 over a short period of time, whereas it had mostly varied between 8 and 10 points before the COVID-19 crisis. The SPI for environment-related topics shows no similar increase after the COVID-19 crisis. The rise in the search for nature-related topics during the spring season in 2019 suggests that seasonality effects should be accounted for to isolate the effects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Data source : Google Trends. Notes : Three-week moving average of the Google Trends indicator. Mean across keywords (unweighted) and countries (weighted by population size)

Search behavior for topics related to nature and environment (January 1st, 2019—May 11th, 2020).

Using a difference-in-difference approach with a 3 week bandwidth, we compare the increase in the online searches for six nature-related and six environmental topics between the periods before and after March 14th in 2020, with the increase over the same period in 2019 to control for possible seasonal effects (Fig.  3 and Table  1 ). The effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the search popularity indicator for nature-related search topics (model 1 in Table  1 ) was estimated as an increase of 4.138 points ( p  < .001). The seasonality effect in the case of nature-related topics is estimated to be 1.665 points ( p  < .001). For the environment-related search topics (model 2 in Table  1 ), the effects are small and not statistically significant.

Notes : Mean Google Trends indicator across keywords (unweighted) and countries (weighted by population size)

The effect of the COVID-19 crisis on search behavior.

The results are robust to a change in bandwidth. Based on a bandwidth of two rather than three weeks (see Table  2 ), the estimated effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the indicator for nature-related search topics becomes an increase of 4.076 points ( p  < .001) and the seasonality effect is estimated to be 1.575 points ( p  < .001). For the environment-related search topics the effects are again small and not statistically significant.

The results at the individual topic level (see Table  3 ) reveal some heterogeneity in the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the relative online popularity of the twelve topics. A positive effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the SPI is found for all six nature-related topics ( p  < .05 for four out of six topics). The largest positive effects are found for the topics ‘birds’ (7.800 pts, p  < .001), ‘forest’ (6.154 pts, p  < .01) and ‘nature’ (5.175 pts, p  < .001). As expected, no significant effect of the COVID-19 crisis on any of the six environment-related topics such as climate change or air pollution was found.

4 Discussion and Conclusion

The true extent of the global impact of the COVID-19 crisis has yet to be fully determined, but that it will be immense is uncontested (Helm 2020 ). Initially, short-term rescue actions will be needed to help those who were affected most. However, long-term recovery will require substantial investments in physical, human and natural capital. Thus, the COVID-19 crisis provides us with the opportunity to not just restart, but to re-design, investments and to initiate a transformation to a new form of growth, focusing on resilience, well-being and sustainability (Bhattacharya and Stern 2020 ). This societal change will need to rely on cross-fertilization between economic and social recovery programs, environmental policies such as climate actions and biodiversity conservation programs such as the recently adopted EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

Public support for green and sustainable recovery policies will play an important role and cannot be taken for granted. Communication strategies and framing of the recovery actions after the COVID-19 crisis will be important. Our analysis of online search behavior in the European Union indicates that the behavioral changes associated with the crisis are accompanied by positive changes in public awareness regarding (local) natural resources such as forests and birdlife. Increased experience with and appreciation of green spaces and wildlife can—partly—underpin this growth in awareness. However, public awareness of environmental issues such as climate change was found to be unaffected by the COVID-19 crisis based on online search trends. The general increasing sense of urgency for many environmental problems may have been counteracted by the reduction in media attention and the short-term positive trends reported for several pollution levels.

Our findings suggest that public support for programs aiming at more resilient and sustainable living environments may have increased. Communication about climate adaptation strategies may benefit from stressing the pivotal role of urban green and blue spaces especially if these spaces would also be publicly accessible. Framing the decarbonization of transport systems as a means to support walking and cycling as well as to protect green spaces rather than directly promote them as climate policy measures may increase public support. Co-benefits of environmental policies, especially those related to nature and biodiversity conservation, may thus play an even more important role in the future after COVID-19.

While we find evidence of changes in public awareness, these changes may be short-lived and people may revert to previous patterns once the crisis is past. People’s habits and behaviors are influenced by many factors such as available time and income. As societies recover from the crisis, behavioral changes may again be reversed as choice determinants and context change. Thus, in order to benefit from the increased support for nature and biodiversity, it may be important to act quickly and to incentivize a long-term change by, for example, supporting urban schemes for greening built infrastructure and creating livable cities.

Finally, the COVID-19 crisis has also shown individuals that individual action, especially on a global scale, can make a difference and can create general common benefits that are noticeable on a large scale. Together we were able to flatten the curve. This real-life experience can act as a trigger to use individual behavioral changes to tackle public-good problems such as climate change and biodiversity conservation.

Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

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We would like to thank Ronald Rousseau for his comments on a previous version of the study.

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Rousseau, S., Deschacht, N. Public Awareness of Nature and the Environment During the COVID-19 Crisis. Environ Resource Econ 76 , 1149–1159 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00445-w

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Student Engagement and Environmental Awareness : Gen Z and Ecocomposition

NANCY G. BARRÓN teaches courses on the rhetoric of sustainability, diversity, and climate change as well as professional writing. Her research interests include the rhetoric of sustainability, identity, culture, and transdisciplinary writing. She also designs student symposia and conferences for a public exchange of research findings.

SIBYLLE GRUBER is a teacher with the Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. She has published on the positionalities of international faculty, feminist rhetoric, environmental literacy, and composition theories and practices. She teaches courses that focus on the social and cultural aspects of environmental literacy practices.

GAVIN HUFFMAN graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a certificate in rhetoric. His research interests include the rhetoric of fear, sustainability, and the language of legislation.

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Nancy G. Barrón , Sibylle Gruber , Gavin Huffman; Student Engagement and Environmental Awareness : Gen Z and Ecocomposition . Environmental Humanities 1 March 2022; 14 (1): 219–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481528

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This article collaboration addresses the importance of contextualizing current climate change discussions in twenty-first-century ecocomposition classrooms. It specifically focuses on the practical significance of what students’ writing and research can accomplish in and outside the classroom, and on how student involvement in the research process can create spaces for new awareness and renewed interest in active engagement with climate change discussions. The article references student projects exhibited at ClimateCon 2020, including one project that focused on Rachel Carson’s ability to persevere despite the many challenges she faced. With ecocomposition as an entry point, the article shows the importance of continued education about the environment and climate change, getting involved with sustainable practices, engaging with environmental awareness campaigns, and, when needed, lobbying for readjusting corporate business practices to include sustainability efforts.

• Starting the Conversation: Learning about the Environment in the Writing Classroom

Rachel Carson concludes “A Fable for Tomorrow,” published in her influential 1962 book, Silent Spring , by pointing out that “a grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.” 1 No longer a fable, tragedies include vast forest fires across the globe, hurricanes, floods, and global pandemics. These tragedies are also played out at a local level in northern Arizona where we as the study’s authors live, teach, and learn. Here, increased cancer rates on the Navajo reservation are associated with uranium mining, and a nearby forest fire cost the lives of nineteen firefighters. 2 These tragedies, and many like them, have caused ecoanxiety, ecophobia, and climate depression. 3 Students tell us that they feel powerless and paralyzed in the face of a rapidly advancing climate crisis. 4 Many young people have confirmed that their fears about climate change, quite similar to the fears about COVID-19, are connected to an uncertainty over what is yet to come, which, according to Caroline Hickman, a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, creates an “out-of-control feeling.” To address such debilitating experiences, Hickman argues, we need to take action, either individually or collectively, to create a sense of agency and reduce anxiety levels. 5

In this article we, as a collaboration between two professors and one undergraduate student, discuss the results of taking action and incorporating opportunities for contextualizing current climate change discussions. We show teachers how the principles of ecocomposition can be used to combine current narratives focused on fear and overwhelming anxiety about the climate crisis with a growing awareness, curiosity, and willingness to explore creative solutions to transform a currently unstable and uncertain future. Specifically, we focus on the practical significance of what students’ writing and research can accomplish, and on how student involvement in ClimateCon 2020, a collaborative student conference, can create spaces for new awareness and renewed interest in active engagement with climate change discussions. We conclude by pointing out the need to combine teacher, students, and citizen roles to create a call to action that expands current narratives about the environment and that realigns public opinion in favor of sustainability and climate change action. With ecocomposition as an entry point, we show that we can participate in education about the environment and climate change, get involved with sustainable practices, engage with environmental awareness campaigns, and, when needed, lobby for readjusting corporate business practices to include sustainability efforts.

• The Reason for Ecocomposition and Environmental Awareness in the College Classroom

“Why isn’t there more of an outrage?” asked Maria Welch, a Navajo field researcher with the Southwest Research Information Center in an interview with Laurel Morales, a senior field correspondent for Fronteras Desk and NPR. 6 Welch, whose parents grew up next to uranium mines on the Navajo reservation and played in contaminated water, studies the impact of uranium mining on Navajo families today. Welch’s questions about the silence surrounding the environmental destruction caused by uranium mining are indicative of a history of discrimination faced by Native Americans, communities of color, and low-income communities. George McGraw, a human rights advocate and founder and CEO of DigDeep 7 —an organization that focuses on bringing running water to communities such as the Navajo Nation—puts it bluntly: “This is a community that has found themselves voiceless.” 8

Such voicelessness, and political, racial, and economic marginalization, are not new in the United States, nor are we surprised that the environmental struggles of communities of color, working-class communities, and communities considered to have little economic and political power are often left out from discussions on climate change. Nancy G. Barrón and Sibylle Gruber, both identifying as Gen X professors, embraced the challenge of breaking the silence and using ecocomposition to incorporate climate change into class discussions and to create ClimateCon, a public space to address environmental action opportunities. Gavin Huffman, a Gen Z English major who was enrolled in a capstone rhetoric and writing course and participated in an undergraduate research projects course, embraced the challenge to explore possible approaches to the environmental crisis and to provide insights from and for Gen Z students on how to move beyond feeling scared, angry, and overwhelmed. Barrón and Gruber have lived and worked for more than twenty years near the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona where they teach rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies through theory-based application projects grounded in ecocomposition practices. Huffman applied his rhetorical knowledge to discussions on climate change and sustainability that could lead to social change and action.

The increasing urgency of climate action, and growing student concerns about the environment, 9 encouraged Barrón and Gruber to focus three junior/senior-level rhetoric and writing courses on historical, local, national, and global discussions surrounding the environment and climate change, especially how they influenced Gen Z. We focused our teaching practices on principles of ecocomposition, 10 which emphasize the interdisciplinary nature and the “ecological pursuit” of writing, 11 in which any writing activity has to be seen in its historical, political, or ideological context. 12 We also incorporated process pedagogy, Paulo Freire’s concept of democratizing education and knowledge, and feminist principles as a way to “teach students an appreciation for diversity that can prepare educated citizens to shape and participate in a multicultural, democratic, and ecological society.” 13 Even though many of the studies on the impact of an ecocomposition curriculum on student learning focus on short-term results of specific situational practices, 14 we were encouraged to apply these practices in our own localized environments and contribute to the growing work of ecocomposition scholarship.

After students in previous rhetoric and writing courses told us about feeling paralyzed and powerless because of media portrayals of the current and impending climate crisis, we created course curricula and learning environments for three junior- and senior-level courses that focused on environmental literacy, climate change, and sustainability, and that also provided opportunities to map the connections between the environment and human actions. With this, “the ecological dimensions of selfhood,” in which “the whole spectrum of the nonhuman physical environment is embedded in each of our identities,” 15 became part of the curricula we introduced to students. The end results were student-directed projects that were focused on environmental developments and climate change actions, and that provided spaces for the “discovery and articulation” 16 needed to gain well-rounded knowledge about necessary educational approaches to climate change discussions.

In addition to providing students with a rhetorical foundation, 17 we introduced work by such authors as Rachel Carson, Ward Churchill, Barbara Kingsolver, and Winona LaDuke. 18 Our closeness to the Navajo Nation was especially important in our course design and in our decision to create spaces for transformative actions. Because of the social injustices and the unwillingness or inability by a normative system to communicate these injustices, many activists who live and work outside this normative system have experienced pushback and threats when trying to write about or discuss the cultural, political, social, and economic complexities of environmental developments. We incorporated texts that addressed environmental justice, the contributions of Indigenous peoples to climate discussions, and the need for a renaissance of thought that acknowledges Indigenous contributions to educational thought. 19

To our students, and to us as well, the opposition often seems insurmountable, and belittling comments, refusing to listen to arguments, undermining justified actions, and detracting from scientific facts have become politically accepted tactics. 20 To show that individuals and groups can participate in climate change action, we included talks on guerilla gardening in South Central Los Angeles, urban agriculture, and stories and podcasts on the impact of climate change on Native American communities. 21 We developed the course curricula with room for student input, and we encouraged them to bring in additional materials that they could introduce to their classmates. In each course, students worked on conceptualizing projects related to climate change. They also crafted a research paper with an action plan for countering climate change, and they developed a presentation that highlighted the rhetorical situation for creating the application project.

• Gen Z Sensibilities and Transformative Action: The Need for Climate Change Discussions

When we first discussed creating a common space for students that would allow them to “build their own environmental ethics through a process of exploration,” 22 we saw it as an opportunity to expand classroom spaces and promote open discussions about normative systems, environmental racism, environmental policies, the climate crisis, and environmental activism. The contextual nature, and the importance of purpose and audience in ecocomposition, combined with a critical pedagogy that focuses on democratizing education and questioning ideologies, norms, and social conventions, provided the starting point for student explorations of how environmental concerns were and are being brought to the forefront of US consciousness. This way, education and knowledge, as Freire points out, are “processes of inquiry” 23 that create opportunities for developing critical consciousness and encourage us to reflect on and revise our pedagogical strategies. 24

The need for “a process of exploration” 25 and a place for “true reflection and action upon reality” 26 resulted in a collaborative research conference to provide students from the three redesigned junior- and senior-level rhetoric and writing courses a forum for public discussions on climate change action. Organized around panel discussions, poster presentations, and breakout sessions, ClimateCon provided many opportunities for focusing on the escalating climate crisis. Before the conference, students had read, discussed, and presented on sustainability, environmental justice, and climate change action as part of the weekly assignments. In addition, students in each class used their experiences as members of Gen Z to research a topic related to climate change, create a project that showed opportunities for transformative action, and present their findings at ClimateCon. The conference was designed for formal and informal interactions in a meaningful setting,” 27 with scheduled and “unscheduled” learning opportunities. These unscheduled learning opportunities, as Boyan Slat pointed out in his discussion of relaunching an unsuccessful ocean clean-up system, are part of revisiting failed attempts and creating spaces for future success. 28

We knew that ClimateCon had potential for encouraging students to see their work as an opportunity to influence a public audience and to engage in hopeful climate action in small and large ways. We were not prepared, however, for the overwhelming enthusiasm and the positive atmosphere that surrounded the event. The participation in brief panel discussions was animated and included sustainability in baseball, China’s garbage classification system, addressing climate denier arguments, and environmental narratives in game design. The conversations were even more dynamic when students mingled in the hallways of the Liberal Arts Building where participants elaborated on their posters, showed their videos on iPads, and provided details on three-dimensional projects, and where audience members surrounded presenters, asked questions, talked about their own experiences, and provided feedback on what they found especially eye-opening. A student’s project on “Growing Sustainability on Campus and Reducing Single-Waste Use” showed what specific campus efforts were already in place at Northern Arizona University, including the elimination of serving trays, the push for bringing your own drinking flasks, and the use of multi-use carry-out containers. This led to spirited debates on how these efforts could be advertised more fully and publicized across campus.

Audience members also practiced with a student-developed app called “Gamifying Sustainability,” and they provided suggestions on how to market the app to Gen Z. They wanted to know more about recycling and reducing carbon emissions on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, where climate change is no longer a far-off threat and rising sea levels are predicted to cause severe coastal flooding. The immediacy of the current climate crisis led to a brainstorming session that included possible individual actions of reducing single-car use, moving to sustainable eating practices, and encouraging social media use to create or join action networks. And because the presenter and the audience had learned about ecoanxiety and social media from another presenter, they were encouraged to discuss the futility of social media “dooms-scrolling,” an activity that many of them had engaged with. Instead, this presenter pointed out that information on Greta Thunberg’s commitment to climate strike actions and Fridays for Future were accessible because of social media, and that young people could easily find out about climate change actions because social media provided an easily available forum for distributing information.

In addition, posters on sustainable eating, fast fashion and sustainability, renewable energy on the Navajo Nation, sustainable gaming, the effects of climate change on wildlife, and generational differences in climate change discussions provided students with multiple opportunities to engage with one another and to show their knowledge of current discussions on climate change. As one student pointed out, her research on climate change and the discussions with the audience led her to further explore the connections between racial inequality, sustainability, and conservation efforts.

• Gen Z and History: Contextualizing Climate Change Action

Many of the presentations encouraged spirited exchanges. We highlight one of them because it was especially influential in showing the need for remembering and addressing critical moments in history. Huffman, an undergraduate English major, decided to explore the life and work of Rachel Carson, a historical figure that he knew little about, and that most of Gen Z had never heard about. Huffman’s research, in other words, rediscovered Carson for Generation Z and showed why she was successful not only as a scientist but also as a writer whose personal and professional lives were far from ordinary. In this presentation, Huffman could show that Carson was able to apply her professional skills as a marine biologist and conservationist to change how we now understand the intricate connections between humans and natural environments, and how detrimental the use of pesticides is to the ecosystem. Specifically focusing on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring , with its attention to narrative style and scientific soundness, Huffman discovered that Carson, despite many adverse forces in her personal and professional life, gave voice to the concerns of many who suffered the effects of the chemical industry. His research, and his poster presentation at ClimateCon, were especially powerful as a way to reestablish Carson’s influence on current discussions on the environment and climate change.

Huffman’s enthusiasm, and the attention he received during ClimateCon, showed us that Carson’s life story and her writing on environmental pollution resonates with young adults. Carson’s ability to persevere because she believed that silence would be detrimental to the planet was especially powerful for Gen Z. Students related to Carson’s initial training as an English major, her literary publications that focused on the environment, and her studies in biology. Carson applied what Lloyd Bitzer called the rhetorical situation—“the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse.” 29 As Bitzer put it, and as Carson so skillfully shows us in Silent Spring , “rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.” 30 Carson knew that her readers needed to be convinced that the current environmental damage affected the human and nonhuman world. She also knew that she needed to include more than scientists to create a widespread appreciation for the devastating impact of DDT on the environment. 31

One of the important points for Huffman to show was Carson’s seamless fusion of science and the art of storytelling to create a narrative that does not discriminate against the nonscientist and can be understood by a general audience. Her readers, he pointed out to his audience of Gen Z students, were able to imagine the urgency of Carson’s plea for preserving the earth. Instead of focusing on the separation of the arts and sciences, splitting audiences as specialists and nonspecialists, and creating divisions based on subject-knowledge, 32 he showed his peers that Carson focused her writing on multiple stakeholders with and without disciplinary knowledge.

Huffman wanted his audience to understand that Carson challenged readers of Silent Spring to take action. In Carson’s case, this meant that rather than simply informing the public that DDT was harmful to the environment and its inhabitants, she offered ways to combat it. Students who participated in the exchange pointed out that, without solutions to mitigate the dire predictions, Carson would not have been able to convince her audience that they can participate as change agents. They specifically pointed out Carson’s use of questions throughout the book, which encouraged readers to think more critically about the ways they are affecting the planet and how they can change the environmental narrative. In other words, students were particularly impressed that Carson was able to change her audience’s behaviors and become more environmentally conscious. Huffman and his Gen Z peers attributed this to Carson’s emphasis on showing her audience the possibility of a brighter future despite an uphill battle instead of presenting a doomsday narrative. Through the impassioned discussions in the hallway, students concluded that a solid argument, a well-written narrative, and a convincing presentation need to be followed by perseverance in the face of adversity, ridicule, and dismissal.

ClimateCon created an enthusiasm for participating in climate change action that the preceding class activities—readings, discussions, analytical writing exercises, and a proposal centered around climate change action—could not garner. Once students started to work on creating solutions for localized problems, an important point emphasized by Thomas Hothem in “Suburban Studies and College Writing,” 33 and after they received feedback from audience members at ClimateCon, their commitment to participating in climate change action increased. The final weeks in class were spent on refining their projects and writing a final paper that incorporated theory and application and that outlined the exigence for creating the project and the climate change action that students would embrace. The work they submitted showed engagement, a willingness to leave their comfort zones, and an ability to “shape a rhetorical position for themselves,” 34 and it helped them “acquire a sense of context with which to gauge their relationship to their surroundings, their backgrounds, their education, and hence their future.” 35

• Changing Public Opinion: Hope for the Future of Gen Z

Young climate change activists are part of a global movement. Deborah Adegbile from Lagos, Nigeria; Ayakha Melithafa from Cape Town, South Africa; Greta Thunberg from Stockholm, Sweden; Alexandria Villaseñor from New York City; and Ridhima Pandey from Haridwar, India; are just a few of the engaged activists who organize protests, take legal action, and work with farmers affected by climate change. 36 When students learn about the commitment of their Gen Z contemporaries, and when they are encouraged to question “the shape of choices, the structure and distribution of power and authority, the participatory process of decision making,” 37 climate change discussions can become part of a participatory and transformative curriculum for Gen Z students. Instead of remaining a temporary academic exercise, using the principles of ecocomposition provided opportunities for students to see the connections between historical events and current discussions on climate change. Changing “doomsday scrolling” and doomsday narratives to narratives of opportunity prompted Barrón, Gruber, and Huffman to embrace the following motto for ClimateCon2020: “If we agree that today’s climate change crisis is human-made, then we can make the changes necessary to reverse it.” ClimateCon2020 showed that we could become agents of change, and that we could encourage those around us to move toward transformative action, whether it’s on a small or large scale. 38

This article is a reminder for teachers that we need to bring the principles of ecocomposition—“the study of the relationship between discourse, nature, environment, location, place” 39 —to the forefront of our teaching and learning environments. This is especially important when science is often discredited, politics is focused on a consumer mentality, and social media platforms are used to attack climate change activists. This Machiavellian approach to the environment—what can be described as a disinterest in ethical concerns by politicians and big corporations deploying power for their own gain—encourages complacency of the powerful. ClimateCon2020 provided the setting for expanding narratives about the environment, sustainability, and climate change. It encouraged a shift away from self- and media-induced lethargy to a belief that each one of us can and needs to participate in our fight for slowing climate change. As one student said, ClimateCon2020 “was about our futures and not about our homework.” To continue the momentum, it is important to promote ecological literacy by continuously creating spaces for public exchanges and by combining our roles as teachers and students with our roles as citizens to create a call to action that encourages an expansion of current narratives about the environment, changes our anthropocentric worldview, and begins to realign public opinion in favor of sustainability and climate change action. 40 With this article, we show that we can participate in continued education about the environment and climate change, get involved with sustainable practices, engage with environmental awareness campaigns, and, when needed, lobby for readjusting corporate business practices to include sustainability efforts.

We end this article by reminding our readers of Wangari Maathai, a 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement who emphasizes the connections between environmental and social justice actions. As she put it in her Nobel Lecture: “I would like to call on young people to commit themselves to activities that contribute toward achieving their long-term dreams. They have the energy and creativity to shape a sustainable future. To the young people I say, you are a gift to your communities and indeed the world. You are our hope and our future.” 41 Our experiences confirm Maathai’s description of young people. Recent climate change actions such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Earthjustice 42 led by committed members across the globe show us that they have the strength and creativity needed to prompt global action on climate change. Our responsibilities as teachers and students include continuous critical and analytical learning about current climate change discussions to end an immoral silence and acknowledge environmental degradation as a social justice issue. With knowledge and understanding of the climate crisis, we are hopeful that we can participate in and design successful climate change action for a safer and healthier natural environment.

Carson, Silent Spring , 3 .

Steinbach, “Six Years Later.”  

See Estok, “Theorizing” ; Estok, “Introduction” ; Christman, “I Have a Dream” ; Alex and Deborah, “Ecophobia” ; Deyo, “Eophobia” ; and Pikhala, “Environmental Education.”  

See Plautz, “Environmental Burden” ; Richardson, “Climate Trauma” ; Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth .

See Nugent, “Terrified of Climate Change?”  

Morales, “For the Navajo Nation.”  

Dig Deep, “Our Work.”  

See, for example, Plautz, “Environmental Burden” ; Winston, “Young People Are Leading the Way.”  

See, for example, Dobrin, “Writing Takes Place” ; Weisser, “Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity” ; Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition.”  

Dobrin, “Writing Takes Place,” 18 .

See Plevin, “Liberatory Positioning of Place” ; Hothem, “Suburban Studies and College Writing.”  

Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition,” 176 .

See Goggin and Waggoner, “Sustainable Development” ; Hembrough, “Engaging” ; Hembrough, “Case Study” ; Geary, “Writing about Wolves” ; Heiman, “Odd Topics.”  

Weisser, “Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity,” 81 .

Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition,” 166 .

Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation” ; Burke, Grammar of Motives ; Burke, “Ideology and Myth” ; hooks, Teaching ; Foucault, Discipline and Punish ; Anzaldúa, Borderlands .

Carson, Silent Spring ; Churchill, Struggle ; Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer ; LaDuke, All Our Relations .

See Kincheloe and Steinberg, “Indigenous Knowledges in Education” ; Battiste, “Struggle and Renaissance” ; Price, “Indigenous Leaders.”  

See, for example, Williams and Treadaway, “Exxon and the Valdez Accident” ; Whyte, “Dakota Access Pipeline” ; Nakamura and Wagner, “Trump Mocks Sixteen-Year-Old Greta Thunberg.”  

See Finley, “Guerrilla Gardener” ; Davison, “How Urban Agriculture” ; Carter, “Greening” ; Flatow, “How Native American Communities” ; Jones, “How Native Tribes” ; US Department of the Interior, “Climate Change” ; Laduzinsky, “Disproportionate Impact” ; Bryce, “Indigenous Leaders” ; Morales, “For the Navajo Nation” ; Whyte, “Dakota Access Pipeline” ; Ibrahim, “Indigenous Knowledge Meets Science.”  

Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition,” 174 .

Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , 72 .

Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed , 84 .

Illich, Deschooling Society, 29 .

Slat, “System 001B.”  

Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 1 .

Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 4 .

See Griswold, “How Silent Spring Ignited” ; DeMarco, “Rachel Carson’s Environmental Ethic” ; Wills-Toker, “Environmental Rhetoric of Rachel Carson,” 293 .

See Gartner, “When Science Writing Becomes Literary Art.”  

Hothem, “Suburban Studies.”  

Hothem, “Suburban Studies,” 35 .

Hothem, “Suburban Studies,” 38 .

See Dillen, “Time to Listen” ; Reynolds, “Star Student on a Mission” ; Varagur, “Meet India’s Teen Climate Advocate” ; and Galvez-Robles, “Nineteen Youth Climate Activists” ; Leung, “Swedish Teen Climate Activist.”  

We acknowledge that organizing a conference and incorporating collaborative learning is not easy. We are full professors who do not teach a 5/5, and our research agenda includes the rhetoric of climate change, science writing, ecofeminism, and ecocomposition.

Dobrin, “Writing Takes Place,” 14 .

See Plumwood, “Androcentrism and Anthrocentrism” ; Plumwood, Environmental Culture ; Boddice, Anthropocentrism ; Quinn, Castéra, and Clément, “Teachers’ Conceptions of the Environment” ; Leonard, “Why Lakes and Rivers” ; Marchesini, Beyond Anthropocentrism ; Dobbins, Piga, and Manca, Environment, Social Justice .

Maathai, “Nobel Lecture.”  

Fridays for Future, “What We Do” ; Extinction Rebellion, “What Is XR?” ; Earthjustice, “Our Work.”  

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Education is key to addressing climate change

Education is a critical agent in addressing the issue of climate change. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) assigns responsibility to Parties of the Convention to undertake educational and public awareness campaigns on climate change, and to ensure public participation in programmes and information access on the issue.

Education can encourage people to change their attitudes and behavior; it also helps them to make informed decisions. In the classroom, young people can be taught the impact of global warming and learn how to adapt to climate change. Education empowers all people, but especially motivates the young to take action. Knowing the facts helps eliminate the fear of an issue which is frequently colored by doom and gloom in the public arena. In this context, UNICEF has tapped into the minds and imaginations of  children around the world  to capture what it means to be a child growing up in the age of rapid climate change.

Through its  Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development  programme, UNESCO aims to “help people understand the impact of global warming today and increase "climate literacy" among young people.” This programme and other innovative educational initiatives, including the  Global Action Programme (GAP) ,  Action for Climate Empowerment  and the  ZOOM campaign , were presented and discussed at the  COP 22 .

The World Metrological Organization (WMO) works closely with weather presenters who are committed to education and outreach on climate change and who have formed a new network  Climate without Borders,  which has a daily reach of approximately 375,000,000 people, and aims to “educate, motivate and activate” weather presenters to reach out to their audiences armed with useful information.

Partnering with  Climate Central , WMO has also produced a series of  videos  called "summer in the cities" which provide a glance into future effects of global warming on weather in cities around the world. This follows on from a  video series “Weather in 2050 ” in which TV weather presenters reported a typical weather forecast, based on scientific scenarios, for the year 2050.

Heatwaves put bees at risk

Eleven-year-old Markela is a fifth generation beekeeper, but climate change is making it so that she may not be able to carry on the family tradition. Wildfires, heatwaves, and droughts that are increasing in intensity and frequency due to the climate crisis, put bees and the ecosystems at risk.

Healing Chile’s Huapi Island

On Chile’s Huapi Island, native forests have become fragmented, making the soils poorer and drier and leaving the population vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Now, thanks to the restoration efforts of Indigenous Peoples, native trees are making a comeback.

Early warning systems are saving lives in Central Asia

As Central Asia grapples with the increasing frequency and severity of climate-induced hazards, the importance of robust early warning systems cannot be overstated. However, countries need both technical knowledge and resources to effectively implement these systems on a large scale. Japan has been a reliable ally for countries, helping advance early warning systems and increase resilience in the region.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environmental Education — Environmental Awareness as the Only Key for Our Future Existence

Environmental Awareness as The Only Key for Our Future Existence

• Categories: Air Pollution Environmental Education Environmental Ethics

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Published: Feb 11, 2023

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Essay on Environmental Awareness

Environmental awareness is a powerful force that encourages us to understand and care for the world around us. It’s about recognizing the importance of our environment, the challenges it faces, and the actions we can take to protect it. In this essay, we will explore the significance of environmental awareness, its impact on our planet, and why it is crucial for our future.

Understanding Environmental Awareness

Environmental awareness is the recognition that our actions have consequences on the natural world. It involves being conscious of the environment’s value, the threats it faces, and the responsibility we bear to safeguard it for ourselves and future generations.

The State of Our Environment

Our planet faces numerous environmental challenges, including climate change, deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction. These issues affect not only our ecosystems but also human health, food security, and quality of life. Understanding the gravity of these challenges is the first step toward addressing them.

Promoting Responsibility

Environmental awareness promotes a sense of responsibility toward our planet. It encourages us to make choices that minimize harm to the environment and reduce our ecological footprint. By being mindful of our actions, we can contribute to a healthier world.

Environmental Education

Environmental awareness goes hand in hand with education. Schools, museums, and organizations play a crucial role in teaching us about the environment and its complexities. Environmental education equips us with the knowledge and tools needed to make informed decisions.

Advocacy and Action

Being aware of environmental issues empowers individuals to become advocates for change. When we understand the problems our environment faces, we can take action by supporting conservation efforts, participating in community cleanups, or advocating for eco-friendly policies.

Connection to Nature

Environmental awareness fosters a deeper connection to nature. When we appreciate the beauty and importance of our natural surroundings, we are more likely to value and protect them. This connection enriches our lives and enhances our well-being.

A Global Perspective

Environmental awareness extends beyond our local communities; it has a global perspective. It reminds us that environmental issues are interconnected, and solutions often require international cooperation. Climate change, for example, is a global challenge that demands a collective response.

Positive Impact

Environmental awareness leads to positive changes in behavior. People who are environmentally conscious are more likely to conserve energy, reduce waste, recycle, and support sustainable practices. These actions collectively reduce the strain on our planet’s resources.

Health Benefits

Caring for the environment is not just about protecting the planet; it’s also about safeguarding human health. Clean air and water, as well as access to green spaces, contribute to our physical and mental well-being. Environmental awareness reinforces the need for a healthy environment.

Conclusion of Essay on Environmental Awareness

In conclusion, environmental awareness is a vital force for positive change in our world. It encourages us to recognize the challenges our environment faces and the role we play in either exacerbating or alleviating them. By understanding the significance of our natural surroundings and the impact of our actions, we become stewards of the Earth, working together to protect and preserve it.

Environmental awareness is not a passive concept; it’s a call to action. It empowers us to make choices that benefit both the environment and ourselves. As we move forward, let us embrace environmental awareness as a guiding principle in our lives, fostering a deeper connection to nature and a commitment to a sustainable and harmonious future for all living beings on our precious planet.

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10 Surprising Ways You Can Raise Awareness About Environmental Issues

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There’s no way around it —humans can only protect the planet through action. This effort can’t happen without educating the greater public and raising awareness about environmental issues — and that includes everyone, from parents to neighbors to strangers. How do people effectively and efficiently get the word out about the environment? Here are 10 ways to raise awareness about environmental issues.

1. Attend a Rally or March

A strike can be an effective way to draw attention. Consider movements like 2017’s People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C. The same thing happened in 2019 when millions of people worldwide gathered in their respective countries before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, and again in 2022 when Fridays for Future carried out global strikes in protest of global heating. These events received significant news coverage.

If you can’t find a rally or march to attend, you should talk to like-minded individuals to organize your own. There are climate change activists everywhere, so you won’t have to look very hard to find people who want to help. Be sure to promote your event early and often so that you can achieve a high turnout.

Rallies and marches can be especially effective when you have local issues related to climate that you could rally around. If you want to learn more about creating a successful rally or march, look no further than learning from many young climate activists who have both organized and attended rallies or marches to help our planet.

2. Use Social Media

We all know social media has power. Online platforms can work as tools to help you educate more people. It might not seem like much to share, like, and comment on posts, but you’d be surprised at how much influence those actions have. You only need to see one tweet to change your perspective.

Try using your online presence to the planet’s advantage. An easily-digestible post with accurate information can do wonders. If you don’t have time to create that content, you should look for social media accounts that promote sustainable living and discuss environmental topics. From there, you can follow these accounts and share their content.

Be careful what you share on social media, however. Some people have promoted sustainability while also taking tourist trips that are anything but sustainable and end up sending mixed messages to their followers. Spreading public awareness can also sometimes backfire, as in the case of slow lorises having an increasing demand for them as pets , which has put this animal in danger of extinction.

Research each topic and craft your messages carefully to have the greatest chance of making a positive change.

3. Contact Elected Officials

Our elected officials have more authority than anyone else. After all, they write and sign legislation that becomes law. It’s vital to put people in office who want to protect our planet. By contacting them, you can do your best as a constituent to raise awareness about environmental issues.

If you have an issue you want to address, you should contact local and state legislators via email or phone. They might already have a solution, but you need to hold them accountable either way. It’s also smart to learn about their backgrounds so you know whether to vote for them during the next election.

Tips for contacting elected officials include:

• Identify yourself: The first paragraph of your letter or email should identify you as a constituent. It should also briefly explain why you’re writing to the legislator. 
• Keep it brief: Ideally, a letter or email should be one page long or less.
• Be original: There are plenty of pre-written letters you can simply sign and send to a legislator, but original correspondence helps you stand out from the crowd. Consider using a pre-written letter as a template to write your own unique message.
• Be succinct: Sometimes, less is more. Choose a maximum of three main points to address in your correspondence.
• Get personal: Does the legislation you’re writing about affect your life personally? If so, tell the legislator about it. Include a short story about how the legislation will affect you and your community. 
• Be respectful: It’s fine to take a firm stance on an issue, but always keep your message respectful — even if you disagree with a legislator politically. 
• Include your address: Many legislators are too busy to send a response. However, including your address gives them a chance to reply if they have time. It also solidifies the fact that you are a constituent.

4. Recommend Books and Movies

It’s not always easy to conceptualize climate change. This phenomenon doesn’t affect us in ways we can immediately see, hear or feel. The world might be getting warmer — but that’s not necessarily remarkable to the average person. As a result, you should try recommending media that helps your friends and family learn about climate change more tangibly.

Watch something like Our Planet or Before the Flood for your next movie night. You can also lend reads such as The Uninhabitable Earth and How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos to your loved ones. These resources offer a more accessible and intriguing way for people to learn about climate change.

Reading is also a great way to help people of all ages challenge their thinking and learn from other opinions. Whether it’s encouraging your children to read about nature and wildlife or starting a book club in which you tackle the latest non-fiction books on climate and the environment, reading helps us all understand more about our place in the world.

5. Be Accommodating

There are times when activists can seem unapproachable. If you’re using buzzwords like “net zero” and “carbon footprint” without explaining them, you can’t expect everyone to listen to what you have to say. Your message won’t seem relatable. A person who adjusts their vocabulary accordingly will reach more people.

This method isn’t “dumbing down” specific concepts. It’s simply speaking to people in a language they understand. Try to incorporate more straightforward phrases into your vocabulary.

For example, instead of mentioning a company’s carbon footprint, you could talk about how much greenhouse gas — especially carbon dioxide — the business emits when manufacturing and shipping its products. Rather than saying a corporation is carbon neutral, explain that it removes just as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it emits. These small changes can accommodate people who aren’t as well versed in climate policy as you are.

You can even share stories and anecdotes as a way to make things personal. These tactics will make a difference.

6. Write Articles and Create Videos

Do you have a creative streak? If so, you should consider putting out content to raise awareness about environmental issues. This method will be especially useful when you want to inspire hope or shine a light on unknown topics. There’s always room for more articles and videos about how people can make a difference.

You can use online platforms like blogs and YouTube to publish your content. Eventually, you should have a repository of content that helps raise awareness. We can never have too much information surrounding climate change.

Be sure to use your social media presence to promote your content. There’s a higher chance people will see everything that way. You can also reach out to publications to see whether you can be featured.

7. Learn the Nuances of Recycling and Composting

More people are taking advantage of curbside and city recycling programs, while others are engaging with modern composting methods because of environmentalist trends on social media. While these are severely impactful actions to create environmental awareness among your household and loved ones who visit, leading by the wrong example is frequently a byproduct of well-intended enthusiasm for climate action.

Many people need to research more before engaging with recycling or composting and end up doing them incorrectly. This is how wishcycling came into existence — putting something in recycling that you’re unsure about and hoping the facility takes care of it. 

Actions like this, while framed with positive motivations, have harmful side effects. Inappropriate recyclable gum up machinery, causing breakdowns. Too many faults lead to decreased funding because they aren’t meeting metrics, potentially leading to dismantling city recycling altogether. 

Composting operates similarly. Whether you use a countertop composter or a worm bin, it’s essential to show your household and visitors the suitable protocol. This way, if they are inspired to begin their climate activist journeys, they start on the right track. 

8. Combating Consumerism and Capitalism

People’s purchasing habits are among the sneakiest yet impactful environmental issues of the modern era. Increased e-commerce caused shopping-related emissions to skyrocket. Influencer content on social media exacerbates this behavior, as they normalize excessive, frequent purchases. Raising awareness about this issue requires people to do a few things:

• Despite their convenience, actively boycott corporations with negative environmental impacts, such as Amazon, SHEIN, and Walmart.
• Unsubscribe and unfollow influencer content where most of their content is hauls or sponsorships for products with an adverse impact.
• Support local.
• Tell friends and family you want to avoid shopping as a hobby or a way to spend quality time.
• Have a secondhand-first mentality.
• Mend and repair instead of buying something new.

The constant need to spend and obtain material possessions is a thought process embedded in most developed nations. Overcoming this by practicing slow, intentional shopping practices leads to far less waste and condemns a system meant for environmental exploitation and labor crises. 

9. Perform a Trash Audit

There is nothing that is going to make someone more aware of the waste they produce than a trash audit. Encourage your household or office to do one to raise awareness on several environmental issues, including single-use plastics, e-waste, and more.

Place sheets of paper with pens near all trash receptacles. Make everyone write down every item they throw away, whether a candy wrapper or an iPhone. Set a deadline for the audit to end — it could be a week or a month.

At the end of the period, everyone involved will know the items they throw away most. Repeated items, like coffee pods, Q-tips, or banana peels, could be catalysts for how to shave waste production. Each item can produce a goal or encourage an eco-friendly replacement. Otherwise, people may not understand precisely how much trash they throw away. 

10. Prioritize Eco-Financial Responsibility

There are several ways to raise awareness about the environmental impact of where you put your money and investments. Let’s start with personal spending.

The perfect way to tackle this issue is to take your money from chain banks and place it in local or eco-friendly institutions. Most banks benefit from fossil fuel investments or other questionable initiatives — putting your money in these businesses indirectly supports environmental destruction. The more people switch to local, climate-aware banks, the more toxic banks struggle to support their dangerous interests.

Additionally, investments have a carbon footprint too. Many people discuss their investment portfolios and how well the S&P 500 treats them. Though index funds and other assets may be reliable because you’re supporting successful companies, many of these organizations have horrific environmental impacts. Numerous top-performing enterprises do little to curb their emissions for ever-increasing profits. 

Green investing is a novel and eco-conscious way to put money toward environmentally cognizant projects and companies. Would you instead put your money toward green energy innovations or a tech company illegally dumping e-waste in underdeveloped regions? 

The Importance of Action

Even though we all know the importance of taking action for the environment, how many of us do anything about it? Knowing what to do is just the first step — we need to take that knowledge and turn it into action.

According to Yale’s 2021 climate opinions map, 72% of American adults believe global warming is happening. Yet how many Americans are taking steps based on these beliefs? We conducted a survey of the American public to find out how many are taking action to raise awareness for the environment. Here are the results.

According to our survey, nearly 50% of Americans have taken zero action to raise environmental awareness. This indicates that even though many might recognize, in theory, the importance of protecting the environment, far fewer are going out of their way to support the idea. But if we want real change to happen, we need to start living out our beliefs today.

Ways to Raise Awareness About Environmental Issues

It’s essential for people who care for the planet to raise awareness about climate change. If we want to protect the Earth, we need everyone’s participation. Consider exploring these ideas to help you speak up and educate others. Your efforts can not only help inspire others to act but also change the future of our world and everyone in it.

Last updated on February 28, 2024

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Need for environmental awareness.

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The need to spread environmental awareness is enormous in the context of successfully addressing environmental problems. It is linked to environmental education.

On the one hand, provision of environmental education creates greater awareness in individuals and communities with respect to putting environmental resources to use even while conserving them. On the other hand, greater environmental awareness increases the scope of environmental education—as a discipline as well as inclusion of aspects of it within the scope of other disciplines.

Various media and means are used to spread environmental awareness among the people. The electronic media and the print media are the major mediums of spreading information about environment among the populace—educating them about environmental concerns and ways to address these. News, features, talk shows and discussions on television and radio are increasingly focusing on environmental themes of today.

Global warming, air and water pollution, overuse of fertilisers, the negative implication of use of plastics and polythene, conservation of energy and fuel resources, all these are topics of current media debate. Newspapers and magazines too are, one may say, more environment conscious than ever before. Articles and analyses explore the environmental debacle that our globe is headed towards and create awareness in the common man about environmental problems.

Schools and universities play an enormously significant role in generating environmental awareness among children and the youth. Textbooks reveal an increasing concern with environmental problems and solutions and numerous courses are available at the postgraduate level that provide environmental education relating to management and conservation of environment, environmental health, social ecology and so on.

The issue of environmental education has been a major cause of concern. Several national and international seminars, conferences and workshops have stressed the need of environmental education.

The United Nations Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972 played a key role in the emergence of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UNESCO held an International Workshop on Environmental Education (ICEE) at Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1975 to identify the guiding principles of promoting environmental awareness education.

It was followed by the International Conference on Environmental Education at Tbilisi, USSR, in 1977 which formulated objectives and principles for developing environmental education at formal and non-formal levels.

The ICEE has been held at New Delhi in the past—in 1980 and in 1985. It was observed during these conferences that the need of the hour was to help create social consciousness and awareness about the harm caused by ecological disruptions.

Environmental Education Goals :

The need for environmental education is recognised by all but there is little actual experience or knowledge about the way to provide it.

The objective of such education is that individuals and social groups should become aware, acquire knowledge, develop attitudes, skills and abilities and be able to address real-life environmental problems. Integrated inter-disciplinary and holistic education is to be provided to all sections of the population. It would first of all require a new approach to education itself—an approach which cuts across different subjects in schools and universities.

The goals of environmental education as pointed out by the UNESCO are to create environmental awareness in the world population—an awareness about the whole environment and problems associated with it and generate commitment in people to work individually and in unison towards solving existing problems and preventing new ones from emerging.

Objectives:

The objectives of environmental education formulated at the UNESCO’s Tbilisi Conference (1977) were as follows:

i. Acquiring an awareness of the whole environment and the many problems that have arisen with regard to human misuse of environment and developing a sensitivity in people in this context.

ii. Groups and individuals must gain skills for identifying and solving environmental problems.

iii. To help people gain experiences and gains a basic understanding of the environment and related problems.

iv. Help people acquire values and feelings of concern for the environment and encourage their participation in improvement and safeguarding of our environment.

v. Ensure evaluation of environmental measures and programmes in terms of ecological, economic, social, aesthetic and educational factors.

vi. Provide to all an opportunity to get involved at all levels in the task of resolving environmental problems.

Guiding Principles:

The guiding principles laid down by the UNESCO ICEE at Tbilisi in 1977 were as follows:

i. The need is to consider the environment as a whole, that is, the natural, technological, social, economic, political, cultural, moral, historical and aesthetic environment.

ii. The need is to have a continuous life process of environmental education—from pre-school level to formal and non-formal education levels.

iii. An interdisciplinary approach to spread awareness of environmental problems and knowledge about environment is necessary.

iv. Major environmental issues are to be ‘ examined from local, national, regional and international perspectives.

v. The complex nature of environmental problems are to be recognised and critical thinking and problem-solving skills need to be developed in people.

vi. The value of local, national and international cooperation in addressing environmental problems is to be highlighted.

vii. The need is to use available knowledge about the environment and the many available approaches to teaching and learning.

viii. Learners must be acquainted with the real causes of environmental problems and the way these get expressed and must be encouraged to participate in prevention and resolving environmental problems.

ix. School-level education needs to link up aspects of sensitivity to environment, knowledge of environment and problem-solving.

x. The need is to stress on current as well as potential environmental situations.

xi. All plans for social, economic and other kinds of growth and development must pay attention to environmental aspects.

Classification of Programmes:

Understanding the dire need for creating environmental awareness and ensuring a holistic environmental education to all, a classification of environmental education programmes has been worked out. Newman’s (1981)

Classification stresses on three aspects:

Environmental studies, environmental science and environmental engineering.

Environmental studies is concerned with environmental disturbance and reducing its impact through changes in society. This can be related to social sciences.

Environmental science is concerned with the study of processes in environment (water, soil, air and organisms) that result in pollution or degradation of environment. It deals with setting up a standard that is clean, safe and healthy for the natural ecosystem as well as human life. This is related to physical and natural sciences.

Environmental engineering is the study of the technical processes that help in reducing pollution and assessing the impact of these on environment. It is related to engineering sciences.

In the USA, the National Environmental Education Act, passed by the Congress in 1990, is aimed at improving understanding among the people about the natural and built environment and the relationship between human beings and environment.

It also aims to encourage post- secondary school students to take up careers in environment. Overall, the objective is to develop awareness and appreciation of our environment, familiarise students about current environmental issues and cultivate investigative, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills in various environ­mental problems.

Related Articles:

• Environmental Education: Objectives, Aims and Principles of Environmental Education
• Importance of Environmental Education in India

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The impact of chinese public environmental awareness on environmental behavior: an analysis based on china national surveys in 2003, 2010 and 2021.

1. Introduction

2. theoretical analysis, 3. materials and methods, 3.1. research area and data sources, 3.2. variable setting, 3.3. analysis method, 4.1. changes in environmental awareness and environmental behavior, 4.1.1. analysis on the changes of public environmental awareness and behavior at the national level, analysis of the change of public awareness at the national level, analysis on the change of public environmental behavior at the national level, 4.1.2. analysis of changes in public environmental awareness and behavior in different regions, analysis of the changes in environmental awareness in different regions, analysis of environmental behavior change in different regions, 4.2. the relationship between environmental awareness and environmental behavior, 4.2.1. direct effect analysis, 4.2.2. analysis of mediating effects, 4.2.3. relationship between different environmental behaviors, 4.3. robustness test, 5. discussion, 6. conclusions and policy implications, 6.1. conclusions, 6.2. policy implications, 7. limitations and future research directions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Zhang, J.; Xue, C.; Hou, G. The Impact of Chinese Public Environmental Awareness on Environmental Behavior: An Analysis Based on China National Surveys in 2003, 2010 and 2021. Land 2024 , 13 , 1418. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13091418

Zhang J, Xue C, Hou G. The Impact of Chinese Public Environmental Awareness on Environmental Behavior: An Analysis Based on China National Surveys in 2003, 2010 and 2021. Land . 2024; 13(9):1418. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13091418

Zhang, Jinrong, Caixia Xue, and Guangjian Hou. 2024. "The Impact of Chinese Public Environmental Awareness on Environmental Behavior: An Analysis Based on China National Surveys in 2003, 2010 and 2021" Land 13, no. 9: 1418. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13091418

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Student Essays

Essay on Environmental Awareness | Importance & Ways to Promote it

Environmental awareness refers to an act of spreading information regarding the role and importance of environment for human life so as to take strong measures to protect the environment from a lot of environmental life hazards. This essay talks on Environmental life hazard, concept of environmental awareness, need and its importance in our Life. This essay is very helpful for children and students in school exams and written tests.

Essay on Environmental Awareness | Concept, Importance & Measures to be taken to Promote Environmental awareness

The place we live in forms the environment. Environment is sum total of all the things that surround us. It is a set of relationships between and among all these things. The environmental awareness is to understand the fragility of our environment and the importance of its protection. Promoting environmental awareness is an easy way to become an environmental steward and participate in creating a brighter future for our children.

Concept of Environmental Awareness:

Environmental awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the environment around us. It is the understanding of how our actions impact the environment and how the environment impacts us. It includes an understanding of environmental concepts, principles, and laws. It also includes taking action to protect the environment.

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Importance of Environmental Awareness

Our environment is under constant threat. Our actions have a direct impact on the environment and the health of our planet. We need to be aware of the consequences of our actions if we want to protect our environment.

Environmental awareness is important for multiple reasons. Firstly, it is necessary for the survival of humans and other species. We depend on the environment for our food, water, and air. If we do not take care of the environment, we will not be able to survive. Secondly, environmental awareness is important for the health of our planet. The Earth is facing many environmental problems, such as climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

These problems are caused by human activity, and they are having a negative impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. If we do not take action to protect the environment, these problems will get worse and the Earth will become less habitable for humans and other species. Thirdly, environmental awareness is important for the future of our planet. Our actions today will have an impact on the future of the Earth. If we do not take care of the environment, we will leave a legacy of environmental problems for future generations.

How Can We Promote Environmental Awareness?

There are many ways to promote environmental awareness. Here are some suggestions:

1. Educate yourself and others about environmental issues. 2. Advocate for policies that protect the environment. 3. Support businesses that are environmentally responsible. 4. Reduce your own environmental impact. 5. Recycle and compost as much as possible. 6. Save energy by conserving resources. 7. Avoid products with excessive packaging. 8. Buy eco-friendly products. 9. Plant trees and support forest conservation. 10. Participate in citizen science projects.

Responsibilities of Students to promote environmental awareness

There are a number of things students can do to promote environmental awareness, firstly, we need to educate ourselves about the issues and then educate others. We can support businesses that are environmentally responsible, reduce our own environmental impact and recycle as much as possible. Planting trees is also a great way to promote awareness as well as helping to conserve forests. Finally, we can participate in citizen science projects which help to collect data on the environment.

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Environmental awareness is important for the survival of humans and other species, the health of our planet, and the future of our planet. We can promote environmental awareness by educating ourselves and others about environmental issues, advocating for policies that protect the environment, supporting environmentally responsible businesses, reducing our own environmental impact, recycling and composting as much as possible, saving energy, avoiding products with excessive packaging, buying eco-friendly products, planting trees and supporting forest conservation, and participating in citizen science projects. Let’s take action to protect our environment!

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The Importance of Public Awareness in Environmental Protection: A Case Study in Paktika, Afghanistan

Public awareness and knowledge of environmental protection are crucial to avoid environmental pollutions. Lack of relevant scientific principles and lack of public awareness of environmental or other projects are hindrances to controlling environmental pollution. The objective of the study was to identify the importance of public awareness in environmental pollution management. Environmental education and public awareness are crucial to avoid environmental pollutions. The study aims to analyze public awareness of environmental protection. The study was conducted in Sharana, the center of Paktika province, and was attended by 71 students from the Paktika Higher Education Institute's Education Faculty. Questionnaires and field observations have been selected as methodologies for this research. The results of the study show that 59.2 percent of survey participants consider public awareness and 35.2 percent think that enforcement of environmental laws is important. People in Paktika do not take part in environmental activities due to a lack of public awareness and throw away pollutants everywhere. If this situation continues, it is not far off that it will turn into a disaster.

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A quantitative study was conducted in 1998 to investigate differences in perception, knowledge, awareness, and attitude with regard to environmental problems between educated and community groups and to identify human-dimension factors to improve public perception, knowledge, awareness, and attitude in relation to global environmental conservation concerns in developing countries. Educated and community groups in Jakarta were interviewed, and data obtained from a total of 537 males aged 30-49 years were analyzed. The data were evaluated by the chi-squared test and logistic regression was applied after factor analysis. The results show that: (1) The perception, knowledge, awareness, and attitude of educated subjects in regard to regional and global environmental problems were much better than those of subjects in the community group; (2) The highest 'yes' response in the community group was in regard to perception of AIDS (82.9%). Few subjects in the community group knew the effects and the cause or source of environmental problems, however, they were well informed about AIDS (86.4% for effects and 93.9% for cause or source). The conclusions are: (1) subjects in the educated group had better perception, more detailed knowledge, were more aware, and had better attitudes in regard to regional and global environmental problems than those in the community group; (2) more education is needed to develop environmental actions and ethics in developing countries; (3) non-formal environmental education through popular mass media should be used more widely and frequently, and more detailed information on the environment should be provided to literate people by newspapers and other means.

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How to improve environmental communication for public awareness

• January 15, 2019
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I often think about the ‘how’ questions. Especially when it comes to making environmental communication for public awareness more effective. This article reminds you of what environmental communication is and why it matters. But it also looks at some examples and how and when to effectively set up an environmental communication campaign.

There already exist industries that can influence the behavior of the public. And these industries are especially effective when it comes to promoting consumption. We have the knowledge!

So, why is influencing public’s pro-environmental behavior still such a challenge?

Environmental communication lacks accessible formats that focus on building relationships with its audience. We can learn from fields such as strategic communication, marketing, or sociology. What these fields do is they show us the importance of getting to know our audience better. So, good communicators focus on building relationships on a personal level. They get to know their audience’s communities and they learn to speak ‘their language’.

For instance, images of hungry polar bears may make the climate crisis quite distant. In fact, as distant as the polar bears to many of us actually are.

Currently, the environmental communication for public awareness emphasizes the importance of the environment. Often even too much. All that to such an extent that it tends to forget about relevant forms of reaching out to those concerned. We cannot expect to change the behavior of people that we’re not reaching with our messages.

How to convince a bunch of cool snowboarders about the importance of pro-environmental behavior?

Use their playgrounds as an example. Images of melting glaciers or mountain areas that no longer receive enough snow might get their attention. It touches them directly.

Environmental Communication for the public: Their awareness and beyond.

Environmental communication messages may sound different to each of us. And our perceptions of environmental issues differ based on various aspects. For example, it changes based on where we’re from, our interests or the stages of life we’re currently at.

So, we need to focus on setting the right objectives and targeting the right audience. Only then we start building up public awareness and influential environmental communication campaign.

Before we communicate, it’s good to learn as much about our audience as possible. By getting to know the audience, we get insights in our target group’s behavior, needs, values and motives .

Knowing about our audience’s place or community attachment can help us set the right tone too.

Additionally, knowledge of their geographic area reveals local environmental issues our audience faces. No matter if they are aware of them or not. But relating to these issues makes our message by default more relevant to them.

How to convince a bunch of cool snowboarders about the importance of pro-environmental behavior? Use their playgrounds as an example. Images of melting glaciers, or mountain areas receiving less snow get their attention. For them these messages are more relatable and tangible.

Familiarity with our audience sets more realistic objectives of our environmental communication campaign. It may still be hard to transform a rural farmer into a polar bear conservationist. But with the right words and local angle to the problem, we may at least get her interested.

What is environmental communication?

Environmental communication, simply like any other form of communication, is based on picking the right words or images to convey an important message.

When I researched the definition of environmental communication, Besley (2015) made me grin. Exactly my thoughts, I thought! He criticizes the environmental communication field trying too hard to reinvent the wheel. Communication focuses on picking the right words or images to convey an important message. Environmental communication, like any other form of communication, does that too. The adjective ‘environmental’ only shows it concerns nature and the environment.

So, environmental communication, is a means of influencing public environmental awareness. It is not by default pro-environmental but rather about public relationships with nature. It appears in many different forms ranging from audio, visual to written messages. It happens on many different levels. That means it concerns the general public, academics, policy-makers or even the governments.

How does Environmental Communication work?

Scientifically speaking, environmental communication borrows elements of risk communication and science communication.

When it comes to risk communication, it is not always linked to environmental risks. It deals with incalculable, man-made threats that we know about but don’t see.  Its main aim is to educate the concerned audience on how to best respond to these threats. So, environmental communication aims to educate the public about overcoming environmental threats. It suggests how the public should react to the changes affecting our and nature’s well-being.

For science communication, the similarity lies in the motive. Environmental communication borrows the function of making science accessible. It ensures the public, media, policy makers and other audience gets access to science . It just does it from an environmental angle.

To sum up: environmental Communication has 2 main social functions , through which we can;

Educate, inform and empower people.

It’s a pragmatic way to make people grasp, feel and change for the better.

Influence people’s behaviour.

Through for instance shaping or constituting certain ways of seeing the relations of us humans towards nature and the environment. In other words, it conveys messages that can frame the ways, in which our audience perceives the world. For example, in a way that portrays certain behaviours as normal.

Advertising, marketing and public outreach have been basically doing this for decades. These disciplines influence the public’ trends by communicating values and needs to the carefully selected target group.

These fields have long been sourcing from interdisciplinary research valuing demographic data, sociological trends or psychological incentivisation.

On the academic level; communication of a problem should get people to change their behaviour no matter what field it is in. Environmental communication would, therefore, benefit from drawing from different fields and not solely from natural sciences perspectives

Why does environmental communication actually matter?

It is saddening that organisations that offer solutions to environmental challenges? at hand often lack the capacity to reach out to the public.

As a result, we take less fortunate decisions, because we don’t have access to the right information. Little awareness can even lead to tolerating unfair practices, exploitation of nature and people for the vision of corporate profit. 

An Environmental communication campaign can empower the public and raise their awareness about issues affecting them. It is influential and informative and potentially offers solutions at hand to people, businesses, or even governments.

Environmental communication also matters for influencing the media by feeding broadcasting and publishing media with accessible, up-to-date information.

Think of where we find most of the environmental information. Environmental information mostly comes from official sources, that report about the environment in rather formal or even conservative ways. This creates a large gap between these institutions and the general public, especially when it comes to understanding the information.

But it is also hard work for the journalists. If media are to communicate about the environment using only the official sources, cracking the ‘official’ language also takes time. Time that journalists don’t have when writing about the environment.

Ending up with plain news that inform rather than inspire participation of the public is then no surprise. 

Accessibility of environmental information

Therefore, effective environmental communication is important for setting a better tone, in which the general public learns about environmental issues. Tone that speaks directly to the public and inspires it to actively participate in pro-environmental behaviours.

Just as many environmental problems relate to our behaviors, so they do to how we learn about the problems.

By now we know that carefully targeted and crafted messages relating to environmental change can influence people to change . So, we need more carefully thought-through messages that relate to specific people at specific locations. We need to ‘translate the official’ formal languages into journalist-friendly forms that inspire the general public to act.

Let’s have a look at some examples of how environmental communication can raise public awareness and influence pro-environmental behaviour.

Examples of effective environmental communication.

It’s not about perfecting your messages and then leaving the people with it alone. Effective environmental communication doesn’t end with informing people and throwing them into the abyss of environmental doom and gloom.

It’s a rather long-term process of building up relationships leading the publics’ next steps to a change.

Both Patagonia and Protect Our Winters (POW), although they closely work together, pursue very inspiring ways of environmental communication.

In silence, I would like to say that it is also their way of marketing. Marketing does not have to be evil and works on many more levels than promoting consumption.

Patagonia is not only an outdoor clothing company. It is a community of outdoor enthusiasts and environmental activists that is rapidly growing all around the globe. Amongst all, it is a retail pioneer that actively demotes consumption for the sake of environmental protection. And despite the fact that Patagonia encourages people not to buy their products, the company’s worth as of 2018 reached $1 billion.

Patagonia supports and empowers communities around the world that face environmental injustice and helps them overcome environmental challenges.

All with the priority of creating a better world for everyone. It emphasises well-being of threatened communities and the well-being resulting from the relationships we have with nature.

Patagonia’s environmental communication campaign empowered many communities around the world and inspired many consumers to go beyond pro-environmental behaviour. It crafts very touching, community-inspired stories that people can relate to. Stories that in fact turn consumers into environmental activists.

Protect Our Winters (POW)

POW is an excellent example of how to convince groups of snowboarders, skiers and mountaineers about the importance of pro-environmental behaviour. Their environmental communication strategy adopted a powerful activist stance. It realised the importance of connecting to people, who are directly affected by climate change – the winter sports communities.

POW speaks the language of these communities, but it also speaks the language of well-informed environmental scientists. Languages that are like chalk and cheese at first, but their knowledge proves important. It transmits the messages back and forth, as POW listens to the communities the same way it listens to the scientists publishing their research.

But most importantly, POW is concerned for the environment and the homes of each of these communities. They relate to the local communities because of their geographical outreach and ambassadors from around the world. But their outreach, similarly to Patagonia, goes beyond the snow enthusiasts. But through them, they manage to raise awareness of political-environmental issues amongst the broader public, where these communities come from.

What is it that works for Patagonia and POW?

When looking into what is it that makes environmental communication work, a certain pattern seems to be emerging:

• Showing what is normal: highlighting pro-environmental behaviour as normal simply shifts the way people think about how they should act. For instance, Patagonia promotes recycling and fixing of old clothes, or not purchasing new clothes when not needed. When a company that sells clothes does that, it clearly demonstrates that this is the norm – how it is usually done.
• Personal Appeal: As Lauren MacCallum from POW UK said: “don’t introduce yourself as an activist but as who you really are.” She is a snowboarder from the Scottish Highlands and she managed to build up a solid community of environmental activists. They have a good influence on not only the snowboarder’s and mountain lovers’ pro-environmental behaviour, but also on the communities living there. Because as her quote concludes “activism without a community is fucking useless”.
• Target specific concerns, motivations and cultural, religious and political values: Both Patagonia and POW manage to target and empower specific communities. They both target the outdoor communities, but both from the local angles relating to the direct cultural and natural environments of the communities.
• Eco-centric vs. Ego-centric values: Both campaigns promote the wellbeing of nature and communities. But why is that interesting is that they craft their messages in a language that is approachable to the given communities. The communities listen and reflect on the relationships they have established with nature and how these influence their wellbeing.

What are the forms of environmental communication for the public?

The forms of environmental communication range from an officially published report to a conversation about nature to an environmental campaign.

There is no single form of environmental communication and each form has a different function, content and context. While conversations may inspire the public to participate in pro-environmental behaviours, the official forms are more relevant for decision makers.

Environmental communication happens online and offline, using words, images, videos or the combination of all. With 4.3 billion active internet users, internet formats are becoming the most informative, educational and influential for the public. That ranges from online news, social media posts and campaigns, images and movies. The offline formats extend their reach to children or elderly through books, newspapers and magazines, advertisements, talks and many more. 

No matter the format, environmental communication tells powerful stories about the environment. Story-telling, therefore, supports all verbal or non-verbal formats of communication, where environment sets the scene.

On the internet we see movies, or images that show the impacts of the environmental change. With words, the stories can go deeper and leave a more emotional impact.

Advertising and online marketing both increasingly borrow stories that relate to the environment and to the people these campaigns target. By inspiring pro-environmental behaviour through their campaigns, they also raise environmental awareness of the wider public.

How to improve your Environmental Communication for public awareness.

Before you even consider a specific form for your environmental communication campaign, it is essential to think of a few things from the beginning:

• Objectives – What do you want to achieve? This could be very specific. In fact, the more precise you are with forming your objectives, the better you can imagine where your campaign may be necessary and whom to address.
• Place – Where do you want to achieve it? Information on where the problem occurs can not only help you better define your audience, but you will also learn about the geography of your audience. Any information from the affected region leads to better targeted messages.
• Audience – Who do you want to engage? Learn about the further demographics of who has the capacity to change anything about a problem. Learn the language of those who you want to act upon your campaign. Target communities rather than individuals and learn about how they respond to different messages. And last but not least, once you are sure of the answers for the above questions;
• Pick a form; Social Media / Podcast / News / Videos / Blogs…
• In any case learn to ‘speak your audiences’ language’. Use language that your audience can relate to, so that your message is clear to them. Consider terminology, tone and but also length and complexity of your communication.    

Environmental Communication and the public

So, environmental communication is a commitment. It’s about learning to understand what the general public can relate to and about sticking around with them. Bring stories that they can relate to on local and familiar levels. Stories that touch the communities emotionally. The words and images are important, but they are not going to change the minds of people who have no relation to them.  If we want to inspire change, first we have to learn, then understand and talk only once we know how to.

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