Environmental awareness and education among college students in China

The objective of environmental education is to foster clear awareness of and concern about environmental issues as well as equipping individuals with knowledge and skills needed to protect and improve the environment. This is done in attempt to create new patterns of behavior in individuals and society as a whole towards the improvement of the environment. The environmental education in affluent Western nations helped build an active environmental movement that resulted in the creation of effective environmental policies. Contentious environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, in combination with a shift from manufacturing to mostly services, has significantly improved the quality of ambient air in those nations. This is something that has not yet taken place in China, where emphasis on rapid economic growth has come at a serious cost of environmental degradation. Lack of active environmentalism and effective environmental policies in one of the largest economies in the world could be due to the fact that Chinese youth do not have sufficient knowledge or awareness of pressing environmental issues. We surveyed about 300 college students in Shanghai to assess their understanding of and concerns about air pollution, water pollution and food safety. We also assessed their knowledge of different measurements of real life ambient air pollution and the relationship between air pollution and health. Our results suggest that college students neither have sufficient knowledge about the environmental degradation in their country, nor do they care much about it. There is also a belief among students that the government is putting forth supposedly effective policies. This attitude leads to less need for public action. In this paper, we recommend greater emphasis on environmental education among college students, the future leaders of China.