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When Should Environmental Awareness Be a Policy Goal?

Assessing the Conditions Under Which Raising Awareness Increases Environmental Sustainability and Societal Resilience

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Book cover Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

Since the 1970s, governments have increasingly sought to achieve greater environmental awareness among their citizens using “soft” policy instruments like education and pro-social campaigns. The assumption has been that greater awareness among populations would result in changes in individuals’ behaviors, and reduce aggregate effects of environmental degradation in ways that could not easily be addressed through “hard” regulatory or economic instruments. Decades later, governments still invest in environmental campaigns and education, but the evidence for their effects on material improvements to the environment and societal benefits is not always clear. This chapter addresses why this is the case and categorizes the conditions under which governments may be most likely to find environmental awareness to be a rational target in pursuit of improvements in environmental conditions, and society may be most able to meet these challenges.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Subsequent United Nations conventions on climate change and biodiversity further codified this commitment to educational and public awareness programs within international environmental governance (Convention on Biodiversity 1992; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992).

  2. 2.

    Changes in the amount of time that children spend with electronic media, as opposed to playing outdoors, has sparked particular concern (Louv 2008). Pergams and Zaradic caution that the United States may be experiencing a decline in appreciation of nature, or biophilia, as a direct result of “videophilia” (2006).

  3. 3.

    A Pearson’s correlation (r) is a numerical measure of the strength of a relationship between two variables with a range of 0 (no association) to 1 (an extremely strong). Cohen’s rule of thumb is that a correlation of 0.10 as a small effect, 0.30 as a medium effect, and 0.50 as a large effect (Cohen 1992).

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Gifford and Danna Walker for reviewing this chapter.

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  1. George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Karen Akerlof

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  1. Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Vittorio Loreto

  2. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Muki Haklay

  3. Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg , Würzburg, Germany

    Andreas Hotho

  4. Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

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  5. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

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  6. VITO—Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Mol, Belgium

    Jan Theunis

  7. Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Torino, Italy

    Francesca Tria

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Akerlof, K. (2017). When Should Environmental Awareness Be a Policy Goal?. In: Loreto, V., et al. Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_15

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