The overlooked role of academic environmental organizations in addressing environmental education issues

摘要

Environmental education quality is one of the most important aspects concerning the present society, being linked to all the facets involved in environmental protection. Universities should play an important role in addressing this problem, by allowing students to develop the necessary experience and skills to become fully able to research and make decisions about the environment. However, environmental education may be regarded as worrying and far from offering solutions, despite the introduction of many environmental courses and study programmes in most important universities. Studies regarding children's perception of the environment (Snaddon, Turner, & Foster, 2008; Walshe, 2008) show that their thoughts are not too worrying, but when similar studies are performed on undergraduate students, the results are disappointing (Liu & Lin, 2015). Additionally, it is believed that environmental study programmes are quite inefficient (Clark et al, 2011a). Generally speaking, in various fields such as climate change or restoration ecology, it can be noticed that universities are not fully involved in a serious and comprehensive manner in addressing the global issues affecting the environment (Nelson, Schoennagel, & Gregory, 2008, Lemons, 2011).