Hope, Responsibility, and Action: How do young people view environmental issues?

Many young people struggle to link their personal actions with global problems. Despite concern about environmental issues, those uncertain connections can create confusion on how to take relevant environmentally related action. Furthermore, young people tend to think that government, rather than individuals, is primarily responsible for the environment. This can result in a discrepancy between understanding the source of environmental problems and how individual actions—such as voting, attending political rallies, or recycling—might create change. We may find ways to support young people in meaningfully linking these ideas by considering the factors that drive their concern for environmental issues and their understanding of effective environmental actions. Fostering a holistic approach to addressing multifaceted environmental problems may be especially important. This study's authors surveyed young people about their perceptions of environmental issues and actions.

Three-hundred-and-five high-school students (135 male and 170 female) between the ages of 12 and 18 answered, in class, a 9-item, survey about their attitudes and concerns regarding current environmental problems. The students attended one of five public high schools in Southeast Queensland, Australia. Researchers designed the three-section survey to measure: (1) attitudes about the environment and views of who is responsible for environmental problems, (2) the perceived relative importance of environmental threats, and (3) perceptions of the actions most critical in addressing environmentally related issues. Researchers designed the questions to understand students' general environmental concerns and whether a sense of hope and, relatedly, hopelessness, fueled their feelings. Using statistical analyses, and controlling for age and gender, the researchers looked for relationships across students' attitudes, views on responsibility for environmental problems, and perceived importance of environmental issues and actions.

The researchers found some “mismatched” environmental perceptions. As in previous studies, the researchers found that, overall, young people viewed environmental action as important, but the specific type of action that young people considered important was inconsistent with some of their other views. While students assigned a higher level of environmental responsibility to the government than to themselves, for example, they also ranked “writing to politicians” as the least important environmental action and “saving electricity” as the most important.

Respondents' sense of hope or hopelessness was critical to how they perceived environmental threats. In turn, those perceptions related to how they thought about responsibility and action. If the student believed that an action was useful, for example, then they were more likely to feel empowered to take that action. Young people who perceived the government as responsible for protecting the environment were more likely to indicate that global warming was an important environmental issue. Meanwhile, respondents who took personal responsibility for the environment were more likely to view resource consumption as the most important environmental issue. Overall, students' ideas about the environment were strongly influenced by their hope that people can work together to improve the environment.

The authors acknowledged the study's limitations. This study did not control for social and political drivers, which are likely influencers of young people's feelings of hope or hopelessness. Further, some of the questions were quite abstract in their structure and content. This abstractness may have limited respondents' abilities to interpret and respond to ideas related to complex environmental issues (such as, for example, “resource consumption”). Additional studies could strive to elucidate some of those confounding factors.