Alison Atherton and Emma Partridge
In this day and age, you’d have to be living under a rock not to be aware of the debate raging over sustainable futures and climate change. But exactly which side of the argument are university students on? Researchers Alison Atherton and Emma Partridge from the University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) conducted a survey aimed at answering this question.
Although there has been much energy directed at educating communities and school groups about the environmental crisis, very little research has focussed on the attitudes of university students and their concern for the changing climate, and what – if anything – they are doing about it. Previous research carried out by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and the Australian Student Environmental Network has gathered opinions from students who are already environmentally active.
But what about those who are silent on the matter, or whose opinions barely reach more than a whisper? “These are the types of students the survey was aimed at,” Atherton explains. “We wanted to particularly reach people who haven’t been traditionally involved with environmental activism or environmental groups.” But were the findings surprising?
According to Atherton and Partridge, the most surprising result was not the encouragingly strong response of 1500 students, or the high levels of concern amongst those respondents – 59 per cent of students answered, ‘climate change is a major problem that deserves serious attention’, and a further 15 per cent answered, ‘I think climate change is the biggest problem we face today’ – but the biggest surprise was the willingness of students to take personal action on climate change. As many as 69 per cent of students said they were interested in learning more about how to reduce personal greenhouse emissions and 78 percent said that in the past year they had taken some level of action to do so. Despite these promising results, the survey also shows there are still barriers to students taking the level of action that they would like to.
“It is interesting for UTS staff to see how interested the students are. Many said that they want to respond, but the lack of time or knowledge about how to do so is preventing them getting involved. There can be an assumption that if students aren’t doing something it is because they don’t care. In fact, the results indicate the opposite; they do care, but there are barriers to them being more involved than they might like to be,” Atherton says.
Atherton and Patridge believe their findings should instigate action and pave the way for the development of opportunities aimed at knocking down these barriers. The results of the survey are clear - were environmental activities available to students, they would be more than willing to participate. Partridge says, “It would be great to see the university respond to this level of student concern and interest in ways which are fun and engaging for students.”
ISF responded to this demand by running a free training weekend for students who had actively volunteered. Like the research, the training session was funded by the NSW Environmental Trust and was open to all NSW students, but particularly those who were not active environmentalists.
“We were not excluding those people who were already active,” says Partridge, “but the idea was to train people who will train others – to impart knowledge to those who don’t currently have access to it. Social networks are the glue that holds this idea together so we were especially looking for candidates who were interested in using the skills they learnt within their own social contacts, whether they were sporting groups, within faculties, or any other kind of social group.”
Find out more about the survey and results of the innovative training program.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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