The effect of education on the forest and non-forest students’ knowledge of environmental and climate change

Document Type : Research article

Authors

1 Assistant Prof., Department of Forestry, Ahar Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

2 Associate Prof., Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO), Tehran, Iran

3 Assistant Prof., Department of Animal Science Ahar Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

By considering environmental education as the basic source of knowledge to increase awareness of climate change and environmental issues in students, this was studied here by surveying students residing in Kalibar in the Arasbaran region (as forest dwellers) and Tabriz (as the non-forest dwellers). The main aim of this research was to quantify the students' information on environment and climate change and the effect of workshops in increasing their information. The statistical population consists of 69000 individuals, and data were collected from 221 intermediate-level students by questionnaires distributed in six schools. One school was randomly selected from each of the urban and rural areas of Kalibar, as well as from urban areas of Tabriz, resulting in 6 schools in total. The content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed through a panel of academic and executive specialists. The reliability was also measured using the Cronbach's alpha coefficient in environmental (0.74) and climate (0.84) fields. Based on the results, > 90% of students in both forest and non-forest areas emphasized the importance of the Arasbaran forests. Internet was mentioned as the most important source of environmental and climate information among the non-forest (42.1%) and forest (34.5%) students. The workshop held for both groups of individuals led to a relative increase of 10% in awareness of climate change. In addition, 34 and 15% of the students in non-forest and forest regions stated that they had previously no information on the climate change consequences, which was increased to 5 and 8% in the post-workshop period, respectively. After the workshop, 63.5 and 60.7% of the students in non-forest and forest regions believed that they could and should participate in climate change campaigns. Overall, the results of the research showed that the workshops had a significant effect on increasing the awareness as well as environmental information.

Keywords

References

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