1.
Chapter Two
FEATURES OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
Instructor’s: - Mohammed I(MSc.).
Email: imu2019g@gmail.com
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Environmental Education and Communication, By: Mohammed Ibrahim (MSc.) 1
ASSOSA UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
AND ECONOMICS

2.
Awareness and sensitivity to the
environment
Environmental sensitivity
 Describes the ability of an individual to perceive and process
information about their environment.
 It is a basic feature found in many organisms that enables an
individual to adapt to different environmental conditions.
 Levels of Environmental Sensitivity often vary considerably
from individual to individual, with some being more and
others less sensitive to the same conditions.
 Such differences have been observed across many species
such as pumpkinseed fish, zebra finches, mice, non-human
primates and humans, indicating that there is a biological
basis to differences in sensitivity.
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Environmental Education and Communication, By: Mohammed Ibrahim (MSc.) 2

3.
Theoretical background
 The concept of Environmental Sensitivity integrates multiple
theories on how people respond to negative and positive
experiences.
 These include the frameworks of Diathesis-stress
model and Vantage Sensitivity, as well as the three leading
theories on more general sensitivity:
 Differential Susceptibility, Biological Sensitivity to Context,
and Sensory processing sensitivity
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Environmental Education and Communication, By: Mohammed Ibrahim (MSc.)
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4.
Diathesis-stress model
 According to the long-standing Diathesis-stress model,
people differ in their response to adverse experiences and
environments, with some individuals more negatively
affected by environmental stressors than others.
 The model proposes that such differences in response result
from the presence of "vulnerability" factors, which include
psychological (e.g., impulsive personality), physiological (e.g.,
high physiological reactivity) and genetic factors.
 Diathesis-stress model is helpful in understanding differences
in response to negative stressors, it does not consider or
describe differences in response to positive experiences.
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5.
Vantage sensitivity
 Describe individual differences in response to positive experiences
and environments.
 While some people appear to benefit particularly strongly from
positive experiences (e.g., positive parenting, supportive
relationships, psychological interventions),
 others appear to benefit less.
 While the Vantage Sensitivity framework considers individual
differences in response to positive experiences, it does not make
predictions about the response to negative experiences.
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6.
Biological Sensitivity
 Based on evolutionary thinking and proposes that an individual's
sensitivity to the environment is shaped by the quality of early life
experiences.
 For example, particularly negative or especially positive
childhood environments are understood to predict greater
physiological reactivity later in life.
 In contrast, sensitivity is expected to be lowest for individuals
with childhood environments that were neither extremely
beneficial nor extremely adverse.
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Environmental Education and Communication, By: Mohammed Ibrahim (MSc.) 6

7.
Cont.………….
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 Generally;- more sensitive individuals are characterized by sharp
perception as well as deeper processing of external information
due to neurobiological differences in the central nervous system,
which are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors.

8.
Environmental awareness
 Being environmentally aware means understanding how our
behaviour impacts the environment and committing to making
changes to our activities to protect the planet.
 The environmentalist movement in recent decades has prompted
many people to make both minor and substantial lifestyle
changes to live in a more environmentally friendly way.
 Being environmentally friendly means reducing your impact on
the environment as much as possible.
 Individuals affect the environment in a variety of ways including
pollution emission to land, air and water, use of natural resources,
energy consumption and waste
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9.
Knowledge and understanding of the
environment
 Knowledge is regarded as essential for successful action.
 This is not only the case for basic skills, such as reading and
writing, but also for highly sophisticated professional performance,
such as brain surgery
 Environmental knowledge is defined as the knowledge that integrates know-how
related to the functioning and problems of ecosystems.
 the civic behavior alternatives and the obtention of a greater environmental benefit.
 before a person can act, he or she must have some understanding
of the natural states of ecosystems and the processes within them
(system knowledge).
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10.
 And also know what can be done about environmental problems (action-
related knowledge).
 A third form of knowledge, knowledge about the benefit (effectiveness)
of environmentally responsible actions, is particularly relevant when
people have to choose from a pool of possible actions.
 System knowledge usually relates to the question of how ecosystems
operate or to knowledge about environmental problems A typical
example is knowledge of the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2)
and global climate change.
 Many of the scales currently used to measure environmental knowledge
conform to a system-knowledge If environmental system knowledge is
defined as ‘‘knowing what,’’
 then action-related knowledge is ‘‘knowing how,’’ or knowledge of
behavioral options and possible courses of action
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Cont.………….

11.
 For example, if people know that CO2 contributes to global warming,
they may still not know what actions they can take to reduce their
CO2 emissions.
 action-related knowledge is accessible by means of questioning, for
it can be articulated.
 It refers to information that either has direct relevance for action (if
I do not use my car, I produce less CO2) or indirect relevance (gray
energy is energy invested into products before I buy them––a fact
that I should consider when I buy certain products).
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Cont.………….

12.
 Buying a new, fuel-efficient car, for instance, can be a better way to cut
down CO2 emissions than driving an old car less often.
 The kind of knowledge required here, environmental effectiveness
knowledge, addresses the relative gain or benefit (i.e., the relative
conservational effectiveness) that is associated with a particular
behavior.
 This sort of knowledge has repeatedly been proposed as relevant for
successful action
 It has been labeled ‘‘relational knowledge,’’ ‘‘task knowledge’’ and
‘‘impact knowledge’’.
 With this form of knowledge, the focus in action-related knowledge has
obviously been extended from a mere knowing how to conserve to
knowing how to get the greatest environmental benefit.
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Cont.………….

13.
Attitudes of concern for the environment
 Environmental attitudes are an essential part of behaviour control, which either declines or
increases ecological quality between humans and nature.
 Environmental attitude can measure knowledge, affect, and intention based on conventional
perception.
 Environmental attitudes are described as ‘the collection of beliefs, affect and behavioural
intentions a person holds regarding environmentally-related activities or issues’
 A positive or negative attitude towards the behaviour, a subjective norm to
perform the bahaviour, and perceived control over the behaviour are
causes of intention.
 Attitude in turn is jointly determined by strengths of beliefs about
consequences of the behaviour and evaluations of these consequences.
 Value priorities play an important role for these evaluations.
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14.
 Environmental concern has been treated as an evaluation of, or an
attitude towards facts, one’s own behaviour, or others' behaviour with
consequences for the environment.
 It seems then as if environmental concern may refer to both a specfic
attitude directly determining intentions, or more broadly to a general
attitude or value orientation.
 environmental concern represents a new way of thinking called the New
Environmental Paradigm (NEP).
 In a second value orientation, environmental concern is tied to
anthropocentric altruism; people care about environmental quality
 mainly because they belief that a degraded environment poses a threat
to people's health.
 Thus, it is not the threat to the environment, but the threat to the well-
being of people that is of central concern
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Cont.………….

15.
 According to a third value orientation, environmental concern
expresses self-interest.
 For example, perceived personal threats caused by environmental
deterioration is an important factor underlying environmentally
responsible behaviour.
 Environmental concern is a function of some deeper cause, such as
underlying religious beliefs or post-materialistic values.
 More recently, in reviewing public opinion data, noted a gradual shift
among people with the second and third value orientations toward
what they identify as an ecocentric value orientation, which is similar
to the NEP worldview.
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Cont.………….

16.
 The age hypothesis:- The age hypothesis states that younger persons are
more concerned about environmental deterioration than older persons.
proposed as a possible reason for this, that younger persons are less
integrated in the existing social order.
 The social-class hypothesis:- The social-class hypothesis states that
environmental concern is positively associated with education and income.
the upper and middle classes have satisfeid their basic material needs and
thus focus on satisfying other `higher' needs.
 Support for a positive correlation between education and environmental
concern has been found in several studies.
 The residence hypothesis:- Urban residents are assumed to be more
environmentally concerned than rural residents.
 The gender hypothesis: found that men were more environmentally
concerned than women.
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Cont.………….

17.
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