Why it is important to protect the environment: reasons given by children

Abstract

Though the significance of involving children in environmental sustainability efforts is widely acknowledged, we still lack evidence on what they think of environmental issues and about the protection of nature. The aim of the paper is to systematically describe the reasons that children give for protecting the environment. Thirty-three children (aged 6–11 years) participated in one of the six focus groups. Method of qualitative content analysis was used for analyzing the data. Study findings showed that participants were aware of some of the environmental problems or environmentally harmful behaviour like litter and pollution. Moreover, the study participants had various views about the importance of nature protection like maintaining clean environment, protecting human life and health, or protecting animals and plants. The reasons they gave for environmental protection were related to both humans and other parts of the nature. Furthermore, the participants learned about nature protection from sources like family, school, various literature sources, computer games, television and by watching how others behaved. Implications regarding results of the study are presented further in the paper.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• children
• environmental knowledge
• environmental understanding
• nature protection
• environmental protection

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank study participants for sharing their thoughts during group interviews, and for their parents for giving their consents to that. We would also like to thank camp and school leaders and teachers, who helped in the process of collecting written consent forms from the parents and who allowed the researcher to interview children during the camp or class time.

Declaration of interest statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors.