Climate change and costs: investigating students’ reasoning on nature and economic development

Abstract

The tensions between environmental protection and economic growth are critical to future well-being, and it is therefore important to understand how young people conceptualize these tensions. The aim of the present study is to explore students’ solutions to the dilemma of economic development and mitigating climate change, with regard to societal responses to the challenge of climate change. The study was conducted in China’s Green Schools. Green School is an international long-term programme with the aim of increasing students’ knowledge of environmental issues, and transferring this knowledge into positive actions to affect the wider community. The data were obtained through semi-structured pre- and post-interviews with 15–16-year-old students in three groups (12 students) from Green Schools in the Beijing area. The results show that students’ discussions focused exclusively on economic growth and social welfare. Students seem to believe that environmental problems are inevitable, nature is a ‘box’ of resources, and economic development is necessary in order to sustain and even improve nature. Therefore, there is no dilemma between economic development and environmental protection. The paper ends with a discussion on research and implications for teaching climate change.

Keywords:

• climate change
• economy
• environment
• decision-making
• culture

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing helpful feedback. We would also like to thank Anne-Sophie Crépin, Ola Halldén and Peter Davies for helpful comments and suggestions of an earlier version of this paper. Li Sternäng was supported by a grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.