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Home Environmental Education and Awareness About Environmental Education and Awareness

Environmental education and awareness (EE&A) encourages the kind of thinking and behaving which is in harmony with the environment that its quality can be preserved for future generations.

Therefore we all are the target group, regardless of gender, age or the level of education.

The content of EE&A is not only to create a positive attitude towards the environment, respect for life in all its forms, knowledge of and care for the environment surrounding us, but also to understand the interdependence among areas that, at first glance, appear diverse, yet are closely related. EE&A is closely bound to the social, economic and cultural areas and leads to the understanding of the principles resulting from this bond.

The EE&A’s goal is to objectively inform the public about the state and the development of the environment, so that people who have lost direct contact with nature could restore their relationship to the environment in which they live. This may lead them to start acting soundly and thinking ahead, which requires certain knowledge, abilities and, above all, a strong motivation for positive changes. Such changes will lead to a healthy and functioning environment around us.

EE&A is also a preventive tool for environmental protection. It is important to realise that we do not have knowledge of all the complicated principles governing the relationship between living organisms and the environment, and so it is not possible to determine with an absolute certainty all the impacts of human activities on the environment and, consequently, on human health. EE&A encourages people to assume full responsibility for the environment and creates conditions for every individual to engage in its protection. It is mainly about being aware of how the individual patterns of behaviour affect the environment when solving environmental problems in a municipality and also about events that affect the environment directly. All this has to be done in a friendly way understandable to everyone.

EE&A carefully differentiates among the individual target groups of residents in order to achieve maximum efficiency, while respecting the current interests, possibilities and needs of these groups and the economic, health, social and ethical factors. Even though EE&A cooperates with all groups of the population, a special attention is paid to so-called multiplicators, i.e. individuals who can further influence others and thereby promote the positive changes in the behaviour of other people – these include teachers, entrepreneurs, publicly active people and journalists.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to evaluate the achievement made by EE&A, because its true efficiency may only be recognized over a longer period of time. It is certain, however, that the effectiveness shows itself later, in the form of lower costs for eliminating damage to the environment and people’s health, and is also reflected by the prosperity of the municipality. If the work with public is to be successful, it must be done carefully, systematically and continuously, in a creative fashion and with a lot of patience. There are three basic methods of influencing the public, which are mutually interconnected:

• providing information and education in a form of lectures, training sessions, specialised literature, mass media, reports,
• creating positive emotional ties to the environment surrounding us by participating in common events or having individual hobbies/activities,
• promoting skills that are beneficial for sustainable lifestyle, i.e. practical activities in environmental protection, initially under professional supervision, later active participation in the implementation of factual projects etc.

By providing a method, EE&A leads to an active approach in solving environmental problems. It also results in a better understanding of ourselves and our possibilities, deeper understanding of the world and its laws. EE&A is a life-long process which creates an environmental culture.