Publications of environmental education programs reveal interdisciplinary boundaries

Background/Question/Methods

Human actions trigger an increasing loss of biodiversity and ecosystem changes. A rising number of publications testify the focus of the scientific community to investigate and tackle these global problems. In addition, educational programs and projects are likewise attempting an outreach to increase public awareness and enable necessary perspectives in society.

However, the scientific community is widely not aware of these programs since they are beyond the common scheme of generating publications. Additionally, the effect and merit of these programs is often not evaluated, and at best only measurable on a long-term scale.

The aim of our study was to investigate how environmental education programs and public conservation projects are presented in the scientific literature. In particular, we 1) quantify which scientific fields are involved and 2) if there is an overlap of environmental and educational research within these interdisciplinary projects.

We therefore conducted a quantitative review of all articles from the Web of Knowledge addressing environmental and scientific education and outreach programs over the last ten years (2001-2011). In addition, we analyzed the link between different disciplines judged from the scientific field of the studies and the fields of references each study quoted using network analysis and ordination methods.

Results/Conclusions

Overall we identified around 200 studies on environmental education. Approximately half of those studies investigated people’s attitude towards environmental problems and their awareness and perception of the environment. Most other studies focused on environmental education projects and citizen science programs.

The majority of these articles were published in journals from the areas of environmental studies and social studies in equal parts. Other fields like plant and animal science or psychology published only few studies.

While there is a strong tendency in social sciences to restrict citations to their own discipline, citations reveal stronger interdisciplinary links in environmental sciences. This notion increases when only articles on citizen science projects and education programs are considered.

In conclusion, there is still a high demand for environmental education projects, since the scientific literature to date widely neglects this vital part of outreach of scientific research. Both practitioners and scientists agree that society needs to dramatically change to enable a sustainable future, yet ties and interchange between different fields would also need to be increased. However, only implementation into education would enable future generations a sufficient understanding of the current problems mankind and our planet face.