Characterizing the Energy-Saving Behaviors, Attitudes and Awareness of University Students in Macau

Shujie Zhao,Qingbin Song,Chao Wang

doi:10.3390/su11226341

Abstract

Currently, energy and its usage are the primary environmental issues in all countries and regions. As a special social group, university students not only have extremely high energy consumption needs, but they have more advanced consumption concepts. Understanding their energy-saving characteristics could provide foresight for predicting the energy-saving characteristics of future residents. Using data collected from 737 valid questionnaires, from five typical universities in Macau, this study investigated university students' energy-saving behaviors, attitudes and awareness, and analyzed the possible influencing factors. The results showed that the energy-saving behaviors and attitudes of respondents from five university were nearly the same. Meanwhile, 75.98% of the respondents clearly recognized that energy-savings behaviors are closely related to their daily study and life, and 96.61% of the university students thought that it is very necessary to save energy. In addition, 92.94% of students thought it was necessary to carry out energy-saving education in universities. The regression analysis indicated that “the relationship between energy-saving awareness and daily life” and “the necessity of energy-saving education” are positively correlated with the energy-saving awareness at the significance level of 1%, whereas the energy-saving behaviors, “give priority to energy-saving products” and “shut down your computer when going out”, are positively correlated with energy-saving awareness at the significance level of 10% and 5%, respectively. Finally, we proposed effective suggestions for raising the awareness of saving energy among university students.

Highlights

Energy is essential and important to the economic and social development and the improvement of quality of life in all countries and regions [1]
The research team consisted of 10 trained graduate students from the Macau University of Science and Technology, who were familiar with Macau and all kinds of information required for investigation, as well as able to effectively and continuously deal with various situations in a rigorous investigation
Our study showed that the mean level of energy-saving behavior was nearly the same in all five universities

Summary

Introduction

Energy is essential and important to the economic and social development and the improvement of quality of life in all countries and regions [1]. Asia’s total electricity generation has grown a staggering 26-fold, with annual growth rates from 6.5% to 9% as compared with a global growth rate of 2.2% [3]. Asia accounts for 36% of the global energy consumption, and in the future, total energy consumption in Asia is expected to increase by 2.2-fold from 2008 to 2035 [4]. In non-OECD Asian countries, the energy consumption levels from the industrial and residential sectors are expected to increase by 1.9-fold and 2.2-fold, respectively, while their expected growth worldwide is only 1.5-fold and 1.3-fold, respectively [5]

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