INVESTIGATING CLIMATE CHANGE PERCEPTION AND AWARENESS LEVELS AMONG UNIVERSITY SCHOLARS OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

— The increasing people’s awareness on the environmental changes through the education is an imperative measure to influence inhabitants at all levels in the society to play a chief role in extenuating and adapting to the environmental change. Therefore, it is supreme to assess the university scholars’ level of awareness and the perception about climate change since it is prone to influence how the university level scholars and instructors conduct information transfer in their classroom. The study in hand is primarily designed to evaluate perception and awareness level about climate change among university scholars from main universities of Pakistan. According to the findings of the study television access, mobile phone access, environmental / agricultural magazine access, newspaper are affecting significantly in accelerating the scholar’s awareness about climate change whereas on the other hand radio access and computer / internet access was affecting insignificantly. Potential problems associated with climate change in Pakistan are lacking funds for research on climate change, lack of government policies for this pertaining issue, no environment science courses offered in most of universities, lack of media role and lack of seminars and conferences on this issue. The print and electronic media should raise campaign to aware of the people about the climate change and universities should start degrees regarding environment sciences as well as on climate change. So, in this way university scholars and media can play an imperative role for the betterment of the environment.