‘It’s my responsibility’: perspectives on environmental justice and education for sustainability among international school students in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes students’ perspectives on sustainable development, environmental justice, and concomitant environmental education programs at two international schools in Singapore. Data include surveys of over 250 students and 19 focus-group interviews with 300 students. In addition to having a detailed and nuanced understanding of the complexity of climate change and its impacts, most students acknowledged both the likely consequences of continuing resource-intensive industrialization and the growing and unjust disparity in carbon emissions between developed and developing countries. Many students also recognized that contemporary lifestyles rooted in overconsumption are not sustainable and proposed a variety of measures – both mainstream (i.e., discourage meat consumption and single-use plastic) and radical (population-control measures) – to curb consumption. While identifying some areas for improvement in their schools’ commitment to sustainability issues, students overall valued the ecological education that their schools provided them and to various extents recognized the privileges it has afforded them.