The behavior and cognition of ecological civilization among Chinese university students

Abstract

Abstract In response to the increasingly serious ecological and environmental crisis, China has upgraded its national strategy from environmental protection to ecological civilization. China has carried out comprehensive publicity and education on ecological civilization. Many universities also arrange ecological civilization courses for students, or infuse ecological civilization into traditional courses. This paper investigates Chinese university students’ ecological civilization cognition and behavior. Based on the 13404 questionnaires of 152 universities and using the multinomial logit regression model, the authors explored the relationship between Chinese university students’ cognition and behavior. This paper divides the students’ ecological civilization cognition into two parts, one being the common-sense cognition that comes from China’s long-term public ecological and environmental education and the other one being the cognition of national ecological civilization strategy that comes from the recent intensive and comprehensive political publicity. This paper finds that university students with the latter cognition show a stronger willingness to implement ecological civilization behavior. This result reveals the role of China’s political publicity on ecological civilization in terms of influencing its citizens’ behavior, and provides inspiration for other countries to publicize environmental politics and promote public environmental protection via mass media.