Environmental Threats and Geographical Education: Students’ Sustainability Awareness—Evaluation

Abstract

Teaching geography creates an opportunity for the transfer of knowledge about environmental problems and ways of solving them. Teachers from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and the United Kingdom indicated strengths and weaknesses of physical geography as well as the selected geographical concepts of: Maps/Cartography, Astronomy/The Earth in the Universe, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Endogenic processes, Exogenic processes, and Soils and biosphere. There was a variety in how confident students were around these topic areas. The main types of difficulties identified by the study were: too little time for implementation, difficult terminology, and lack of tools for the proper transfer of knowledge. Moreover, the attractiveness of individual issues for students also varies. The research clearly shows that students lack an awareness of problems related to the environment. There are considerable differences between the level of students’ knowledge about climate change or air and water pollution (relatively high awareness of global warming) and issues related to soil and vegetation cover (low awareness of soil depletion, soil pollution, changing the boundaries of the occurrence of plant zones, etc.). To make people aware of the importance of environment, we should take care of education in relation to global challenge and sustainable development.