Environmental Education For Biodiversity And Sustainable Development

This book gathers interdisciplinary reflections from researchers, educators, and other experts on the subject of biodiversity closer to education and learning. The book also highlights its role as an added value to strategic principles for healthy ecosystems and sustainable human development. It promotes critical thinking and foster practices and attitudes for Education for Sustainable Development reconciling education with principles of human behaviour and nature. Readers especially find this book a timely resource in light of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, the Aichi Targets, and the new EU biodiversity strategy “Our life insurance, our natural capital: an EU biodiversity strategy to 2020”. Along with the challenge of ecosystems and public health, biodiversity conservation is essential for humanity’s continued security and sustainability, as it touches on all aspects of people’s lives.

This Book presents innovative and state of the art studies developed in Environmental Education in different countries to highlight this theme and promote its implementation all over the world. It will give a scientific perspective of Nature-based solutions to promote environmental education in all citizens and a more educational perspective as to how this approach can be implemented at schools and universities. Not less important is that includes science communication as a key factor for training and disseminating about the environment. The invited authors are recognized experts with excellent work developed in Environmental Education. This contributed volume presents innovative and creative work in the area giving a step forward in the implementation of Environmental Education, namely as a target of 2020 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development. The invitation of authors from many different countries allows the creation of a network and subsequently the book will bring concrete ideas as to how to develop operational capacities to bring added values to Environmental Education at an international level.

The book discusses elaborately the nature, scope and importance of environmental education. It examines environmental pollution, ozone layer depletion, biodiversity conservation role, causes, effects of environmental hazards critically.

Globally, there is a need to promote and empower practical action towards better environmental conservation and greater sustainability; education aspires to achieve and motivate this – one mind at a time. This book advances a future-oriented vision of the development of environmental sustainability education in settings outside the high-school. It provides practical guidance for teacher practitioners and policy makers in community-oriented environmental sustainability education. It promotes a modern holistic approach to sustainability learning in and by the community through participative engagement with sustainability issues. Its special foci include working with volunteers and citizen scientists, through museums or through re-purposing Higher Education. Its approach emphasises the implementation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and cooperation with environmental management professionals. This book’s cosponsors include the International Association for Headwater Control and FAO – European Forestry Commission’s Working Party on the Management of Mountain Watersheds, as well as the International Environmental Education Conferences, Eger, Hungary and the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Subcommittee on Future Studies. Community education has long been a goal for environmental management, whose practitioners realise that interventions, such as biodiversity conservation, are only truly sustainable when supported by the local land-user and stakeholder communities; this depends upon these stakeholders’ understanding why intervention is necessary.

The book deals with the matter of environmental education applied to education for sustainability, taking into account formal and non-formal education contexts and bearing in mind the relationship between environmental quality and quality of life. The ideas, experiences and perspectives presented by the various specialists contributing to the book, from various geographical regions, provide an overview of the diversity of approaches used internationally in the field of environmental education and supply background information on the different problems inherent to this field, as well as a bird's eye perspective on the initiatives, projects and concrete action on the ground.

Education in South Asia has a renewed agenda which can enable societies to leapfrog development that is sustainable such that the individual is prepared for his/her involvement, responsibility and commitment to local and global discussions of our common future. This book on South Asia will focus on initiatives under the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) umbrella and discuss the challenges, opportunities, issues and strategies in the countries of the region. It presents these initiatives of Environmental Education/ESD vis-à-vis the administrative, economic, social, cultural and ecological realities of each country at various levels of policy, planning, implementation and evaluation. The discussions in this book extend beyond formal education systems like schools, higher education, pre-service and in-service teacher preparation to community education and education initiatives conceptualized with the goal of sustainability. All initiatives will demonstrate how each country in its own pace contributing to move ESD from the periphery to the core of education initiatives.