A survey for measuring quantitatively the effectiveness of environmental communication

Improving the environmental consciousness of people was pointed out as one solution to sustainable development for environmental problems during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro (1992). For this reason, environmental communication has been focused on worldwide as playing an important role in improvement of people's environmental consciousness. However, until now social surveys about the effects of environmental communications on the general public have shown that this communication may not be effective because this process is not understood by the information sender. Therefore, the effectiveness of environmental communication must be understood by the sender to effectively achieve the expected role and the effective way to do it. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication, and to propose effective ways to improve people's consideration of environmental communication. We focused on one media, websites on WWW. Websites on WWW are one of 26 tools in ISO 14063 for communication of international standards for environmental management. Social field surveys were conducted to measure changes in people's consciousness and grasp the situation of the collective consciousness. Firstly a preliminary survey was conducted, and then activities of gradual environmental communication carried out, surveys with the same style of questionnaire conducted 6 times, and finally the results were quantitatively evaluated by multivariate analyses. To quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication through websites and field surveys, we examined three points. Firstly, 'Changes in consciousness as affected by using the website' was examined. From the results of covariance analysis, changes in a subject's consciousness was much better after using websites than other kinds of environmental education such as in the classroom. Secondly, the 'Ability of websites to function as a tool for environmental communication' was considered. Comparisons of each questionnaire by factor analysis clearly showed that environmental education through a website greatly affects not only environmental consciousness but also motivation for environmental activities. Third 'Characteristics of website design that affect subject's consideration' were determined. The most important points affecting a subject's consideration was the visual impacts of coloring, positioning of photos, fitting of visual design and content. These results quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication and we propose that the effectiveness of websites is sufficient as a tool to change people's considerations of environmental communication.