Case study on sustainable environmental behavior in engineering education
2020
Vintere, A., Latvia Univ. of Life Sciences and Technologies, Jelgava (Latvia)
The UNESCO document states that Action for Climate Empowerment is implemented through education, which has a crucial role to play in climate change, building capacities and attitudes for climate change mitigation, as well as stimulating and reinforcing understanding of, and attentiveness of climate change. A particular attention should be paid to engineering programmes, as engineers contribute to building a sustainable society, present and future, use resources efficiently and effectively, seek multiple views to solve sustainability challenges and manage the risk to minimise adverse impact on people or environment. In keeping with these principles, a primary objective of higher education engineering curricula is to produce graduates to be able to undertake engineering activities in a way that contributes to sustainable development. A case study was conducted at the Riga Technical University and the Latvia University of Life sciences and Technologies to assess the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in engineering studies, to assess the ecological intelligence of emerging professionals, and identify the measures to mitigate the effects of CO2. The study includes several components that characterize sustainable attitude to environment: sustainable consumption, environmentally friendly transport, energy efficiency, zero-waste, etc. In total 194 engineering students took part in the study. The paper summarizes the results of a survey on sustainable environmental behaviour. The results show that more than half of the respondents (52 %) say they have never heard of the SDGs, 43 % are confident in their ecological intelligence and 42 % say they may have. Although more than two thirds of the students (68 %) are aware of energy efficiency, only 25 % of the respondents carry out an energy audit of their home, etc. The article provides a full analysis of the research.
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