Environment Awareness

environmental problems. While some of the problems might be alike due to their global nature (e.g. global warming, depletion of the ozone layer), others are specifically local ones. How do people out of different cultures perceive these problems? How do they react to them? The aim of this study is to figure out what factors are most important in explaining different levels of awareness concerning environmental problems and to compare the level of awareness as well as the actual behavior towards environment of people living in developing and developed countries. As the countries of study India and the Federal Republic of Germany have been chosen. India is thought to represent a developing country while Germany gives an example of an economically developed country. An additional aspect when choosing the countries of study was to use the competence of the author who lives in Germany, but has the great possibility to do some fieldwork studies in India and to work together with Indian colleagues. The design of the study has three stages: First, information on India as far as environmental awareness and environmentally friendly behavior are concerned will be obtained by both fieldwork and a systematic survey of the available literature. This paper will focus exclusively on the first part of the study design. Second, the same will be done for Germany. The third and final step will be to compare the results obtained for India and Germany. The first part of the country study will focus on the different factors that might be able to explain awareness of environmental problems. The ultimate objective is to find the most decisive factors in creating awareness of ecological issues, since this is the first step in developing effective campaigns to promote a higher level of environmental awareness among the population. The special emphasis of this study is on the role of media in creating environmental awareness with the underlying concept of media being a very broad one. The different media sources considered can be categorized as follows, Mass media (e.g. radio, television, newspaper and magazines), Institutional media (e.g. school, government officials or village leaders) , Traditional media (e.g. family members, other relatives, friends and neighbors, NGO work) As a first explanation of environmental awareness modern mass media will be considered. It is still to be confirmed that the role of mass media is one of the most important factors underlying the knowledge of environmental problems: This can only be true on the conditions that first, mass media are accessible to large proportions of the population, second, are spending some time on environmental issues and third, people are interested in information on ecological issues provided by the media so that they view or listen to the corresponding programs as well as read newspaper articles or other written publications dealing with environmental issues. Second, representing the institutional media the importance of school education in creating environmental awareness and training environmentally friendly behavior will be examined: the aim is to find out if and to what degree and how successful knowledge on ecological issues is taught at schools. A third factor being able to explain the level of environmental awareness might be traditional media, the social environment of a person. If discussions on environmental issues within the family or with friends, neighbors and colleagues take place quite often or even regularly this will probably influence a person’s awareness and behavior in an environmental friendly way. The work of NGOs and the support they perceive by the Ministry of Environment & Forests will be considered, too. Forth, in addition to the role of media the degree to which a person is exposed to environmental pollution in every day life might influence its awareness of ecological problems. Suffering from a disease or permanent health problems due to environmental pollution will probably even enhance the level of awareness. After discussing the reasons that promote environmental awareness, the second part of each country study will focus on the resulting different levels of awareness itself. The question is if the level of awareness of environmental problems is higher in more developed countries than in less developed ones or vice versa. Whatever should be the case it should be indicated by the explanations offered above. The third part of each country study will finally examine the individual’s actual behavior towards environment. This stresses that it is important to make a difference between the way in which people actually behave and their awareness of environmental problems that is a prerequisite, but not necessarily sufficient to develop an environmental friendly behavior. It is, for example, possible that somebody is quite aware of the fact that his behavior is detrimental to natural environment, but as long as he is not convinced that it is important to preserve the environment he might not be willing or motivated to change his behavior.