A Novel Environmental Awareness Index Measured Cross Nationally For Fifty Seven Countries
Today, a number of major challenges exist for measuring environmental awareness cross nationally. These are 1) conceptualising environmental awareness and its relation to concrete behaviour is still under development; 2) the lack of a universally applicable methodology for country comparisons; and 3) the lack of an easy to use tool for data gathering for global studies. After overcoming these challenges, a new Environmental Awareness Index (EAI) was constructed. Six hypotheses were formulated on the EAI, relating to 1) national wealth; 2) state of the environment; 3) postmaterialist values; 4) self transcendence values; 5) self enhancement values; and 6) gender equality. EAI scores from 57 countries were measured for crossnational comparisons. The countries scoring highest on the EAI are Austria, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Denmark. All the countries with the highest EA are found in Europe. Of the non European countries, the best performers are Japan, New Zealand and Canada. The weakest EAI scores were found in Southern Asia, Mexico and Africa. Additionally, the perceived current state and trend of the environment in 57 countries was compared. The results indicate that, globally, the perceived state of the environment is rather worrying and in most countries deteriorating. After calculating correlations of the six hypotheses and the measured indicators of the study, the results show support to all six hypotheses. This study strongly indicates that significantly better correlations with the other national level indices are achieved by studying EA with our wider approach (EAI consisting of motivation, knowledge and skills) than by studying customarily only environmental concern.