Engaging school children in sustainable lifestyle: Opportunities and challenges

Sustainable Development Goal 12.8 aims to capacitate people with relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature. This study documents unique opportunities and challenges associated with engaging school children in Sustainable lifestyle for health.

To identify opportunities and challenges in engaging school children in Sustainable Lifestyle.

Participatory action research was designed through "Sustainable lifestyle Campaign" for 134 students (11-14 years) of 8 schools in Kolar city, Karnataka, India. The project was divided into Induction, Interaction and Reinforcement phases. Induction phase included Inter-school competitions (on themes of climate change and health). In Interaction phase, participants individually named various impacts of climate change and the climate change risk they perceived. In groups of 6-8, they then Free Listed and Pile sorted Climate change actions. In Reinforcement phase, interactive games and symposium on Climate Change and Sustainable Lifestyle were organized for the participants. At the end of Reinforcement phase, participants repeated the free listing and pile sorting exercise. Free lists were analyzed for frequencies and Smith's Salience Index, and the pile sorts using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (non-metric MDS) using Anthropac ver 4.98.

The participants named "Cancer" (65%) and "Asthma" (50%) as health impacts of climate change while other impacts were largely unknown. Major themes, such as "Perceived risk", "Eagerness to engage in climate action", "Incompleteness of information" and "Lack of autonomy" were identified. Reinforcement phase improved frequency and Smith's salience (>0.8) of individual level climate change actions across groups. Non-metric MDS showed that rationale of pile sorting shifted from "Source-based" sorting to "Level of Action" based sorting after the Reinforcement.

Existing knowledge of participants regarding sustainable lifestyle is theoretical with insufficient emphasis on health. Sustainable lifestyle awareness campaigns focusing children must have provisions for family and peer involvement to sustain the individual or family level actions.