Perceptions about climate change among university students in Bangladesh
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Perceptions about climate change among university students in Bangladesh Shah Md Atiqul Haq1,2,3 · Khandaker Jafor Ahmed4 Received: 3 January 2019 / Accepted: 2 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This study is concerned with the perceptions of university students in Bangladesh regarding climate change. A self-administered questionnaire survey was filed out by 650 finalyear undergraduate students studying in a variety of academic disciplines at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet, Bangladesh. This study found that a majority of respondents perceive temperatures in Bangladesh as increasing and rainfall as decreasing. A majority also think that climate change is due to human activities such as deforestation, dredging rivers, extracting sand from rivers, the development of industry, and carbon emissions from vehicles, while a significant but smaller proportion perceived it as punishment from God for human sin. We examined the effects of selected variables— students’ sex, religious affiliation, involvement in an environmental organization, completion of university courses related to the environment or climate change, academic discipline of study, and past experience of extreme weather events in their home locality—using three multinomial logistic regression (MLR) models on perceived changes in temperature, perceived changes in rainfall, and perceived causes of climate change. The MLR analysis regarding the perceived changes in temperature indicates that effects of sex, experience of extreme weather event in their home locality, and the completion of climate change-related courses are statistically significant. For perceived changes in rainfall, these are significantly explained by all predictors except completion of a climate change-related course. And finally, for perceived causes of climate change, the effects of students’ experiences with extreme weather events in their hometown and involvement in an environmental organization were found to be statistically significant. Keywords Climate change perceptions · Extreme weather events · Academic disciplines · Sociodemographic factors · University students · Bangladesh
* Shah Md Atiqul Haq [email protected]; [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Background and introduction People from different sociocultural backgrounds maintain beliefs about and perceive climate change in ways that are highly diverse and sometimes difficult to predict (Dunlap and Jacques 2013; Fabiyi and Oloukoi 2013). Climate change perceptions are locally situated (Bunce et al. 2010; Speranza et al. 2010; Battaglini et al. 2009; Brody et al. 2008) and shaped by individuals’ attitudes and beliefs’ (Carlton and Jacobson 2013). People are considered as good natural observers of their local environment (Salick et al. 2009; Turner et al. 2009), and those who are experienced with the adverse impacts of climate change in their local areas, such as air polluti
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