THE STATE OF ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AS AN ELEMENT OF ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS

The aim of the article is to present the state of environmental knowledge of young people. Contemporary perception of environmental problems has been evaluated in recent decades. More and more often are the problems related to climate change and our role in activities to maintain the values of the natural environment directly visible. The implementation of the idea of sustainable development not only in economic but also social life creates opportunities for both broadening one’s knowledge and taking actions for nature. Environmental awareness presented in the article is based on the assessment of the state of ecological knowledge. The research, on the basis of which the article was developed, was carried out in 2004 on a group of students from Warsaw University of Life Sciences, and was repeated in 2019. The research was carried out in a group of students of the faculty of Economics. The obtained results indicated that the main sources of acquiring knowledge on topics related to the environment are changing, and the role of education and training in the educational institution is increasing. On the other hand, the level of ecological awareness, expressed in the state of knowledge, varies in terms of subject matter. In the case of defining the five researched terms, it was possible to observe a higher correctness of the assignment of terms and their definition among the respondents from the second survey carried out in 2019. The respondents from the repeated survey also showed a higher level of knowledge in the field of knowledge of national parks in Poland