Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development Through Mobile Learning: Transgressing the Geographical Boundaries

Emergence Of Environmental Education

The man - environment relationship have been established in the early periods itself. In the recent past, human beings have attained the ability to destroy natural life at devastating rates and magnitude. Human activities have adverse impact on the environment on varied spatio-temporal scales and extents (Poulopoulos, 2016) and it led to global change. Global change according to World Health Organization refers to global environmental hazards to human health and the hazards may include climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, changes in ecosystems due to loss of biodiversity, changes in hydrological systems and the supplies of freshwater, land degradation, urbanization and stresses on food producing system (Poulopoulos, 2016).

In order to conserve the environment and sustainably manage the natural resources adopting ecological principles, the need for environmental education was felt world over in the early 1970’s. The events that followed Stockholm Conference on Human and Environment (1972) only reiterated the need for environmental education and solemn pledge by the United Nations body and national governments to save the environment from increasing human print. Recommendation 96 of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment called for the development of environmental education as one of the most critical elements of an attack on the world’s environmental crisis. In the spirit of the progressive Tbilisi Declaration, arising out of the First Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in Tbilisi, Environmental Education is viewed broadly to include issues of inequity, poverty, values and ethics (Sinha et al., 1985). Environmental education can be defined as learning to protect and improve environment in a systematic, focused, planned and knowledge intensive way. The environmental education must be broad based and strongly related to the principles mentioned in the United Nations Declaration on the New International Economic Order (UNESCO, 1975).