Public Environmental Awareness And Participation In Environmental Protection

The environment problem has become the most sever test that nature poses to humanity which now countries all over the world have to face. The public participation has become an important solution to environment problem appears urgent. Therefore based on findings of existing studies both home and abroad, from the example of Wuxi water crisis, combining the theoretical research with the empirical study and deduction analysis with induction analysis, the paper specially discussed the public environmental awareness and environmental behaviors under the environmental crisis.The study includes the following aspects: First is the study on domestic and abroad literatures about the public environmental awareness and environmental behaviors. Second is the investigation on Wuxi public awareness of the environment, including the research status of the investigation, the regression analysis on affecting factors and the analysis on the factors which promote public awareness of the environment. The third one is the investigation on Wuxi public participation in environmental protection, including exposition on behaviors and analysis on its social characteristics. The fourth one is the study on influencing factors of public participation in environmental protection behavior. We found that the social factors including social economic status and social capital are internal decision power to the differences of public participation in environmental protection behavior through an empirical research. Finally is the discussion on the connection between public participation in environmental protection and social governance mode in China and an attempt to find out effective ways to promote public participation in environmental protection.We found that after the Wuxi water crisis event, the public's environmental awareness has increased, and its promotion power factor mainly includes: the environmental event, guide of the mass media and promotion of environmental NGO. However, the high environmental consciousness can't be reliably reflected in real environmental behavior. On one hand, the public don't have the mature commonweal conception or environmental quality. On the other hand, even if people have the mature idea, they have to give up the original plan because they don't have enough capacity, effective resources or participation.