The Cultivation Of The Public Environmental Awareness Based On Overcoming NIMBY

The 18th National Congress has explicitly pointed out that, in the process of promoting the construction of ecological civilization, building up propaganda and education of ecological civilization, increasing public environmental and ecological consciousness, and creating an eco-friendly atmosphere are imperative. Nowadays, some communal facilities provide social service to the public, but they also cause negative impacts on surrounding environment, resulting in boycott and conflict from the public who live in the vicinity of these utilities. This would be an issue of significance in construction of ecological civilization. In this study, from the perspective of environmental awareness in NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), lack of public environmental awareness was identified. In addition, cultivating reasonable environmental awareness of the public and promoting construction of ecological civilization were also proposed.Firstly, study of relationship between public environmental awareness and NIMBY suggested that public environmental awareness is not only an essential factor resulting in the occurrence of NIMBY but also one of the critical factors for administering NIMBY. From an overall perspective, there are several institutional factors resulting in the occurrence of NIMBY, including deprivation of acquiring environmental information, imperfection in sharing environmental data and safeguarding environmental rights, and low environmental credit of government. In contrast, on an individual level, lack of environmental knowledge, twisted value of some public, low acceptance to governmental credit, etc. are psychological factors, resulting in unreasonable environmental behavior from the public.Secondly, through choosing events of waste incineration plants of Beijing Liulitun, Guangdong Panyu and Hangzhou Yuhang Jiufeng as typical cases to analyze, we found blind spots in developing and cultivating the public environmental awareness, respectively. This would interpret how should the government cultivate positive environmental awareness of public and guide them to make reasonable environmental actions.Finally, it is also discerned that the government generally concentrated on remedial strategies passively in dealing with NIMBY, and cultivation of public environmental awareness in daily life to avoid the occurrence of NIMBY was normally ignored. Therefore, we proposed that it should be paid more attention to cultivation of public environmental awareness through guiding the public to set up scientific environmental values, establishing perfect social credit system, and leading the public make reasonable environmental actions, which would pave the way for construction of ecological civilization.