Environmental issues increasingly impact the well-being, the ability to have a good life, of people, especially members of marginalized groups. Dealing with environmental issues is a long-standing and increasing focus of activism. Youth are increasingly involved in environmental activism. One focus of environmental education is how to instill the role of being a change agent into students. Marginalized groups experience many problems in relation to environmental issues, and environmental activism impacts the lived experience of marginalized groups in diverse ways. A pre-study scoping review suggested a gap in academic inquiry around “the impact of environmental activism”. The aim of our study was to decrease this gap and to better understand the perceived impact of environmental activism. We used two approaches to achieve this aim. In the first step, we used a survey to ask undergraduate students about their views on the impact of environmental activism. Given the results of the survey and that students need access to information to be able to fulfill their roles as critical thinkers and change agents, we then performed a scoping review of abstracts from Scopus, Web of Science, and the 70 databases accessible through EBSCO-HOST to ascertain what topics and which marginalized groups are engaged with in the academic inquiry of environmental activism. We found that participants felt that environmental activism has an impact on all the social groups and entities we gave them as choices, although there were differences in how positively they viewed the different groups and entities being affected. The participants also indicated that many of the well-being indicators were impacted by environmental activism, although around 30% felt that they did not have information they needed to form an opinion. Finally, our participants felt that different social groups have different ability expectations. Our scoping review found that many of the groups and indicators that our participants felt were impacted by environmental activism were not covered in the abstracts we analyzed. Our findings suggest many gaps and the need for actions and opportunities in relation to the topic of the “impact of environmental activism”.

The state of the ‘social’ that individuals, social groups and societies experience are a focus of international conventions, declarations and goal setting documents. Many indicators of the ‘social’ and measures of well-being that contain sets of indicators of the ‘social’ exist to ascertain the state of the ‘social’ of individuals, social groups, and societies. Marginalized groups are well known to have problems with the ‘social’ they experience. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and similar phrases are used in policy discussions to deal with ‘social problems’ within research, education, and general workplace environments encountered by women, Indigenous peoples, visible/racialized minorities, disabled people, and LGBTQ2S+. The prevention of the worthening of the ‘social’ is one focus of science and technology governance and ethics discussions. Many health professions are also concerned about the ‘social’ such as the well-being of their clients and their roles as stated by many of their associations include being advocates and change agents. The objective of the study was to ascertain how the ‘social’ is engaged with in conjunction with the following international documents (“Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”, “Convention on the Rights of the Child”, “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women”, “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, “International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination”, “UN Framework Convention on Climate Change”, “transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development” and “UN flagship report on disability and development Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals by, for and with persons with disabilities”; from now on called “the documents”). A scoping review using the academic databases SCOPUS, Web of Science, databases accessible under Compendex, and the databases accessible under EBSCO-HOST, coupled with a manifest hit-count coding approach was uses to answer five research questions: (1) Which terms, phrases, and measures of the ‘social’ are present in the literature searched (2) Which of the social issues flagged in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) are present in the academic abstracts mentioning the other eight documents? (3) Which EDI frameworks, phrases and social groups covered under EDI are present in the literature covered. (4) Which technologies, science and technology governance terms and ethics fields are present in the literature covered? (5) Which health professions are mentioned in the literature covered? The results reveal vast gaps and opportunities to engage with the ‘social’ in relation to “the documents” covered for all five questions.