Youth and their Knowledge on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the United Nations (UN) have highlighted the youth as the stakeholders. Their knowledge of the triple bottom line of sustainability (economic, social, and environmental) is a prerequisite for SDG accomplishment. This paper investigates the level of SDGs knowledge among university youth. It was discovered that youth at the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia have a moderate understanding of SDGs and need to be attentive to environment-related SDGs. They were exposed to SDGs by educational institutions and various media platforms. The findings are relevant to SDG-related policy-making and enrich the existing literature. Keywords: SDGs ; Youth ; Higher Education ; Malaysia eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2022. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians/Africans/Arabians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v7i19.3240

Halfway There: Did We Learn Anything? - Youth Perception of Sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals

“…On the other hand, the main source of information about SDGs was formal education for respondents from Croatia. This finding is in accordance with previous studies, where formal education and lessons were the primary sources of information on SD (Yuan et al 2021;Ismail et al 2022;Leiva-Brondo et al 2022).…”

“…Respondents were more familiar with the definition, aspects and dimensions of SD where the answer accuracy was greater than 90%. These findings were similar to those of Ismail et al (2022), who stated that students possess certain knowledge about SDGs. Respondents were less familiar with technical aspects of SDGs such as timelines, national governance systems and MDGs, but they were most familiar with inclusivity aspects of SDGs (Ismail et al 2022).…”

“…These findings were similar to those of Ismail et al (2022), who stated that students possess certain knowledge about SDGs. Respondents were less familiar with technical aspects of SDGs such as timelines, national governance systems and MDGs, but they were most familiar with inclusivity aspects of SDGs (Ismail et al 2022). Vietnamese students possessed a better level of knowledge than the present sample groups and similarly to the present samples, the time frame of implementation was one of the issues when it came to knowledge (Nguyen et al 2022).…”

“…Sustainable Development Goals are the topic of many research papers connected to young people or higher education students (e.g. Amesheva et al 2019;Ismail et al 2022;Leiva-Brondo et al 2022;Loginova et al 2022;Nguyen et al 2022). However, there are more research papers that cover topics such as SD and youth (eg.…”

Students’ Attitude and Perception towards Sustainability: The Case of Universiti Sains Malaysia

“…In Malaysia as a whole, the study of sustainability awareness in general among university students has been conducted recently by many researchers [28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37], supporting the importance of this study. A study on youth studying in public and private educational institutions in Penang found that they have a high level of awareness of the concept of sustainable development issues and are willing to practice a more sustainable lifestyle [32,34].…”