Psychometric Performance of the Revised New Ecological Paradigm Scale in Pakistan: Evidence from Students and Academic Staff Across Ten Universities and Educational Institutions

Abstract

Climate change is a global environmental reality, the indicators of change are remarkable such as rise in temperature, change in raining patterns, frequent cloud bursts and unprecedented flooding, which results in a colossal loss of human and chattels life and economic loss all over the globe. Mitigation and adaptation are the right way to go globally to tackle this threat to human lives all over the world as recognised global efforts by the states and global organisation. Pakistan is no exception in suffering the consequences of climate change and placed at the highest risk level in the world without contributing to the environmental loss. In mitigation and adaptation efforts to climate change challenges awareness and ecological world view play vital role especially in case of Pakistan being highly vulnerable to climate change with critical challenges of socio-economic conditions, food insecurity and life-threatening flooding, drought and heatwaves. The revised NEP scale has been used globally to measure the ecological world view along human concerns on climate change and same has been used to measure the ecological concerns in this study among the university students of Pakistan. A few research studies have been carried out to measure environmental attitude and ecological world view in Pakistan using modified NEP scale, however, the research work is very sporadic. This research has taken a comprehensive review of revised NEP scale and results have shown significant internal consistency and variations of responses of students belonging to different universities in their ecological world view. The findings of the study indicate that EE should be integrated into the curriculum of universities and schools to build an ecological worldview to better adapt and mitigate in the country.