The Role of Education, Self - Reported Knowledge and Environmental Risk Perception in the Disaster Preparedness

One of the dimensions of environmental citizenships is related to the understanding of the structural causes of environmental degradation and also emphasizes the empowerment of citizens. With the increasing threats from the climate change impact, United Nations emphasizes the importance of local capacities for the environmental emergency preparedness. Research shows that education plays an important role in the level of disaster preparedness (for ezample, [1, 2]), also environmental knowledge is important factor shaping public sphere environmental behaviors (for example, [3]) e.g. Hansmann, and Binder, 2020)

This aim of this presentation is to explore to what degree the level of education, environmental knowledge and risk perception influence the level of preparedness for environmental emergencies in Lithuania. Lithuania is one of the countries, were the climate change impacts are drastically increasing during last years, thus it is important to

research the role and preparedness of citizens to cope with related threats, and to indicate knowledge gaps in the understanding of causal relations.

This presentation uses data from 2 data sets, collected during Risk-Space project in Lithuania: (1)the representative survey of Lithuanian population, conducted in 2020, with 2007 respondents in Lithuania; (2)Experts from municipalities in Lithuania, responsible for civil contingency. Conducted in 2021. Experts from 58 (out of 60) participated.

Items, to be analysed in this presentation, include: independent variables (the perception of specific environmental risks (floods, forest fires, air pollution and water pollution); self-reported knowledge about environmental threats, the level of education of respondent) and dependent variables – the level of preparedness of individual and municipality to cope with environmental emergencies.

Results reveal that the self-reported level of disaster preparedness is critically low both evaluating municipality where respondent lives preparedness and individual one. The level of education and self-reported environmental knowledge is significantly positively correlated with the individual disaster preparedness level; however, they are not correlated with the evaluation of municipality preparedness.