• Journal of Climate Change Research
• /
• v.4 no.4
• /
• pp.409-416
• /
• 2013

Recently, the property damage has been increasing due to climate change in South Korea. While the general public has become more aware of the environmental issues, but the environmental education system has not been able to meet up with the demands of the public. The purpose of this study is to suggest preliminary data which is needed for developing a environmental textbook. A survey was conducted to meet the following requirements. Respondent's level of interest in problems or situations concerning the following eight themes: fundamental science, health and medicine, aerospace engineering, life science, electrical electronics, telecommunication, mineral and energy resources, environment. The data was collected from 139 students in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. The results showed that health and medicine issues interest students the most (49.6%), followed by environment (46.8%). We asked the respondents who were very interested in each question for their reasons, and they answered that environmental issue is related to the improvement of their life quality (53.8%) than their curiosity (38.5%). Students were very interested in the other issues because of just curiosity. Most students (90.6%) said seasonal change was not same each year. 18.0% of respondents replied that they and their friends had experienced climate change. The majority of students (94.2%) thought that they will experience natural disaster blamed on climate change during their life. In other words, climate change is already the day-to-day events of their lives. The majority of their opinions, more then three than ten students(30.9%) said the South Korean government should conduct an energy saving campaign to climate change problems followed by expanding new renewable energy (24.5%), conducting adaptation policies of climate change(22.3 %), introducing of a system as like $CO_2$ emissions trading(20.9%) and so on. There are more Stu- dents (69.1%) who know of new renewable energy than students who don't know it; however, respondents who know the meaning very well were just 18.7% showing that most students dimly know the meaning of new renewable energy.