**1. Introduction**

Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level [1,2]. Previous analysis [3,4] provided results of measures using students' concerns, values, engagement, and intended future participation on environmental issues to construct environmental citizenship and its relation to student home socioeconomic background, gender, and migrant status. The results show that there are both similarities and small variations in elements of student environmental citizenship among the Nordic countries and in comparison with their European and international peers. Nordic students stand out as concerned environmental citizens while they rank somehow lower than their European and international peers in engagement, values, and intended participation of environmental citizenship. We find that student environmental citizenship is socially divided in all Nordic countries as it differs significantly between students from different socioeconomic strata and genders. Although not all differences of student environmental citizenship by migrant status are statistically significant among the Nordic countries, we find some significant influence of migrant status interaction with socioeconomic status and genders.

We follow a recent and comprehensive definition of environmental citizenship by the European Network for Environmental Citizenship (ENEC, 2017–2022):

Environmental citizenship is the responsible pro-environmental behavior of citizens who act and participate in society as agents of change in the private and public sphere on a local, national, and global scale, through individual and collective actions, in the direction of solving contemporary environmental problems, preventing the creation of new environmental problems, and achieving sustainability and developing a healthy relationship with nature (http://enec-cost.eu/our-approach/) (assessed on 16 March 2022 ENEC, 2018) [5].

**Citation:** Cheah, S.L.; Huang, L. Construct of Youth Environmental Citizenship among International Large-Scale Educational Studies. *Environ. Sci. Proc.* **2022**, *14*, 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/ environsciproc2022014017

Academic Editors: Andreas Ch. Hadjichambis, Pedro Reis, Marie-Christine Knippels, Audrone Telesiene, Daphne Goldman, ˙ Demetra Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, Jan Cincera and Kateˇrina Janˇcaˇríková

Published: 16 March 2022

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The ENEC definition of Environmental citizenship includes elements of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values. These elements are also compatible with the UNESCO definition of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), "Education for Sustainable Development Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) empowers learners with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to take informed decisions and make responsible actions for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society." [6].

### **2. Existing Data and Measures of Environmental Citizenship**

We present the variables of interest measuring student concerns, values, attitudes, behaviors and intended behaviors related to environmental issues from existing data of ICCS 2016 in Table 1 and PISA 2016 and PISA 2018 in Table 2. Table 1 shows students' responses to the measurement items in percentages of Europe comparing with those of international. The preliminary results in Table 1 indicate an overall similarity between European students and students of the world. In Table 2, without data analysis, we only present the measures of variables relevant for environmental citizenship existing in PISA 2015 and PISA 2018 studies, to serve the purpose of our conference presentation of proposing a measurement of environmental citizenship.

**Table 1.** Description of measures from International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 study.



#### **Table 1.** *Cont.*

Source: Table A1 in [4].

**Table 2.** Measures from PISA 2015 and 2018 studies.



Source: Student Questionnaire for Pisa 2018 www.oecd.org/pisa/data (accessed on 16 March 2022).

#### **3. Discussion and Conclusions**

There have been studies that explore concepts and measures relevant to environmental education; in this paper we have categorised environmental-related questions formulated in the ICCS 2016 and PISA studies into several environmental citizenship attributes. First, the ICCS study appears to focus on students' concerns, values and future intentions in/outside of school engagement that are interpreted as environmental citizenship attributes. Second, the PISA studies seem to focus on knowledge, skills, engagement, dialogue, social media participation, and habit formation that are interpreted as environmental citizenship attributes. Nonetheless, existing studies such as teachers' understanding of sustainable development and student attitudes and consciousness towards the environment, school education and student learning for environmental citizenship, and a collective effort in conceptualization of environmental citizenship [7] also explore concepts and contribute to measures of environmental citizenship. However, the concepts and measures of environmental citizenship are rather fragmented geographically and socio-culturally, as well as across different scientific disciplines at different analytical levels. Hence, this array of studies may also contribute to a current lack of comprehensive measurement and perhaps enable researchers to assess and compare youth environmental citizenship across systems and national borders. This preliminary analysis of the ICCS and PISA studies has led to our proposing a new measurement including eight items measuring students' concerns, values, and future intentions in/outside of school engagement, and knowledge, skills, dialogue, social media participation and habit formation that are conducive to pro-environmental movements and change.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, S.L.C. and L.H.; methodology, L.H.; formal analysis, S.L.C. and L.H.; investigation, S.L.C.; resources, L.H.; writing—original draft preparation, S.L.C. and L.H.; writing—review and editing, S.L.C.; visualization, L.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research did not receive any external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

