Exploring the Relationship between Marine Environmental Consciousness of the Public and the Support for Marine Debris Governance Platform

Abstract

Marine debris is a transboundary global problem Many countries have adopted marine debris action plans to deal with this problem It adopts cross-disciplinary integration and public-private partnership to strengthen the consensus of stakeholders The Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and Taiwan’s environmental NGOs worked together to establish the “Marine Debris Governance Platform” in July 2017 Acting through four aspects the platform drives the attention and response of the whole society to reduce the generation and impact of marine debris Public support and participation are the key to whether waste management and policy goals can be successfully implemented Therefore this study investigates the factors that affect the public's support and participation in the Action Plan of Marine Debris Governance by surveying the public's marine environmental consciousness Internet questionnaires were used in this study to explore the policy support and environmental attitude of the general public in Taiwan By employing convenient sampling 1295 questionnaires were recovered The study shows that (1) People who are young highly educated and with higher annual incomes have higher marine environmental awareness (2) There is a positive correlation among the variables of people's marine environmental awareness (3) People generally recognize the seriousness of marine debris and are willing to reduce the use of Single Use Plastic However the public has rarely heard the platform (4) The public consider "source reduction " are highly effective People who are elder highly educated with more income and marine environmental awareness are more supportive to this policy The routine experience exchange in "Outreach and public participation" program was considered less effective This study recommends that government should promote action plan through education or media campaign such that public’s awareness to the marine environment can be raised to increase their participation toward environmental friendly policy

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Ta-Kang Liu (Supervisor)