Perceptions about climate change among university students in Bangladesh

This study is concerned with the perceptions of university students in Bangladesh regarding climate change. A self-administered questionnaire survey was filed out by 650 final-year undergraduate students studying in a variety of academic disciplines at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet, Bangladesh. This study found that a majority of respondents perceive temperatures in Bangladesh as increasing and rainfall as decreasing. A majority also think that climate change is due to human activities such as deforestation, dredging rivers, extracting sand from rivers, the development of industry, and carbon emissions from vehicles, while a significant but smaller proportion perceived it as punishment from God for human sin. We examined the effects of selected variables—students’ sex, religious affiliation, involvement in an environmental organization, completion of university courses related to the environment or climate change, academic discipline of study, and past experience of extreme weather events in their home locality—using three multinomial logistic regression (MLR) models on perceived changes in temperature, perceived changes in rainfall, and perceived causes of climate change. The MLR analysis regarding the perceived changes in temperature indicates that effects of sex, experience of extreme weather event in their home locality, and the completion of climate change-related courses are statistically significant. For perceived changes in rainfall, these are significantly explained by all predictors except completion of a climate change-related course. And finally, for perceived causes of climate change, the effects of students’ experiences with extreme weather events in their hometown and involvement in an environmental organization were found to be statistically significant.