How School Environmental Education Affects University Students’ Green and Low-Carbon Behavior?

Environmental education is crucial for promoting individual green and low-carbon lifestyles and constructing sustainable societies. However, it is still unclear about the internal mechanism and external boundary conditions of how school environmental education affects university students’ green and low-carbon behavior. From an educational perspective, this paper develops an integrated model of students’ green and low-carbon behavior grounded in social cognitive theory to explore the impacts of two dimensions of school environmental education: teacher-led environmental education and campus low-carbon climate. Structural equation modeling with bootstrapping estimation and moderating effects was performed using a representative sample of 763 respondents from Sichuan Province, China. The results show that teacher-led environmental education not only directly influences students’ green and low-carbon behavior, but also indirectly affects it through mediating effects and serial mediating effects of low-carbon knowledge and attitude. The total indirect mediating effect of teacher-led environmental education is larger than its direct effect. The mediating effect of low-carbon knowledge is 3.3 times that of attitude. Thus, the primary target of teacher-led environmental education is promoting low-carbon knowledge. Moreover, campus low-carbon climate significantly moderates students’ intention–behavior relationship. The higher the low-carbon climate students perceive, the more likely their behavioral intentions are to translate into actual behaviors.