Resumo

RAMIREZ HERNANDEZ, Omar. Identification of environmental problems in Colombia from the social perception of university students located in several places of the country. Rev. Int. Contam. Ambient [online]. 2015, vol.31, n.3, pp.293-310. ISSN 0188-4999.

The studies of environmental quality should not only generate technical reports but also serious inquiries that consider the point of view of the inhabitants in relation to the environmental problems that concern them. Therefore, the aim of this research was to obtain information about the environmental problems that take place in several Colombian zones from the perspective of students who live in them. A descriptive and cross-sectional exploratory study was done making use of a virtual questionnaire in 429 students (27 % of the population). The object-population under study are the students of the course "Introducción a la problemática y estudio del ambiente" at the Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia - UNAD. This is the first study on environmental perception carried out in this University, one of the largest of the country with national coverage. According to the results, information was obtained from 175 municipalities in the country (16 % of the national total) where the main environmental problems identified were: water pollution (39.6 %), air pollution (23.5 %), poor management of solid waste (18.9 %), loss of forests by deforestation (8.6 %), soil degradation (5.1 %), contamination of food by application of agrochemicals (2.1 %), other (1.2 %), plant and animal species reduction (0.7 %) and illegal trade of wild animals and plants (0.2 %). The analysis of the results focused on the first three problems, which allowed us to acknowledge the social actors related to them, the geographic scales in which these are shown, their capacity to jeopardize human health and the existence of literature sources on the topic. On a global scale, the results allowed us to infer that the students' perception on the main environmental problems maintains certain relation with the information spread by newspaper articles and technical reports through the Internet.

Palavras-chave : environmental perception; pollution; environmental assessment; university students.

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