Education is a part of the socialisation process whereby individuals learn about their society and environment. It’s the transmission of knowledge, beliefs, values, ethics and ideals that are pertinent to a community and society. Therefore, it is important to consider environmental education to promote behaviours that align with conservation efforts for the Mediterranean. Environmental Education (EE) aims to create communities where members are aware of environmental issues and are equipped with the knowledge, skills and commitment necessary to care for nature and the environment. Governments and non-gov organisations that want to effectively change how the Mediterranean is treated by means of EE, need to include the cognitive, affective and behavioural components involved (Gardner & Stern, 2002) First, education should raise awareness about the presence of threats, their workings, their impact on human health and the strategies that can be used to counteract them. Secondly, it’s important to tackle people’s motivation to change by creating emotions of empathy towards nature and increasing place identity.

One way to increase conservation behaviour is to call upon individual’s sense of responsibility and public commitment, since it increases compliance with requests to become environmentally friendly (Gardner & Stern, 2002). This could also be done by inducing a state of cognitive dissonance to increase people’s desirable behaviours. This could be, for example, an organisation informing  individuals of their behaviours’ effects on the Mediterranean (e.g. usage of single use plastic or consumption of an endangered species), while asking them whether they would be committed to reducing or changing them. This would raise their perceived control over the issues and create a state of cognitive dissonance if (after being aware of their responsibility and having given a social and official commitment to change) they still acted against conservation efforts. Furthermore, social norms, attitudes, values and the behaviour of one’s peers influence the behaviour on an individual that wants to be accepted in a community. So, it is important to create change: even if only in a couple of individuals, so that they can influence their peers and create an environmentally friendly culture. EE is also targeted to children, so to create habits and shape values instead of changing them. Organisations like WWF have been teaching kids about caring for  nature and have been providing teachers with materials and resources to do so efficiently and at low cost. Shaping values is cheaper than changing them.

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