Environmental Sustainability in Practice

Scientific Approach

The scientific approach to sustainability education focuses on rigorously studying environmental realities and problems to better understand them and to identify their cause-and-effect relationships. The environment is viewed as an object of knowledge and this knowledge is needed for appropriate decision-making.

Scientific inquiry is used to obtain this knowledge:
  1. Observe and identify what others have observed.
  2. Develop a hypothesis about the observations.
  3. Test the hypothesis through experimentation or new observation.
  4. Get feedback from the scientific community.
  5. Use results and analysis to inform new inquiries.

Scientific inquiry is not linear; what is learned in one study helps inform subsequent explorations and experiments, often around the same topic, but at a deeper level. Read more about the process of scientific inquiry here. This approach requires the ability to make observations and conduct experiments, and often integrates systemic and problem-solving components throughout the process. This process is discovery focused not just problem-solving based.

The scientific approach is often seen in environmental science studies.
 

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