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HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE AND OPINION ABOUT GEOETHICS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

"Geoethics is a scientific area that has as its main concern the investigation of ethical conduct of humans with the Earth. Given that, geoethics has the potential to contribute to the achievement of the sustainable development. Geoscientists are professionals that investigate the Earth and have various professional responsibilities when performing their work. As such, geoethics started its emergency in the last decade and initially was focused on the geoscientists’ conduct. Afterwards, geoethics evolved to be concerned about every interaction of mankind with the Earth system, like mining, geoheritage conservation, and climate change. The present study aimed to understand students’ perceptions concerning geoethics and its relationship with Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda of United Nations. The present study was developed under the scope of a Ph.D. thesis project with the aim to investigate and implement an innovative syllabus for teaching geoethics in higher education. Before the implementation of classes aligned with the mentioned syllabus, we conducted a survey that gathered data from 90 students studying geosciences higher education courses. Ages ranged between 18 and 58 years (mean=22.7) including 48 females and 42 males. The survey questionnaire comprised of 11 closed questions related to the importance of learning geoethics in higher education. The analysis of the closed questions’ answers allowed us to understand that students consider important to have and follow an ethical conduct (n=87, 96.7%) and think that geoscientists have responsibilities towards the planet (n=83, 92.2%). The majority of the participants assumed to have already heard the term geoethics (n=53, 58.9%). When confronted with the meaning of geoethics most of the respondents stated that its knowledge is essential to the future professional work (n=87, 96.7%), and gave importance to the teaching of geoethics in higher education (n=82, 91.1%). Concerning the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the majority of the students showed having some knowledge about the goals and considered them relevant due to the current state of the world and the need for citizen intervention on society (n=83, 92.2%; n=68, 75.6%; n=77, 85.5%). Most of the participants assumed that geoethics can contribute to sustainable development (n=89, 98.9%) and were able to point out three Sustainable Development Goals that they considered as related with geoethics. As our main conclusion, we can say that the participants of the study appraised geoethics as a relevant matter to be learned in higher education and grant it as a path for planetary sustainable development."