Identifying Barriers to Youth Involvement in Conservation

By Ruby Lenertz

I’m a high school senior at City High School and the Youth Engagement Intern with Tucson Audubon Society. I’ve been involved with environmental advocacy since I was a freshman. I started by organizing a 12 person rally for climate action and quickly grew the movement into organizing city-wide school walkouts, presenting at a national environmental conference, and protesting at the US Capitol Building. Despite my desire, motivation, and ability to participate in environmental advocacy, I’ve still experienced some of the barriers that youth face when trying to become engaged with environmentalism and conservation. I set out to examine and bring awareness to common barriers that middle and high school students face that stop them from becoming involved in environmental conservation and to help conservation organizations create programming to address those barriers. I surveyed 290 middle and high school students from 8 schools in Tucson to collect data on these issues.

I define real, effective youth engagement as organizations' ability to involve and retain youth participants through youth-targeted programs and education. In turn, youth participants are aware of organizations’ missions and are empowered to help achieve this mission by becoming involved with conservation organizations’ events, programs, and initiatives. Based on my personal experience, we assumed that youth involvement with conservation organizations in Tucson is low. Our assumption was confirmed by the data we collected. To establish the level of involvement among survey participants, we asked students to rate their level of involvement with environmental conservation on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being not involved at all and 5 being very involved. The majority of students, 54.1%, reported little to no involvement in environmental conservation (1 or 2). Only 18.6% of the students surveyed reported being involved or very involved (4 or 5). Furthermore, a Mann-Whitney U Test revealed no significant difference in the involvement levels of high school students compared to those of middle school students.

From there we set out to understand the reasons for the low level of involvement. In order to do this we developed the hypotheses that youth involvement is low because youth don’t think environmental conservation is interesting, youth don’t think environmental conservation is important, youth aren’t aware of specific conservation issues, there is little to no formal education surrounding conservation, youth don’t spend enough time engaging with the outdoors, and/or because youth aren’t actually able to engage due to a lack of access. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.

First, we asked students to define their level of interest in becoming involved with environmental conservation on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being not interested at all and 5 being very interested. Roughly 41% of high school students reported having an interest in becoming involved in conservation (rating 4 or 5), compared to 27% of middle school students. Using a Mann-Whitney U Test, we can see that this difference in percentages is not statistically significant, meaning that neither group of students are more interested in becoming involved than the other. This means that the majority of students, regardless of school level, don’t have an interest in becoming involved with conservation. Because of this, any organization looking to expand their youth involvement needs to start by piquing students’ interest in involvement.

We next asked the students how important they think environmental conservation is. Using the same 1-5 scale, the majority of students responded that environmental conservation is either important or very important with 100% of middle school students and about 65% of high school students responding with a 4 or 5. These results together indicate that although there are barriers stopping youth from becoming involved in conservation, a lack of recognizing the importance of environmental conservation isn’t one of them.

Next, in order to assess how aware students are about three conservation issues that are focus areas for Tucson Audubon, we asked participants how often they hear about habitat restoration, habitat loss, and bird-window collisions from sources such as social media, friends, teachers, parents, and outside organizations. Almost 60% of all students surveyed answered that they never or rarely hear about habitat restoration from these sources, an overwhelming 87% of students answered that they never or rarely hear about bird-window collisions, and about 83% of students answered that they never or rarely hear about habitat loss. This means there is little awareness of conservation topics, specifically ones that Tucson Audubon works on, which could be a potential barrier to engagement.

Our survey also revealed that lack of formal education around conservation is a potential barrier to involvement. About 51% of students never or rarely participate in conservation lessons at school, however, a Mann-Whitney U Test revealed that there is a significant difference between the frequency in which middle school students participate in these lessons and the frequency in which high school students do. Our raw data shows that this disparity comes from middle school students participating in conservation lessons three times more often than high school students.

Of all of the potential barriers we studied, it does not appear that lack of sufficient time spent outdoors is one of them. Our survey revealed that the majority of youth spend at least 3 hours outside every week. Research has shown that the more time youth spend outside, the more they exhibit pro-environmental beliefs and that most youths spend less than 1 hour outside every week. This means that based on our survey, youth in Tucson are spending more time outside than the national average. This combined with the fact we know students hold pro-environmental beliefs means we can conclude that time spent outdoors likely isn’t a significant barrier to youth involvement in conservation.


Finally, we used logistic regression to figure out which of these barriers best-predicted youth involvement in environmental conservation. No single barrier is a significant predictor of youth involvement. However, hearing about specific environmental issues from a range of sources, having school lessons, and spending time outside together can predict how involved students are in environmental conservation. This predictive model becomes more accurate when we include how important students believe conservation is and how interested students are in becoming involved with environmental protection.

Along with identifying indirect barriers to engagement in conservation, we asked students about what they consider to be direct barriers, such as not knowing how to get involved, cost of programs, transportation limitations, scheduling conflicts, and handicap inaccessibility. Our results showed that the only issues more students agreed than disagreed were barriers were scheduling conflicts and not knowing how to get involved. When analyzed with a Mann-Whitney U Test, we see that neither of these barriers is considered more significant than the other. With that being said, just because less students agreed that something was a barrier doesn’t mean it’s something conservation organizations should overlook.

At the beginning of my internship, I set out to define how engaged youth are in conservation and any barriers that could be affecting this level of engagement. We were able to conclude that engagement is low and that indirect barriers include awareness around conservation topics and conservation education in schools. We found that direct barriers include young people not knowing how to get involved and scheduling conflicts. While our sample size was fairly small, our results could prove to be significant in the grand scheme of things. If all environmental organizations developed a way to get youth more involved while considering these barriers, the world could be a very different place. Kids my age are the ones taking the lead on bringing awareness to the environmental crises we face now, but if given the right resources and opportunities, my generation could do so much more than that. I truly believe my generation can solve this crisis, we just need to be given the ability and chance to do so. 

Ruby Lenertz, a senior at City High School and the Youth Engagement Intern with Tucson Audubon, has been involved with environmental advocacy since freshman year.