1. Introduction
With the progress of economic and social development, China’s urbanization is accelerating, and the increase in urban population has aggravated the deterioration of environmental pollution problems. With the rapid economic development and shortening of product life cycles, the rate of product replacement has become faster and faster, and the global energy shortage has caused increasing concern for environmental protection in various countries [
1,
2,
3]. China’s current ecological and environmental situation is very serious due to overpopulation, the long-term unreasonable exploitation of resources such as land, forests, water, and minerals, and the lack of necessary protection and construction of the ecological environment. At present, the deterioration of China’s ecological environment is summarized roughly as follows.
(1) Serious water and soil erosion. Soil erosion in China continues to show a “double decline” in area intensity and a “double reduction” in water and wind erosion. In 2021, the national soil erosion area will be 2,674,200 square kilometers, down 274,900 square kilometers from 2011, the percentage of strong and above grade will drop to 18.93%, and the soil and water conservation rate will reach 72.04% [
4,
5]. (2) The area of desertified land is expanding. The national desertification land area has reached 2.62 million square kilometers, accounting for 27.3% of the national land area, expanding at a rate of about 2460 square kilometers per year. (3) The area of degraded, sandy, and alkaline grassland is increasing year by year. The area of trivialized grasslands has reached 135 million hectares and is increasing at the rate of 2 million hectares per year [
6]. (4) The area of acid rain area is further expanded, and the degree is worsening. Serious air pollution, mainly of the soot type, leads to a large area of acidic precipitation, and the area of acid rain area in China is about 466,000 square kilometers accounting for 4.8% of the national land area [
7,
8]. (5) The quality of the water environment is deteriorating, and water pollution accidents are frequent. According to incomplete statistics, in 2021, the country’s 458 daily discharge of direct sea pollution sources was more than 100 tons, the total volume of sewage discharge was about 7.28 billion tons, and they reported the largest integrated outfall emissions, followed by industrial sources of pollution, consequently, water shortage will be more serious [
9,
10]. (6) With the development of society, noise pollution has become an important source of pollution that affects people’s physical and mental health [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17]. Noise pollution is recognized by the scientific community as an environmental pollutant related to sleep disorders and learning disabilities. Studies have shown that long-term exposure to highways, railroads, airports, and recreational noise can reduce work performance, make people irritable, and can seriously cause hypertension, heart attacks, and other diseases, which is also one of the sources associated with air pollution [
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25].
National governments are paying more and more attention to environmental protection and ecological civilization construction work. To this end, they keep formulating and improving relevant laws and regulations, however, environmental protection is not only the task of the state and government, but also the responsibility and obligation of every resident, and long-term environmental protection and ecological civilization cannot be built without public participation. Under the constraints of environmental governance [
26], environmental education can effectively improve people’s awareness of environmental protection [
27,
28,
29]. Global environmental governance is the fundamental way to solve the human environmental crisis, and environmental awareness and education have been considered tools to help alleviate environmental problems [
30,
31]. Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, China’s higher education has moved with the times, built the world’s largest higher education system, cultivated a large number of high-quality specialists, and played an extremely important role in national revitalization, economic construction, social development, and scientific and technological progress. Historic achievements and changes in the pattern of higher education have been made. The world’s largest higher education system has been built, with the total number of students enrolled exceeding 44.3 million, and the gross enrollment rate of higher education has increased from 30% in 2012 to 57.8% in 2021, an increase of 27.8 percentage points, achieving a historic leap. Thus, higher education has entered a stage of universalization recognized worldwide. With 240 million people receiving higher education and an average of 13.8 years of education for the new workforce, the quality and structure of the workforce have undergone significant changes and the quality of the entire nation has been steadily improved. The awakening of public environmental awareness means that citizens gradually have a correct understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature in line with the essence of ecological civilization, and this awakening of environmental awareness needs to be inspired by education, and the process of gradually awakening environmental awareness is the process of gradually cultivating citizens into ecological citizens. Environmental education is the key to cultivating eco-citizens, and it has become an important value of environmental education in the context of ecological civilization construction to enhance citizens’ awareness of ecological civilization through environmental education. The government’s existing legislative practice of environmental education reflects the importance it attaches to the cultivation of ecological citizens through its environmental education training and other systems, i.e., the introduction of special legislation on environmental education. The awakening of public environmental consciousness requires the introduction of special legislation on environmental education to clarify the systems of ecological citizenship cultivation at the central level and effectively guarantee the effective development of ecological citizenship cultivation at the society-wide level, so as to promote the continuous awakening of citizens’ environmental consciousness and make all citizens in society become the main body in line with environmental protection and ecological civilization construction.
Liu P. pointed out in his study that perfect environmental protection propaganda and education work helps to enhance public participation in the construction of ecological civilization and protects the environment while safeguarding public interests; only by achieving universal environmental protection can we truly achieve long-term ecological civilization construction and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation [
32]. Fan Y.W. proposed corresponding strategies and measures by analyzing the complexity and forms of urban environmental governance in China, in which he proposed that the background of China’s rapid social and economic development hides a severe form of environmental governance, and the government should actively seek the support of enterprises, environmental organizations, and popular social forces while committing to sound policies and regulations and strict compliance, through more non-governmental forces’. In addition, public participation is an effective way to improve the efficiency of environmental protection, and through various forms of environmental protection publicity and education, the public’s environmental awareness and quality can be improved comprehensively, and the citizens’ legitimate right to supervision and information can be guaranteed [
33]. Ecological environmental governance requires the collaborative participation of the government and the public, and that the two work together to provide services for environmental governance to achieve the optimization of the governance process and results. Public participation in environmental governance generates competent evaluations of external information perceptions based on their consciousness, among which the perceived evaluations of environmental risks, government performance, and self-efficacy all feature. The disclosure of bad environmental information can enhance the public’s perception of environmental risks, the threat of environmental pollution to their lives and the damage to their interests, consequently, stimulating the public’s defense mentality. Thus, introducing environmental education (especially, environmental health) could be used as one solution [
34], promoting public participation in environmental governance, and good government environmental treatment performance can enhance the public’s satisfaction and recognition of government work, and increased satisfaction can enhance the public’s participation in environmental governance. The public’s participation in environmental governance has an obvious subjective motivation, and a good perception of self-efficacy can enhance the public’s enthusiasm to participate in environmental governance and help improve the performance of environmental governance [
35,
36,
37].
In summary, environmental protection publicity and education can improve public perceptions of environmental protection, enhance public awareness of environmental protection, and promote public participation in environmental governance, and the government and the public can work together to serve environmental governance to maximize environmental governance performance [
38,
39,
40]. Given the above literature findings, this paper takes public participation in environmental governance as an entry point to analyze in depth the impact of organizing environmental protection publicity and education on environmental governance performance and makes suggestions from the perspective of promoting public participation in environmental governance.
5. Conclusions and Discussions
This paper investigated the impact of environmental education on environmental governance performance, using public participation as the entry point for studying the mediating effects of environmental governance. The empirical results show that environmental publicity and education have a positive effect on environmental governance performance to some extent but are not significant. Environmental publicity and education have a significant positive effect on both public participation willingness and allocated resources; both public participation willingness and public participation significantly contribute to the improvement of environmental governance performance. Public participation shows a good mediating effect between environmental publicity and education and environmental governance performance [
42,
43].
Aldo Leopold, a famous American ecologist and founder of the land ethic, once said the essence of resource protection did not lie in a few government engineering programs, but fundamentally, in a change in the consciousness of all people. To protect the ecological environment, we should not only rely on the macro-control of government departments, and increase investment in environmental protection to take the path of sustainable development, but more importantly, we should improve the quality of awareness in the whole population, increase environmental publicity, and enhance environmental awareness. Environmental propaganda should adhere to the purpose of improving the environmental awareness of all sectors of society and the general public, decision-makers, factories and mining enterprises, young people, and society as a whole. All departments should make full use of the media and widely popularized scientific knowledge of environmental protection. Using close-to-life, reality-based publicity activities can enhance the nation’s environmental awareness and understanding of the legal system, leading to improvements in the public consciousness and increased participation in environmental action. Only in this way can we lay a good foundation for the smooth implementation of various policies and measures. Higher environmental awareness is a sign of progress in social civilization, and the higher the environmental awareness, the lower the resistance encountered to the implementation of environmental policies. Usually, it is necessary to continuously strengthen environmental publicity and education, and it is also possible to raise public environmental awareness by expanding the environmental rights and interests enjoyed by society, including the right to environmental supervision, the right to environmental information, the right to environmental claims, and the right to environmental discussion. In addition, the strengthening of environmental awareness must be accompanied by the construction of a supporting legal system, and the establishment of a virtuous ecological cycle by giving equal importance to ecological exploitation and protection and restoration as guidelines. Based on the theoretical results of the literature and combined with the results of the empirical analysis, this paper puts forward the following recommendations.
First, extensive participation in publicity and education. It is difficult for government-led publicity and education to cover all areas, so it is necessary to use the influence of corporate organizations and celebrities to expand the scope of environmental publicity and education. The cause of environmental protection concerns the vital interests of everyone; any social organization or individual has an obligation to take responsibility for protecting the environment and preventing pollution, so the ambitious goal of ecological livability and sustainable development cannot be achieved without joint efforts of all people and society as a whole.
Second, encourage public participation in environmental governance. The government should also take the lead in encouraging the public to participate in environmental management, and at the same time mobilize non-government forces to encourage public participation in environmental management. The government’s environmental management efforts will create a favorable social atmosphere. In addition, we should give full play to the role of private environmental organizations, guide and encourage them to participate in environmental governance, promote public supervision and media attention, and create a strong social force for environmental governance to comprehensively promote the goal of green development, which is also of great significance to China’s strategic goal of sustainable development.
Third, improve the relevant laws and regulations. The implementation of environmental protection policies cannot be implemented without the guarantee of laws and regulations, and perfect laws and regulations also have a direct impact on the operability of the relevant policies. We need to strengthen the establishment and implementation of laws and regulations related to environmental protection and rely on a sound legal system to comprehensively promote environmental governance. Scientific management systems, standardized operation processes, and strong supervision mechanisms are the important objective conditions for public participation in environmental governance. The environmental emergency management mechanism, media opinion monitoring mechanism, and environmental information disclosure mechanism need to be further supplemented and improved. A sound legal system can also provide the public with clear environmental rights, raise public awareness of environmental protection, and make the public participate more actively in environmental protection work. In short, a sound legal system is an important guarantee for public participation in environmental governance, and an important way to improve environmental governance performance.
Forth, improve the efficiency of government feedback. The government plays a role in guiding and interacting with the public in the process of environmental governance. Mass environmental incidents are typically generative of common demands for environmental governance from the public. If such demands do not receive timely and effective feedback from the government, it is likely to lead to a decrease in the public’s trust in the government and even trigger a crisis of government credibility. A positive interaction cycle between the public and the government is an important guarantee for the smooth development of the government’s environmental protection business, so the government should actively give feedback when the public clearly expresses their demands and give clear responses and answers to ensure smooth and harmonious communication between the two. In addition, the government environmental protection department should regularly sort out the statistics of public demands, actively solicit suggestions and opinions from the public, and make timely improvements in response to the shortcomings of the work.