At its core, conservation is the careful management and preservation of natural resources and the environment. It’s a proactive approach to ensure that the wonders of our natural world – from vast forests to the tiniest insects – are safeguarded for future generations.

These communities can be damaged, degraded, or destroyed by human activity.

• Damage refers to an acute and obvious harmful impact upon an ecosystem such as selective logging, road building, poaching, or invasions of non-native species.
• Degradation refers to chronic human impacts resulting in the loss of biodiversity and the disruption of an ecosystem’s structure, composition, and functionality. Examples include: long-term grazing impacts, long-term over fishing or hunting pressure, and persistent invasions by non-native species.
• Destruction is the most severe level of impact, when degradation or damage removes all macroscopic life and commonly ruins the physical environment. Ecosystems are destroyed by such activities as land clearing, urbanization, coastal erosion, and mining.

Environmental education (EE) refers to organized efforts to teach how natural environments function, and particularly, how human beings can manage behavior and ecosystems to live sustainably. It is a multi-disciplinary field integrating disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, ecology, earth science, atmospheric science, mathematics, and geography.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states that EE is vital in imparting an inherent respect for nature among society and in enhancing public environmental awareness. UNESCO emphasises the role of EE in safeguarding future global developments of societal quality of life (QOL), through the protection of the environment, eradication of poverty, minimization of inequalities and insurance of sustainable development.^[1]

The term often implies education within the school system, from primary to post-secondary. However, it sometimes includes all efforts to educate the public and other audiences, including print materials, websites, media campaigns, etc. There are also ways that environmental education is taught outside the traditional classroom: aquariums, zoos, parks, and nature centers all have ways of teaching the public about the environment.