Youth and Environmental Awareness: Uzbekistan's Experience and Prospects

Аннотация

Environmental degradation in Uzbekistan—from the shrinking Aral Sea to rising urban heat stress—has intensified public concern and placed youth at the forefront of sustainability debates. This article explores how environmental awareness has developed among Uzbek youth since 2021, identifies the educational, social-media, and volunteer mechanisms that shape it, and assesses prospects for deeper engagement by 2030. Using a mixed- methods design, the study triangulates (i) a systematic review of forty-three policy and research documents, (ii) statistical analysis of national programme data, and (iii) a qualitative survey of 145 young eco-activists from six regions conducted between September 2024 and April 2025. Results indicate that the nationwide “Yashil Makon” campaign, digital advocacy networks, and curriculum reforms have raised literacy on climate concepts and stimulated tree-planting, waste-sorting, and eco-entrepreneurship initiatives. Nevertheless, knowledge depth and sustained behaviour vary significantly between urban and rural locales, and institutional bottlenecks limit scaling. The discussion situates Uzbekistan’s case within global youth-environment literature and suggests policy measures such as integrated green curricula, participatory budgeting, and streamlined certification for eco-start- ups. Strengthening youth environmental awareness is shown to be essential to achieving national climate- resilience targets and fostering a culture of ecological stewardship. Keywords: Environmental awareness; youth; Uzbekistan; climate education; Yashil Makon; eco-volunteerism. confined to descriptive accounts of volunteer events. Introduction: Uzbekistan’s rapid socio-economic This article therefore asks: How has environmental modernisation has occurred in tandem with mounting awareness among Uzbek youth evolved since 2021, ecological stress. Desertification now threatens forty what factors facilitate or hinder its consolidation, and per cent of national territory, while airborne particulate what prospects exist for deeper engagement by 2030? levels in Tashkent periodically exceed World Health Organization guidelines. In response, the government A sequential exploratory design was adopted. First, a launched the “Yashil Makon” (“Green Space”) initiative systematic review covering January 2018–April 2025 in 2021, aiming to plant one billion trees by 2030 and retrieved forty-three documents that explicitly explicitly positioning youth as principal agents of addressed youth and environment in Uzbekistan; change. By November 2024 more than two-hundred sources included peer-reviewed articles, government million saplings had already been planted, many decrees, UN agency reports, and news releases through youth-led drives. Concurrently, international accessed via Scopus, the National Library of Uzbekistan partners have invested in youth-focused climate catalogue, and open-access portals. Second, programmes, including UNICEF’s nationwide network programme statistics were analysed: the Youth Affairs of school eco-activists and UNDP’s Youth Climate Agency’s register of eco-volunteer clubs, UNICEF’s eco- Dialogues, which underscore the demographic activist network database, and progress reports on dividend in sustainability transitions. Yet scholarly “Yashil Makon”. Third, primary qualitative data were analyses of how awareness forms and translates into collected through twenty-one focus groups and thirty- action among Uzbek youth remain limited, often nine semi-structured interviews with 145 participants American Journal Of Philological Sciences 13 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN – 2771-2273) aged 15–28 drawn from Tashkent City, Fergana, controllers, and solar drying units. Participants praised Samarkand, Kashkadarya, Khorezm, and tax holidays for start-ups but lamented ambiguous Karakalpakstan. Participants were recruited from certification procedures for eco-products, a barrier university “Green Hubs”, accredited eco-clubs, and compounded by limited domestic venture capital. finalists of the 2024 “Green Spark” entrepreneurship Comparative analysis shows that Karakalpak youth competition. Interviews explored definitions of exhibit heightened ecological concern due to direct environmental awareness, information sources, exposure to the Aral Sea disaster, yet possess fewer behavioural practices, and perceived obstacles. resources for sustained engagement. Conversely, Transcripts were coded in NVivo 14 using a hybrid Tashkent offers dense networks of NGOs and inductive-deductive approach, with member-checking incubators but struggles with volunteer retention as to enhance reliability. Ethical approval was obtained eco-activism competes with lucrative IT internships. from the Tashkent University of Information These disparities underscore the need for region- Technologies ethics board (Protocol № 032-E/24). specific policy instruments. National survey data reve