School students’ knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes toward renewable energy in Jordan Anas Zyadin a, * , Antero Puhakka b , Pirkkoliisa Ahponen b , Tarja Cronberg c, d , Paavo Pelkonen a a School of Forest Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland b Department of Social Studies, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland c B-1047 Bruxelles, Belgium d University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland article info Article history: Received 14 December 2011 Accepted 5 February 2012 Available online 17 March 2012 Keywords: Attitudes Education Jordan Knowledge Renewable energy abstract The aim of this survey study is to investigate the level of awareness and prevailing attitudes of schoolstudents toward renewable energy (RE) in a country which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels despite having high RE resources. The importance of this study stems from the need to better understand the role of education in cultivating awareness of RE, which is necessary for the students to become future responsible energy consumers. To that end, we developed a suitable questionnaire. In total, 617 respondents from both rural and urban areas filled in the questionnaire. Our results indicate that students have limited ability to distinguish renewable from non-renewable energy sources despite many respondents being aquatinted with the common RE sources like solar and wind. Furthermore, over 50% of students are unaware of biofuels such as biodiesel and bioethanol. Nevertheless, 87% of students consider RE to be a viable future energy option, and generally exhibit a positive attitude and willingness to adopt RE even at high prices. Overall, young females appear to be more acquainted with RE than young males. Likewise, students studying in urban areas are more aware of RE and more strongly support their adoption, in comparison to rural students, who show a preference for nuclear energy. This study high- lights the importance of implementing RE education as early as possible to encourage RE development, which is necessary to alleviate the risk from fossil fuel-related environmental problems. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 1.1. Renewable energy at a glance The global energy demand is projected to increase steadily due to the rapid increase in the world population and income growth accompanied by the fast pace of industrialization, urbanization, and motorization [1]. Recently, the Earth’s population hit the 7 billion mark [2]. Implicit in this demographic trend is a substantial increase in annual demand for primary energy from the current 12 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) up to 16 billion toe in 2030 [1], especially in emerging economies such as China and India [1,3]. The proposed remedy for this global multi-dimensional crisis (viz. environmental, economic, and energy security), requires a set of integral policy measures to curb carbon emissions and overhaul the entire energy sector. The prescription also implies developing new technologies for renewable energy (RE) and changing the behavior of traditional consumers [4,5]. Large scale RE utilization may contribute to fulfilling environ- mental protection obligations, rural development and electrifica- tion, land restoration, fostering energy diversity, and minimizing risk from nuclear weapon proliferation [6]. Biomass, solar thermal and photovoltaic, wind turbines, hydropower, ocean thermal, geothermal, and tidal energies are common RE sources, which together effectively illustrate the breadth of the RE horizon and represent readily feasible economic opportunities wherever the potential exists. The Middle East North African (MENA) countries are charac- terized by diverse but disproportionate energy resources. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) hosts the oil rich countries, where substantial oil revenues have pioneered the utilization of RE for desalination of sea water and remarkable clean-energy initiatives such as ALMASDAR city in United Arab Emirates (UAE) and The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia [7]. However, the share of RE in the total installed generation capacity of the Arab countries remains relatively low, standing at around 7% in 2007 [8]. Nevertheless, Morocco is a pioneer in Photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy applications while Egypt ranks first in hydropower and wind energy generation in MENA * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ358 13 251 4496; fax: þ358 13 251 3629. E-mail address: anasz@student.uef.fi (A. Zyadin). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Renewable Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene 0960-1481/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.renene.2012.02.002 Renewable Energy 45 (2012) 78e85