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Introduction
Environmental sustainability awareness is one of the prerequisites for environmental attitude and behavioural change in caring for the natural environment in the face of impeding climate change and global warming. Higher education across the globe holds the responsibility for shaping students and staff in terms of environmental awareness and changing the attitude of future generations towards the importance of preserving the natural environment. In the current context of higher education, various faculty members are playing an active role in creating environmental sustainability awareness among the university students, such that any development and environmental degradation attributed to universities through their daily business activities is being minimised. Universities have the potential for educating the younger generations, particularly students towards environmental sustainability through their education system, curriculum, syllabus, practices and Green University vision. Towards this end, this paper posits that social media can be repurposed as a tool to convey environmental sustainability awareness to students and staff in higher education.
In terms of creating awareness for environmental sustainability, two perspectives were identified in relation to behavioural change. The first perspective assumes that changes in behaviour are brought about by increasing public knowledge through raising awareness regarding an issue and by fostering an appropriate attitude. The second perspective proposes that individuals systematically review their choices and then act in their economic self-interest without the need to have enough knowledge and awareness in the first place (McKenzie-Mohr, 2000). While it is acknowledged that the second perspective through programmes, such as community-based social marketing (McKenzie-Mohr, 2000), is quite effective at fostering sustainable behaviour, this research is in line with the first perspective. A number of theoretical and empirical studies have indeed confirmed that behavioural change may indeed be caused by activities with the objective of raising awareness. Theoretical studies, such as the transtheoretical model (Prochaska and Velicer, 1997; Horwath, 1999; Prochaska et al. , 1994) and empirical research by Swaim et al. (2014) and Halady and Rao (2010), have confirmed our conjecture that increasing environmental sustainability awareness is one of the keys for behavioural change.
Pertaining to the use of social media, the use of such technology is attributed to its popularity and usefulness (Redecker, 2009; Schroeder et al. , 2010; Hamid et al. , 2014). In recent years,...