What are environmental value systems?

An environmental value system is a model of our environmental perspectives. Like all systems, it includes inputs and outputs.

$\hspace{7em}$ Figure: An environmental value system

$\hspace{5.8em}$ input $\rightarrow$ environmental perspective $\rightarrow$ output

Inputs that shape your environmental perspective include things you experience personally, like your education, media you engage with, holidays, events and family values. The worldviews of communities with which you come in contact also influence your environmental perspective, through their politics, ideologies, philosophies, religions and cultures.

Outputs of your environmental perspective include the way you judge environmental issues, the position you take and the actions and choices that you make with regard to these issues.

Inputs change throughout your lifetime, so your perspective will also change. You are also likely to have a different perspective on different environmental issues because the inputs will not be relevant to all of them. In IB ESS, we refer to three broad categories of perspectives, namely anthropocentric, ecocentric, and technocentric. Outputs will change in response to shifts in perspectives and emerging opportunities.

A systems approach to environmental perspectives helps us understand why people hold certain beliefs and why they act in particular ways. It also helps shape environmental perspectives by changing the inputs, thereby affecting the outputs as well. Information campaigns by the government or NGOs can thus change people’s behaviour.

The old ESS syllabus, with final exams scheduled for November 2025, employs the term environmental value system (EVS) to denote an individual’s perspective or a community’s worldview, as described above for the new ESS syllabus, with first exams in May 2026. Thus, the old exams might ask about how a technocentric EVS would solve an issue, whereas the new exams would ask how a technocentric perspective might solve it. Both syllabi recognise that environmental views are affected by various inputs and may result in a range of outputs.