From environmental knowledge to encouraging pro-environmental behavior for air pollution control in Isfahan: a highly air-polluted city in central Iran

Isfahan is a historical city with UNESCO registered World Heritage suffering from air pollution as the major environmental challenge. The present research aims to assess the social and environmental concerns associated with air pollution in Isfahan via exploring the relationship between effective parameters on environmentally friendly behavior among Isfahanian citizens using factor analysis. A questionnaire including the citizens’ knowledge and their experience on air quality impacts, as well as their perception about the level of air pollution, the pollution sources, and its control and self-protection actions was designed and applied to a sample of 388 individuals. The results showed the dried river-substrate of Zayandehroud river, followed by improper municipal management, and the high number of vehicles and mega-industries are the most important contributing factors to air pollution, respectively. These findings were corroborated through correlation analysis between mean AQI values and responses. The findings indicated that people’s awareness about air pollution, its impacts, and their willingness-to-pay for reducing air pollution are increasing as the education attainment increases. Improving the quality of gasoline and the cars as well as developing the public transportation were the main requests of Isfahanian citizens from managers and decision-makers for air pollution mitigation. We conclude that the pro-environmental behaviors of people significantly depend on their perception of air pollution as public engaging in air pollution control plans will be obtained by an increase of their awareness about air quality status, its health-related consequences, and high level of citizen’s responsibility.