Environmental knowledge and other variables affecting pro-environmental behaviour: comparison of university students from emerging and advanced countries

•Influence of knowledge on environmental behaviour among university students.•Countries with different levels of economic development are considered.•Development related classification cannot be applied to environmental performance.

This paper analyses the influence of environmental knowledge on pro-environmental behaviour among university students from countries with different levels of economic development (USA, Spain, Mexico and Brazil). The explanatory variables include formal and informal education sources, gender, motivations, attitudes and perceived effectiveness of pro-environmental behaviour. Differences are found between students from emerging and developed countries which suggest that external factors (culture, environmental structures and services in each country) might play a relevant role in university students' behaviour towards the environment. A multinomial ordered logit model is applied to estimate the influence of the covariates on the environmental performance probability. The results also suggest that motivation and perceived effectiveness are not only significant variables in both groups but also the most important ones in explaining pro-environmental behaviour. While knowledge (objective and subjective) influences pro-environmental behaviour, attitude and informal education are not relevant variables.