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This paper aims to find out if there is a relationship between access to climate change information and student activism.

Exploratory study focused on the survey of 400 [n = 400] students from 10 universities in Spain from April to May 2022. A questionnaire with 19 questions was divided into blocks of knowledge, awareness, and action and bivariate analysis with a margin of error of ±5% and a confidence level of 95%.

The greater the degree of information received, the greater the activism of university students, who tend to use digital media and social networks to get informed. However, they perceive that the university generates little information and a low number of activities related to climate change. Students demand that universities implement informal, formal, and service-learning environmental education strategies on sustainable consumption.

Given the results of previous studies showing the variable “type of degree” does not show differences at the beginning and end of studies, it has not been considered in this research. Nevertheless, it would be convenient to introduce it in future investigations to confirm if this may have an impact on informational habits.

This paper urges universities to act as sources of environmental education, given the relationship between the information received and the pro-environmental attitudes of students.

The universities are powerful social actors that can shape public and political discourses for eco-social transition.

This research adds the variable access to information in studies on pro-environmental attitudes. Furthermore, this research provides data about student perceptions of the university, government, industry, and NGO climate actions.

To succeed in today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, businesses are increasingly required to gain the trust of and inform the society in which they operate about the social and environmental consequences of their actions. Corporations’ claims regarding the responsibility and ethicality of their actions, however, have been shown to be contradictory to some degree. We define corporations’ deceitful implementation of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as pseudo-CSR. We argue that it is the moral characteristics of individuals, i.e. employees, managers and other decision-makers who ignore the CSR policies, which produce pseudo-CSR.

This is a conceptual paper.

The authors conceptualize the gap between true CSR and pseudo-CSR on a cognitive individual level as “moral laxity,” resulting from organization-induced lack of effort concerning individual moral development through ethical discourse, ethical sensemaking and subjectification processes. The absence of these processes prohibits individuals in organizations from constructing ethical identities to inhibit pseudo-CSR activities.

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR by augmenting corporate-level responsibility with the hitherto mostly neglected, yet significant, role of the individual in bridging this gap.