Giving Compass' Take:

• Children are capable of working together to protect a common resource to ensure long-term sustainability. The most successful method employed by the children mirrors successful sustainability programs created by adults. 

• How can this model be used to conserve natural resources currently in jeopardy? How can donors support initiatives that connect children to nature and get them more involved?

• Here's how being outdoors is beneficial for kids. 

When a natural resource is open access, such as fish in a lake, everyone has to limit the amount they take individually in order to sustain the resource over the long term.

But if some people don't cooperate, for example by overfishing or pulling out of a global climate agreement, they risk collapsing the resource for everyone else, leading others to follow suit.

Our research, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, found that some six-year-old children are capable of cooperating to sustain a CPR dilemma using strategies resembling those of the most successful real-world solutions by adults.

Work by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom tells us that we do actually have the social skills necessary to cooperate and avoid environmental tragedy, when we can communicate and come to fair agreements about how a resource should be divided.

We looked at how children deal with such a dilemma in the laboratory in order to find out if these basic social skills are already present in developing children.

Read the full article about children and the environment by Rebecca Koomen at Phys.org.