Water pollution is one of the main European environmental concerns. Despite the large volume of natural available water, too much of it is wasted, polluted and unsustainably managed. Within the thematic ‘freshwater quality’ boarded in the European report SOER 2010 [1], one of the key messages goes for the expensiveness of removing pollution, not only. Therefore, a consistent prevention strategy can be of great relevance to counterbalance the side effects of water treatment. To achieve this goal, prevention requires not only scientific but also social actions. In addition, the most recent European report SOER 2015 [2] updates the progress to policy targets for ‘Water pollution and related environmental health risks’, to conclude that the rapid uptake of new chemicals and technologies required by modern lifestyle and consumption changes, associated with long-term environmental and socio-economic trends, lead to emergent new health issues. In this sense, there is a strong need for prevention and review of consumption habits through projects that complement scientific knowledge (regarding water pollutants, remediation, management and preservation) with hands-on social and community intervention. In fact, promoting young people’s ecoliteracy through environmental education for a water sustainable management, seems a promising strategy to keep up with European directives, but also in line with the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development [3].

Environmental research on water issues has been largely developed during the last decade. However, dissemination of scientific knowledge is mostly driven towards a later stage, involving other researchers, scientific meetings or industry, rather than being directed to lay publics. In Portugal, a large number of social actions are carried out by NGOs. However, many of these initiatives are relatively episodic, short-term and context-proof, characteristics associated with lower levels of individual and social change [4, 5]. Long term impact on individuals and changes on their daily routines are not evaluated, measured or reported. As in many other educational interventions, evaluation of the impact of these initiatives is scarce [4, 6, 7], ignoring not only what are the outcomes but also what elements of the intervention process are associated with positive outcomes. Studies on this field show that the desirable attitudes towards specific environmental issues can be predicted by both cognition (beliefs) and affect (emotions), rather than by technical knowledge [8]. Research also shows that proactive designs favoring hands‑on and problems‑based approaches [9] and community involvement [10] are associated with individual and social positive outcomes. Adolescence is a particularly plastic period in terms of behavioral change and many prevention efforts are directed towards this age‑group [11], as recommended in the Roadmap for implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development given by UNESCO, with Priority Action Area 4 directed to ‘Empowering and mobilizing youth’ [12]. Therefore, it is important to develop context‑specific intervention projects that actively involve participants in the application of scientific knowledge to real‑life problems [13, 14] and contemplate a careful research design to monitor both processes and outcomes in terms of environmental awareness and behaviors.

The present work attempts to put these recommendations into practice, by developing a school-and-community based intervention project that combines knowledge and research from education and chemical engineering with three main goals: to potentiate an intimate contact between university research and secondary schools, finding a common language to disseminate advanced scientific outputs in the domain of water preservation; to evaluate, both in terms of processes and outcomes, the impact of the project on environmental literacy and awareness; to foster secondary school students’ role as active agents in their local community using a community profiling strategy to induce social changes and environmental awareness through dissemination of the acquired scientific outputs.

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