Eleventh International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The negative impact of people’s ways of life on environment is undisputed: evidence of land, air, water pollutions, as well as climate change, is an illustration. This paper intends to show that people’s ways of life can become best sustainability means that both improve local living conditions and protect local living environment. The case study considers a rural population of the Congo basin and how their ways of life affect the Congo basin rainforest. National and international moneys and resources allocated to environmental issues are generally used for planting trees in urban areas, recycling, identifying areas of deforestation, conducting research that include satellite imaging and global monitoring, incentivizing green development and industry, etc., mostly ignoring local people’s ways of life that should be supported to become best sustainability means. This paper argues that there must be a paradigm change in the fight against climate change, to focus more on ways of life of local populations. A concept of such paradigm change will be applied to the ways of life of populations in the Congo basin to simulate how these ways of life can become means and tools of protecting the environment and improving the living condition.