Fight Climate Change With Change Of Lifestyle
Lifestyles are not just a matter of behaving this or that way, but are basically an expression of people’s self-esteem. Lifestyles, therefore, are based on ideas with respect to the individual’s identity. Lifestyle denotes a set of basic attitudes, values, and patterns of behaviors that are common to a social group, including patterns of consumption or even anti-consumption.
Why Change Of Lifestyle Is Important
There are two reasons why change of lifestyles is able to fight climate change. First, consumption pattern which is an important factor in climate change has become an essential element of lifestyles in developed countries. Second, many environmental improvements through technological change requires the changes of lifestyle.
For example, traffic will reduce substantially if people change their preferences from cars to bicycles. This would alleviate climate change considerably if all the majority of affluent individuals in major cities in the world make this lifestyle change over few months.
Change Consumer Behaviors To Fight Climate Change
Climate change has adverse effects on people, food security, ecosystems, etc. Although global concerns on climate change and global warming have risen, leading to formulation of the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1997, yet it has to result in any unanimous acceptance among consumer groups and consumers.
Traditional fuel production and consumption contributes the most to climate change as it increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Some other primary activities like logging, mining of coal, oil and gas production, agriculture and aquaculture are also responsible for climate change. These increased concentrations on greenhouse gases have become a bane to the earth, trapping more heat thereby raising the average temperature of the earth’s surface and forcing climate change. This change in climate is threatening the biodiversity of fragile ecosystems. This situation is further aggravated by unsustainable consumption patterns. The continued promotion of consumerism by the industry through the use of mass media and advertising is spoiling the traditional lifestyle of consumers.
North Americans are very accustomed to viewing themselves as consumers rather than producers. Every time some commodity is consumed across a consumer base of over 300 million people, big changes are going to happen, for good or for ill. Whether that’s taking one aspirin or another actually can have serious ramifications. That’s the nature of large economies such as those that typify the most developed nations. This trend is partly responsible for the vast increase in the amount of petroleum energy used in recent years.
Promoting Change Of Lifestyle
Promoting sustainable consumption patterns can substantially enhance protection of the atmosphere. A major barrier to achieve these objectives is the low level of awareness among the lawmakers and people about the importance and severity of the impact of unsustainable production and consumption patterns and the resultant damage caused to environment and climate change.
