Sustainable Lifestyle: How to Live Healthy While Minimizing Environmental Degradation?

A sustainable lifestyle or living is a practice that involves a person engaging in habits and choices that protect the environment. In this context, living healthy is still an attainable personal goal but it can be done in ways that can minimize environmental degradation. According to experts, sustainable living is still possible even in today's time, amid climate change, pollution, and other environmental hazards.

There are various natural and artificial factors that impact the environment. Although large-scale industrial sectors and countries are called to take action for the environment, sustainable living in the individual level is also significant when it comes to protecting nature. From eating more fruits and vegetables than animal meat to preserving electrical energy, a sustainable lifestyle is just a choice a way to make a difference.

Sustainable Lifestyle

(Photo : Photo by Jesse Ballantyne on Unsplash)

Sustainable lifestyle is not only a concept but a way of living. It involves engagement in social behaviors and a method of making choices that minimize the degradation of the environment. degradation. Some of these environmental risks include the use of natural resources, carbon dioxide emissions, waste, and pollution, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The ratio between Earth's natural resources and increased demand for it is growing thin as the human population grows. By 2050, the world's population could reach a staggering 10 billion and this means that more people will demand for food, housing, and other necessities and aspirations, the UNEP adds.

With this, the UN environmental body is warning that even our lifestyle choices are putting the planet at risk, while calling for targeted action.

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Sustainable Living

Amid the threat of environmental deterioration, experts recommend that there are ways to live in a realistic sense while not completely depriving one's own wants and needs. Below are some of the ways that we can achieve sustainable living:

Sustainable eating
Sustainable traveling
Sustainable energy use

When it comes to sustainable eating, choosing a more plant-based diet and eating less meat, as well as eating locally and seasonally is one of the ways to achieve a sustainable lifestyle. Since food waste generates significant amounts of the greenhouse gas methane, finishing one's meal and not letting it go to waste is a good start. This kind of lifestyle is also related to practicing good waste management when throwing leftover food.

On the other hand, sustainable traveling involves the consistent decision to travel by walking, cycling, or other climate-friendly means to one's destination. This is because there is a load of scientific evidence that fuel-based vehicles and other conventional transportation are emitting volumes of greenhouse gases that accelerates the natural process of the greenhouse effect.

Who would have thought that energy use, including in households, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions? But with the application of sustainable living, minimizing the usage of light, water, and gas at home could make a difference to the environment.