Kinshasa, June 8th, 2026 (CPA).- Landscaping has been proposed by an expert as a practice capable of reconciling urban development with the preservation of mega-biodiversity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, CPA learned during an interview on Monday held on the sidelines of World Environment Day, celebrated annually on June 5th.
“For a country endowed with biodiversity as rich as that of the DRC, landscaping is a practice that intelligently integrates vegetation into people’s daily lives by creating functional green spaces in urban centers, thereby reducing the anthropogenic pressure exerted on tropical forests and surrounding protected areas,” said forestry engineer Fabrice Bamolona. According to Bamolona, in the face of rapid urban expansion, landscaping significantly improves the living environment by providing shade, reducing heat and enhancing air quality.
From an environmental perspective, the introduction of vegetation helps stabilize soils and prevents major disasters such as erosion and flooding. The expert further explained that within residential areas, landscaping promotes biodiversity through the establishment of essential ecological corridors. These green connections enable insects, birds and small mammals to move freely between different habitats, reducing the isolation created by urban concrete infrastructure. .
The forestry engineer nevertheless emphasized the distinction between landscaping and forest management, describing the two approaches as complementary. While landscaping focuses on the local scale—neighborhoods and cities—with the primary objective of integrating nature into human living spaces, forest management operates on a much broader territorial scale, aiming at the sustainable management of forest ecosystems, reforestation and the overall fight against deforestation. “Landscaping is a practice accessible to everyone, but its effectiveness and sustainability are considerably enhanced when supported by training, technical guidance or professional supervision,” he concluded. Landscaping consists of planning, designing and managing outdoor spaces such as cities, villages, road networks and public parks, with the objective of making living environments functional, aesthetically pleasing and ecologically balanced.