R&D Focus Area: Community-Based Actionsagainst Global Warming and Environmental Degradation
PUBLIC NEEDS for this R&D Area:
Area Director:
Masayuki HORIO
Professor Emeritus,
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Social problems to be solved:
- Global warming and environmental degradation
- Decline of local community, especially in rural areas
- Immoderate modernization based on fertile fossil energy supply
- Incompetence of sciences, technologies and social systems for overcoming problems above due to disintegration
To construct socially effective solutions for global warming and environmental degradation, it is essential to introduce a structuralized approach(*1) based on socio-technological analysis.
- (*1) In this structuralized approach, any project is evaluated by defining its real Green House Gases reduction potential including its potential social realization.
GOALS:
- To create a social wave that will modify immoderate modern social metabolic systems through consistent collaboration among initiatives for pollution control, waste management, energy conservation and renewable energy intensification, bio-diversity conservation and traditional culture and local community revitalization
- To develop regional field-based collaboration of people within scientific disciplines, government agencies, various industries and academia with sufficient emphasis on further applications of the methodologies thus developed for other both in Japan and abroad
R&D Program: Community-Based Actions against Global Warming and Environmental Degradation(FY2008窶2013)
- To fund and support R&D projects (of 3-5yrs. in duration) that are designed to pursue Goal[1]and/or Goal[2]
R&D Project Categories
- Category I: Projects that conduct surveys and research necessary to solve the above-mentioned problems and that provide options as well as policy recommendations
- R&D Project
- Category II: Projects that aim to develop and demonstrate technologies (systems) and techniques necessary to solve problems (at least one PDCA cycle(*2) in the period)
- R&D Project
- (*2) A cycle of Plan, Do, Check (or evaluate / analyze), Act (or improve)
